Suspension
To the Version of Me That Nearly Didn't Make It
CW: Workplace toxicity, psychiatric hospitalisation, and brief mentions of self-harm. Please read with care for your own energy.
The gym floor is a specific kind of theatre. It is a stage built on the performance of strength, but the air inside was thick with a different kind of weight. My manager ruled through a quiet, sharp dismissal, a man who had poisoned the well long before I ever dipped my bucket in.
Within two months of my arrival, I watched a talented colleague finally break and resign. The system was insulated, a closed loop where any sign of struggle was framed as a personal flaw rather than a failure of the architecture. I was passionate about the work. That was precisely what made it so difficult to leave.
I lived in a state of constant physical rebellion. I’d have a fever and it would be logged as irresponsibility. My nervous system was speaking truths the workplace refused to hear, yet I felt anchored to the floor, not only by circumstance, but by shame. The shame of another failed job felt as heavy as the iron dumbbells I was teaching others to lift. I was carrying more than I could hold, and I could not set it down.
The Mirroring
In order to survive, I started to fracture.
I didn’t become a bully in his image, not exactly. But I grew a layer of dog-eat-dog armour that he rewarded and I wore it because it was the only currency the environment recognised. I became cold. I guarded my turf against the newer trainers with a hardness I still feel in my chest when I look back at it. I was mirroring his scarcity mindset just to earn a shred of temporary safety.
The cruelty of this survival self was that the more I morphed into that shape, the more he resented me, especially when I succeeded at the very things he had claimed ownership over. It was never about performance. It was about power. And somewhere in that mirroring, I lost track of which parts of my spirit were still mine and which were just the reflection of a toxic sun.
Spiritually, I was unplugged. There was no ritual, no anchor, no deliberate inner life. Just the suspension, the hanging, without yet having a name for it.
The Breaking Point
The internal pressure eventually became too much to contain. What I had been carrying physicalized, and I ended up hospitalised for self-harm. I had wanted to be held in a psychiatric ward before that point, had asked for it, and been refused, because it was described to me as a “scary place” and I apparently “did not look like I belonged there”.
I want to sit with that for a moment. I asked for help from the institution designed to provide it. It looked at me and decided I wasn’t the right kind of broken.
The hanging wasn’t a metaphor anymore. It was the clinical stillness of a bed, the particular silence of a ward, the strange quiet of a body that had finally said: I cannot do this anymore.
The Hanged Man
In Tarot, the Hanged Man is the card of this specific suspension. It is being held in place by forces not entirely your own, paralysed by the fear of being seen as someone who has come undone. But it is also the pause before the choice. The upside-down view is not the punishment. It is what becomes possible when you stop fighting the position.
I did not choose to hang. But I chose, eventually, what I would no longer let string me up.
The Reckless Aliveness
After the hospital, I came out different. There is no cleaner way to say it.
The apartment, the boss, the partner, gone. For a period, I lived recklessly, by the standards I had previously held myself to: exploring, meeting new people, moving through the world without the familiar weight of shame and performance. I was unemployed and, for a while, I genuinely did not care. This was not collapse. This was the first breath of someone who had stopped shrinking.
It didn’t last in that form, and it wasn’t meant to. What followed was quieter and more deliberate. I found myself drawn to meditation classes rather than the fitness classes I had taught. The shift started small: a Yin Yoga class that happened to close with a sound bath. The antithesis of the grind. The body found the door before the mind knew it was even looking for one.
Death
Death is not the crisis. It is the threshold the crisis demands.
The version of me that mirrored the bully, that internalised the scarcity of the gym floor, that turned pain inward because there was nowhere else for it to go, that version had to be released. Not judged, not punished. Released.
Today I can stand in front of rooms and teach. My old manager would never have allowed me to lead a group class, that particular suppression was deliberate and I knew it even then. But that is the Death card in action: the possibility that opens only once the old self is no longer gripping the doorframe.
The first time I taught a group class, I cried in the mock session. I messed up the script, got nervous, and cried. I showed up anyway. That is the whole story.
Rotating the Image
In therapy, specifically through EMDR, we rotated the traumatic images. The manager’s face. The heat of the fever I was told to work through. The moments of self-inflicted pain. My younger self (“The Fool”) had wanted hypnotherapy to simply erase those memories. But the Hanged Man taught me something different: not erasure, but a change in camera angle. The same material, held at a different angle of light.
The weight of the guilt, the shame of the crisis, it began, slowly, to shift. Not disappear. Shift.
Ho‘oponopono: A Practice of Release
Ho‘oponopono is a Hawaiian practice of reconciliation. The four phrases below are not for the other person’s absolution. They are for your own unburdening. The forgiveness moves toward yourself. You do not need to be at peace to begin. You only need to begin.
An Unsent Letter, Example
To the version of me that lived on that gym floor:
Thank you.
You showed me exactly what I did not want to be, and I became it anyway, for a time, because I thought that was the cost of staying. Thank you for the resilience I scavenged in the middle of the fire. Thank you for the breaking point. I would not have left any other way.
I love you.
Not the system. Not the shape I grew to survive it. But the part of me that carried the fear, the part that thought it had to be dog-eat-dog to make it through. That part deserved love then. It still does.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I morphed. I’m sorry I was cold to the newcomers who reminded me of who I had been before the armour. I’m sorry I reached the point where the only way to express the pain was to turn it inward. I’m sorry for the fever I forced you to work through, the ward I was turned away from, the belief that leaving would be proof of yet another failure.
Please forgive me.
I am asking the version of myself that nearly did not make it to forgive the version that thought she had to become someone else’s reflection to stay alive. That version was doing what she could with what she had. That is enough to work with.
I hung upside down long enough to see it differently now.
For Your Grimoire
Shadow work can destabilise. If this section surfaces material that feels too large to hold alone, that is not a failure of character, it is information. The author worked with a therapist through this period, including EMDR, and continues in professional support now. Seeking a counsellor is not a detour from the practice. For neurodivergent practitioners especially: burnout is systematically misread as irresponsibility. You are not imagining it. And you do not have to excavate alone.
The prompts
The Survival: What have you survived that you have not yet fully acknowledged? Give it a name. Write it plainly, without softening it.
The Weight: What did you decide you would no longer carry? Be honest with yourself, did you actually put it down, or did you just shift it to the other shoulder?
The Transition: What version of you needed to be released for you to inhabit the life you are in now?
The Voice: Write the opening of your own unsent letter. It does not need to be poetic or resolved. Just begin with: To you.
To the Reader
If you are currently hanging, if you are in suspension, in the limbo before the choosing, in the place where nothing has resolved and you do not yet know which way is up, this is what I want to say to you:
It is scary to be there. The not-knowing is its own kind of pain, and it does not respond to effort or willpower or trying harder. You do not have to force the next thing into existence.
Sometimes the first thread back to yourself is just a yoga class that closes with a sound bath. Let that be enough for now. The signs will come when you stop bracing against them.