Ghosts and the 7 of Wands
...or how I am learning to differentiate.
I’ve spent the better part of the last year thinking about anxiety and ghosts. Anxiety because it is an old friend I am learning to live with, and ghosts because I’ve read a few very good ghost stories! I absolutely love a good ghost story1, but let me tell you what I mean. I do not like a ghost story that is scary (or gruesome) for a thrill, I like a ghost story that is believable. A ghost story that reminds us that the dead still move around us and shape the world with their stories and memories.
We like to think that we control our destiny. That we are ruggedly independent and shape our own lives. We don’t like to imagine that other people, the plant & animal beings around us, or the spirit world have an impact on our present. But they do! And a good ghost story reminds me of this.
I just finished reading (listening) to The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford. I wouldn’t categorize this as a traditional ghost story, but it fits my personal definition. (Note: I’m not going to give away any spoilers, because it is such a beautiful story - get yourself a copy!) The main character, Dorothy, is haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors - not in the traditional sense of supernatural apparitions (though there are some strange encounters), but in the mental health struggles she experiences all through her life. She lives in a fictional future where she can undergo experimental epigenetic therapy to try and heal the trauma she has inherited over the centuries through her ancestors: the first Chinese woman to ever step foot in North America, a young girl who escapes a flu pandemic, a WWII nurse, and an Asian American tech developer. Each woman’s story is told in first-person and they weave together throughout the book, while Dorothy is haunted by invisible anxieties as well as “memories” that are not her own.
This sort of magical realism is all the ghost story I need. And something about it deeply resonates with me. The study of epigenetics, although fictionalized in this particular book, is the very real study of how genetic information is expressed through generations. From the dictionary: “Specifically, the study of the way in which the expression of heritable traits is modified by environmental influences without a change to the DNA sequence.” In other words, we are all walking around with stories inside of us, passed down through the bodies of our mothers and grandmothers. How much of our particular personality, quirky preferences, or debilitating anxiety have their genesis in something our ancestors experienced? Add to that the way tragedy or trauma are rarely talked about openly in families and it’s easy to understand how our family ghosts are kept invisible. They are unable to be seen because their stories were never told.
I drew a tarot card after I finished this book (a practice I’m sure I will write about in more detail in a future post), and I drew the 7 of wands.
The 7 cards are always a bit tricky for me. Most keywords you’ll find for 7 are things like: transformation or initiation. Big concepts that elude simple explanations. But when I look at this card, the first thing I notice is that you can’t see who is coming at the main character. She has invisible adversaries! Perhaps her inner voice is a harsh critic or perhaps her anxiety is coming at her from all sides, and perhaps each of these internal battles has a ghost story at its root.
I have experienced a low hum of anxiety for most of my life. I had many sleepless nights as a child and very specific fears that would instantly send waves of dread through my small body: kidnapping, murder, house fires, falling through ice into bottomless depths, being trapped in a car under snow (it’s possible I watched too many “I survived” and/or crime shows as a child of the 90s2). I am only recently even acknowledging to myself that anxiety has been a friend of mine3 for a long long time.
When one of my kids started having intense anxiety, I immediately began reading as many books and listening to as many podcasts4 as I could. Surely, I can control this uncontrollable situation by learning as much as I can about it. And I very quickly saw my own reflection staring back in the mirror. Everything I read was uncomfortably familiar: rumination, catastrophic thinking, worry pretending to be “problem solving,” overestimating the problem while underestimating my ability to deal with it. Welp, it’s me!
One of the best tools I’ve gleaned over the last several months from all of my researching has been: differentiation. Kathleen Smith wrote about it in her book, Everything Isn’t Terrible, as separating your thoughts from your feelings or separating your feelings and experiences from those of the people around you. This feels like 7 of Wands energy. In moments of anxiety can I slow down and differentiate between my anxious thoughts and the feelings I’m experiencing in my body? Recognizing that my heart might be racing because my thoughts are busy with worst case scenarios helps me to get back in the present moment where I am actually quite safe. Separating myself from the feelings of my anxious child helps me to feel calmer (still a work in progress) while parenting through a meltdown. I’m like the main character in the card fighting off invisible adversaries with the magic of my wand/will.
The invisible assailants are hard to recognize, maybe some are just bad habits, or skills that we developed as children to keep us safe in emotionally fraught environments, or maybe some are epigenetic ghosts of shared trauma. But I think whichever they are, and whether we ever develop a drug or therapy like in Ford’s fiction - exploring our stories and differentiating ourselves from them will help us to be calmer, more whole versions of ourselves. I want to befriend my ghosts.
Some of my favorite non-traditional ghost stories include:
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward & Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Oh, and also school shootings - 90s kids were the first to experience this particular hell.
It helps me to think of anxiety as a companion of mine, instead of a failing of my brain or a disorder that I will have my whole life. If those are helpful for you, I honor your experience.
A short list of some of my favorites:
The Opposite of Worry by: Lawrence J. Cohen
Everything Isn’t Terrible by: Kathleen Smith
Flusterclux podcast with Lynn Lyons
Wow, that is so interesting! I think you’d definitely enjoy the book! Thanks for reading.
Lindsey, I started reading your articles because you commented on one of my comments, and now I’m hooked! :) This article appeals to me even more than the outstanding one on walking because I share your belief in inherited emotions. In therapy I discovered that I had strong guilt and fear of being falsely accused of theft that I later learned may have come from a grandfather who had been accused of theft and subsequently drank himself to death. I also did a past life regression that explained traumatic grief—I had been a young married soldier killed in battle, leaving behind a young wife and infant child. Both emotions plus the anxiety you described were present in my psyche and unexplained until I learned about these experiences in both my genetic and spiritual heredity. Of course there were traumas and emotions in this life to be dealt with too. There are very few people I would ever mention these things to, so it was nice to discover in this article somebody who understands. 😊