Plucking Out and Picking Up the Swords

By Madeleine Gunhart

Author's note and content warning: This essay explores themes related to mental illness and alludes to emotional abuse. While specific acts of abuse are not described, I use some occasionally violent metaphorical imagery and harsh language to convey my experiences. Please take care.

I’ve always had an aversion to sharpness.

Knives, anger, razors, reprimands, scissor blades, harsh words — all jagged edges that cut fear into my heart for as long as I can remember.

So, when I first picked up Tarot and got to know the suits — between the heart-forward cups, the passionate wands, and the grounded pentacles — the cold, rational swords were immediately my least favorite. I flipped through the fourteen swords cards, which depicted pain, heartbreak, deception, and defeat, and felt a lurching dread in my stomach.

Even the cards that felt less intimidating — those representing knowledge, ideas, and logic — left an unpleasant metallic tang on my tongue. As someone who primarily processes the world through empathy, imagination, and creativity, I’ve long been categorized as less useful, intelligent, and overall less than those with a natural inclination for STEM subjects, or those with more “confident” (read: aggressive) methods of approaching life.

However, one swords archetype in particular drew me in from the beginning: the queen. She sits on her throne, face impassive, welcoming with one hand and raising her sword in warning with the other. To me, she represents a mantra I had long admired but could never quite embody: “Be kind, but take no shit.” This, I thought, is who I need to become. I framed the Queen of Swords (along with her Mystic Message poem and some floral scrapbook paper) and hung her above my altar, hoping she would inspire me to stop taking shit and start setting boundaries.

Fast forward several months. I get more comfortable with Tarot and learn to appreciate some of what the swords have to offer. The Three of Swords, with its pouring rain and pierced heart, spoke to my long history of mental illness, as well as the chronic emotional pain that comes with being soft and sensitive in an overwhelming world. The restful Four of Swords felt welcoming too— a reminder to take care and recharge.

Jump ahead a couple more years. Tarot is part of my routine and my identity, and it’s slowly becoming part of my career and online “brand.” The swords don’t scare me the way they used to, even if I don’t particularly love them. I start receiving creative coaching from Cecily Sailer, whom I’ve admired as a Tarot reader, creator, and human for some time. I tell her about my desire for boundaries, my wish to become the Queen of Swords. She helps me on my journey with encouragement, insight, and practical exercises.

Then, suddenly, in the midst of this healing, an explosion shakes my reality. A charged, frightening encounter with my abuser reawakens old trauma — not old in the sense of long gone, but old as in deeply rooted and enduring, like a giant oak tree. The event leaves me shaken and shattered, shrapnel digging into me like blades.

Cecily leads me with gentle strength through this time and becomes the first person to validate and acknowledge the abuse I suffered for decades. The word scares me: abuse. Sharp. But it lances something in me, commencing a great and necessary drain.

I start to think about my internal structure differently. I start to see with the clarity of the swords: why I formed certain habits, why I struggle, why I fear, why I ache. I realize: I am the figure from the Ten of Swords — a card in which the swords undeniably represent anguish, hurt, and trauma — lying on the ground, stuck all over.

All this time, I realize, I have been full of blades. 

For 30 years I had internalized my pain, embarrassed that I wasn’t coping with it better. I believed that my wounds were self-inflicted — that, maybe, if I weren’t so weak, my skin would have become impenetrable. My suffering was my own fault, and thus something I should carry alone.

In my formative years, I learned that my job was to bleed for everyone else (but keep it internal — no one wants to see my weeping wounds). Like a prey animal concealing its vulnerability, I fought to keep my swords under wraps, even though they pricked at my insides with every breath I took. Accepting these stabs with a smile felt easier than facing the judgements and punishments I would receive for crying out in pain. So, I took the path of least resistance. I filled myself with harsh metal, trying to keep the world around me from doing me in.

It’s not easy removing a sword that’s lived in you for years. Your organs have rearranged around it. It feels load-bearing, as essential as your spine, and no doubt covered in decades of set-in gunk.

Not to mention the excruciating process of pulling them out. It hurts, ripping open wounds the whole way down.

But when the body begins to heal without the invasive steel… there’s nothing like it.

As I did the work of extracting the swords, I could feel myself growing lighter. I realized the immense, frightening, giddy joy of freedom.

