What do you carry that’s not really yours?
Maybe it’s your mother’s happiness. A friend’s anxiety. Your cousin’s stability—or lack thereof. Or maybe you’re an overachiever trying to fix everything for everybody and make sure they feel worthy and loved in the process.
Not that I’d know anything about that. Because growing up neck-deep in narcissism has no impact whatsoever. Har!
I kid. Point is, if you’re feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, here’s some good news: it’s time to let it go. There is, however, one small catch to making the most of this moment. But it’s not a bad catch.
Next Week in the Cards
Featured: Meow’s Tarot, primarily because the deck is sitting right next to my keyboard.
Outlook: Ten of Swords Reversed
You have an exit ramp—a chance to slip out from under all that baggage you’ve been dutifully hauling. And it doesn’t have to be slow, either. Which is good, because maybe you’ve had enough.
I know I have. I really have.
But this isn’t just a “drop it and run” situation. It’s a rewrite. That story where you end up drained, flattened, and left behind? You get to decide the next chapter. You’re stepping out of a role you never auditioned for—and you get to consider what role you want to step into instead.
Advice: Ten of Swords Reversed
We’re likely shaking free of burdens we never should’ve been carrying in the first place. Other people’s neuroses. Unreasonable demands. Trying to heal a relationship all by yourself. Forever playing “the bigger person” when you were fine as you were. It’s not your job to make abuse easier to dish out while you try to “heal” an abuser who is perfectly happy being abusive.
If you hang on to the unfairness—how wrong it was, how much you suffered—you’ll slow your recovery. And if you try to quietly and patiently remain oh-so-understanding while hoping the folks who dumped the baggage on you in the first place will notice it’s hurting you and voluntarily retrieve a few bags?
Yeah, well…that’s not going to happen.
Some people (consciously or not) seek out us responsible, squishy, cares-about-the-world types to offload onto. Not everyone who says they love you does. Not everyone who acts helpless actually is. And even if all that’s true, you still do them no favors by helping them stay weak.
Here’s the thing—when you finally put it down, you don’t just feel lighter. You can see the landscape again. Out from under that load, you have room to think. There’s space to recover. You can start deciding what you want to carry forward, instead of being stuck with junk you never asked for.
Maybe I’m projecting, but here’s what I’ve found: process the feelings and look toward building what’s next. Getting stuck on how wrong it all was just keeps you stuck. That injustice is sticky and gooey. You can’t undo the past. The more you chew on it, the worse it tastes.
I get the temptation—I’ve done it myself. When I left my family’s high-control religion, my brothers shunned me for decades, and my parents kept me at arm’s length, certain I was part of “Satan’s world.” I did absolutely nothing wrong. I deserved far better than I got.
But what now? The trauma doesn’t just vanish (and trust me, I’ve had the therapy to prove it). I didn’t want to live forever saturated in anger at the unfairness of it all. I can’t change the past. But I can use what I know to help others trying to get out.
That’s turning the pile of crap I was handed into fertilizer. And I’m growing some nice flowers from it.
This week, you can drop some of your old load—easily, quickly, maybe almost instantly. The doors will open.
And once you do, don’t waste too much energy obsessing on the weight you carried, how long you carried it, or how unfair it was. Acknowledge it, sure. But don’t spend hours asking “why?” or “what if?”—those questions keep you staring backward instead of moving forward.
Put your strongest focus where it can make a real difference: healing, recovery, and writing your own ending to the story. Nothing else. (Including fixing everybody else’s mess.)
Now, for you:
What are you ready to drop?
What might healing look like?
If you rewrote your own ending, how would it go?