T The Hermit

I have read Tarot cards since I was a preteen. The deck I use is the Kazanlár Tarot, its creator is a Hungarian artist, and the cards are detailed and beautiful in a way that feels like looking through a window into another world.

Going through the cards and their meanings was always a fascination. But one card held me from the very beginning, from the age of ten. I was amazed and scared of it at the same time. This card is The Hermit.

The card is a picture within a picture. The Hermit stands at the centre of a sandstorm, a torch gripped in his hand. His face reveals nothing, it is a closed door. He is entirely alone, sealed inside his own world. He is going through something. He is healing. The storm is his life in uproar. The torch is the flicker that keeps him moving, the stubborn hope of emerging from it as a better man. It is also a lantern held out for others: follow this, if you can find it.

He did not stumble into this exile. He chose it. Because the life he had lived could not hold him any longer, he turned his back on everything familiar and walked himself into the nothingness, the only place left where he might find himself again.

He will come out of it stronger. Healthier. The next card in the sequence of the Major Arcana is Strength, and it carries a double meaning: either you have your demons firmly in hand now, or you are still wrestling with them, but managing, through wit and cunning, to keep your footing.

Anyways, I know now, why I was so involved with this card all my life. I am this Hermit.

I am going through changes unlike any I have faced before. I have always been able to renew myself, always emerged from the fire with something intact. But those past transformations were not quality work, they were for survival.

Bare, desperate, functional. This time is different. I am in a warm home. A good relationship. Work that means something. I finished my education officially, but I am still learning something new every single day.

So what are these changes, exactly? They are not cosmetic. They go all the way down to the bone.

I am shedding my raw, thickened, armour-like skin, the one that was never allowed to heal properly, that hardened over wounds instead of closing them.

I am releasing a past that hurt me in ways I spent years pretending it didn’t.

I am dismantling the reactions that were baked into me before I was old enough to choose them, the flinching at a raised voice or hand, the armour, the ” I am striking first or I am to be slain ” mentality. I am taking apart the defence system I built to keep myself alive, because what protected me then is suffocating me now.

I am sitting with my traumas instead of outrunning them. And I am doing battle with the oldest, most corrosive belief of all, the one that whispered, then shouted, then became so familiar it felt like fact: that I am cursed. That I am rotten to the core. That something in me is fundamentally, irreparably wrong.

That is what this storm is made of.

And yet, the card has its shadow side. Transformations like this are a lonely business. Self-doubt surfaces. Self-esteem cracks open in places you didn’t know were fragile. My journey of self-discovery is no exception. The doubts come. The old wounds bubble up.

The loneliness I carry is not born from isolation. My partner is steadfast, he is always there, always behind me, without question. But this particular loneliness is older than anything. It is ancient and cellular.

It is the unshakeable truth that lives beneath all the noise: that I live alone in my own mind. That the people who love me (and I am lucky enough to have those) can stand at the edge of my storm, close enough that I feel their warmth. But they cannot enter the turmoil for me.

They cannot carry my particular darkness. That burden has a single owner, and it has always been me.

And perhaps that is not the tragedy it once felt like.

Perhaps that is precisely the point. The Hermit does not resent his solitude, he has made a tool of it. He has taken the thing that could have destroyed him and turned it into the only light he has.

That is what I am learning to do. Not to wait for the storm to pass. Not to wish I were someone less complicated, less scarred, less tangled in my own history.

But to stand in the middle of it, uncertain, still half-made, and trust that the torch in my hand is enough. That I am enough. That when I finally walk out the other side, whoever meets me there will find someone worth meeting.

And to know, the storm does not last forever. But the person it forges, she does.