Here’s today’s journal writing prompt along with my corresponding journal entry. Read more for details!
Queen of Swords
Am I nurturing my mind?
It’s probably an odd question, I realize that. In a very general sense queens in the tarot represent mothers, or rather the nurturing aspect in life. While swords represent the mind. So how does one nurture the mind?
An obvious, quick and easy answer would be education – right? But I think there’s more to it than just that. What about mental health? It’s super important, right? Whenever mental health goes down the drain everything else tends to follow down that drain too.
In a nutshell, I think it’s about being honest around one’s self care and the impact it has on your mental wellbeing. And I’m slacking. Or rather, everything has basically gone out the window.
My sleep pattern is all over the place, making it challenging to maintain any sort of routine. Meds get forgotten. Personal hygiene gets overlooked. Housework is left for a later than doesn’t come. Eating habits have reduced to just snacking. I never got into an exercise routine intended to keep my body in balance. I don’t even write in my mood trackers anymore.
This decline didn’t happen overnight. It started when Covid began and I can’t help but wonder why something like this would cause such a deep disturbance when I’ve been sticking to my routines rigidly for years prior. But it did. It’s like none of it fucking matters, so why bother.
The last time I took a shower, my body started to violently shake hard enough to cause serious pain in my joints. I ended up switching to a bath to get it to stop. The clutter I’ve got going on in this house is unreal. Laundry piled up for miles it feels like. The list goes on and it just adds to the overwhelm that I feel each and every day.
Where would I like to start to get myself back on track? Sleep. I believe that by getting myself back into some sort of consistent sleep pattern that it will be easier to remember to take my meds on time. Once my meds are back in order like they should be, I expect that I would feel less overwhelmed and better able to cope with everything else.
Nothing else matters when my sleep and med routine has gone to shit. Because when I’m not taking my meds, I’m plagued by debilitating migraines – it’s not just mood that goes out of whack. Everything else does. My ability to cope declines. My ability to self-regulate declines.
The worst part about this is once your executive functioning declines enough so that organizing thoughts, plans, and carrying them out becomes a mess, it’s no longer about willpower. You can have all the willpower in the world but not have it matter if your brain is going in too many directions at once. Makes me think of the Chariot card from Necronomicon deck.
See? The image of this card depicts a massive beast with at least six different heads. All those heads are trying to go in a different direction. There’s nothing but destruction in this beast’s wake. I feel like that’s the point I have reached.
It’s difficult to be optimistic when your headspace is a fucking mess causing the overwhelm you feel. It’s difficult to keep shame and self-hatred at bay when you look around you and see the mess you’re causing in your life. It’s difficult to remember to show yourself grace and compassion.
But, I’m well aware that bullying myself back into shape never works. If shame was an effective motivating tool, none of us would ever be in a mess in our lives. Shame only complicates the mess. Shame tells us we deserve the mess. Shame convinces us to be buried it that mess because we deserve it.
Shame lies.
This Chariot card’s imagery reminds us that we need to align our behaviors with our intentions. When we don’t have a clear goal in mind, we tend to end up spinning our wheels and making a mess because we’re either trying to go everywhere and do everything OR because our actions create an impact we never intended or desired.
So I’m setting a goal to get my sleep back in control. I’m a night owl and for the first time in years since before I had children, I’ve been able to sleep according to my natural rhythm. The difference here is that I don’t have an imposed schedule from a job. Back before having kids I would work the night shift – graveyard shift whenever possible. This is the time when I am the most active and alive so it only made sense to me to capitalize on that. What I need to do now is flip the script, so to speak, once more. Impose my own schedule and the things that I once did in the morning are now at night and vice versa.
Before my meds were at 7 and 7 because it was easy to remember (with the aid of alarms) and worked with a day time schedule. I need to start paying close attention to the wake cycle that actually works for me and figure out where the optimal meds times are in that window. I can rebuild the rest of my routines around that.
This also means that I need to go back to writing in my mood tracker to hold myself accountable.
Hopefully this will also mean the fire and drive to write will return. It bothers me so much that I haven’t been writing. More than anything else, this upsets me.
So I’m going to bring today’s question back to you. How does it apply to your life right now? How do you feel about it? What’s happening around that to make you feel this way? What would you like to do about it?
Write the answers in your journal in detail.
If for some reason this prompt is leaving you stumped, that’s okay, you can either write about something else or just allow the image of the card inspire you instead. The entire point of this is to get you started, not to confine you in any way. Happy writing!
~ Legacy of the Divine Tarot by Ciro Marchetti (Illustrator and Author) © 2009
~ Necronomicon Tarot by Anne Stokes (Illustrator), Donald Tyson (Author) © 2012
~ Credit for 3D model and assets used in this rendered image can be found here.
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