Left Out in the Cold: The Five of Pentacles in the Tarot

This week I woke up seized by a wave of anxiety.

No, that’s not the right description.

Imagine a graveyard at night — preferably the eeriest graveyard you can conjure up. There should be tombstones. Lots of them. Erected to the memory of all your dashed hopes and failed dreams. Walking through the plots, you happen upon an empty grave, unmarked, dug out, but no one is committed to eternity there just yet. That’s for your latest endeavour. And, you can’t see the bottom of the grave — in fact, it’s so dark you can’t make out much at all, except for the sudden, unmistakable feeling of a hand reaching out to grab you by the ankle and pull you in.

That’s what my anxiety felt like: the gnarly hand of panic grasping at my otherwise tranquil state, threatening to drag me into the darkest underworld containing all the fears I struggle to keep at bay. Fear of failure, fear of things not working out, fear of people quietly gossiping about my failure and the fact that things didn’t work, fear of having to return to a life that I had done my darnedest to leave behind because of the all-consuming negativity — but I digress. Despite feeling this way, I still undertook my daily Tarot pull and apparently my much-cherished deck has a sense of humour: it turned up the Knight of Wands when all I seemed to feel was…