Unleashing my “chaos,” which had long been trapped by the expectations, fears, and survival mechanisms within me, brought many unexpected gifts. I reconnected with parts of myself, like my confidence, silliness, and sultriness, which had long been caged by the swords. I used new, shinier swords to cut myself free from old habits and thought patterns. I stood up for myself. I laughed loudly and spoke boldly.

But swords have two edges, after all. Sometimes, in the haze of anxiety and fear, freedom can feel like a sick illusion. Even when the swords are no longer holding you in (a la Eight of Swords), you still bite at the bars of your phantom cage like a feral beast.

The new boundaries I set in order to protect myself were necessary. I held them firmly, but they were met with pushback. When people get used to you taking their blows, they become vehemently opposed to you putting on armor and raising a weapon of your own.

It hurt to see people I’ve known for years brand me as cruel or selfish or rude for simply refusing to let them impale me like they used to. I wasn’t cutting them with my swords; I wasn’t even turning their own swords against them. I simply blocked their blades by refusing to contort and fawn and self-deprecate. It still hurts. It still happens. But I’m getting stronger in my resolve.

After publicly celebrating my newfound joi de vivre for a couple of months – via declarations of my loving relationship to self, assertions that I’ve been happier than ever, and some jester-like antics – a small, simple, harmless mistake I made on a Sunday night punctured a fetid abscess inside of me, unleashing vitriol that had been laying in wait. (You’re not good enough. You can’t do anything right. Too stupid to live. Worthless. Burdensome. Ugly. Fat. Unlovable.) 

The needy perfectionism, the hateful voices, and the self-loathing flared up, like a rash I thought I’d cured, returning to set my skin ablaze. The most jarring part was that it was such a light trigger that launched me into a flash storm of hurt. It felt like a tornado of swords swirling around me, cutting into my vulnerable flesh.

I might be freer than I was before, I realized, but I still had puncture marks and leftover blades festering deep within me. 

I tried to breathe, to hold all these sharp truths together at once: I am healed. And I’m hurt. I’m healed. I’m hurt. I’m thriving and better than I’ve ever been. I’m so fucking wounded that it knocks the breath out of me sometimes. I sat in my bed and wept, transforming into the character from the Nine of Swords.

For a long time, I thought she was a symbol of my past depressive episodes. But no matter how hard we try, we can’t excise all our pain. Trauma, life, and grief can all sink their fangs into your neck when you least expect them to. Our experience on this earth is cyclical and repetitive at times, for better or for worse.

Who am I really, I thought, to expect that I can pull entire rusted, crusted-over swords out of myself and walk away unscathed? Just because you feel good on the surface, I told myself, doesn’t mean you can ignore that internal bleeding, baby.

But, even then, I was patronizing myself! As if I should know better. Like I should have seen the swords’ clarity and warning strikes from miles away.

Who am I? I wondered again, this time with more compassion. Someone healing from trauma and doing their goddamn best. And sometimes that best is weeping openly in bed. Sometimes it’s believing in something better despite the onslaught of pain. Sometimes it’s resting, with a gentle reverence for your body and spirit. Sometimes it’s forgoing being palatable and setting protective boundaries.

I realized that in my raucous, joyful display of healing, in my assurances that things were better (finally, better), I was juggling my swords — dancing, twirling, laughing, flaunting — for a captivated audience. Look what I can do! I am a master over pain. I have solved my trauma. I’m good now, I promise. See these things that hurt me once? I wield them now for your entertainment.

But even with all the pomp, a small dagger (that simple mistake that harmed no one) can hit just the right spot and send the whole spectacle crashing down.

The freedom was never a lie, but it was only part of the truth — the gilded hilt of a sword that continued to gut me.

Selecting my favorite shiny bits of truth wasn’t enough. I had to lay it all in front of me, like an armory filled with metal that was both glinting and blood-stained.

Like everything, holding truth is a balancing act. There’s no road diverging in the wood offering two distinct paths — one of pain and trauma, versus the other — one of healing and freedom. All of these aspects exist on the same path, in the same body. They coexist, as convoluted and strange and scary and miraculous as it might seem.

I still find the imagery in the swords cards harsh at times. But I realize now they’re necessary messengers. This world, this life, this journey can all be harsh.They can be cruel. They can be deceptive. Sometimes you need to be struck with a sharp truth to find your own clarity, your own way forward.

The swords were weapons used against me, and they were the tools of my own salvation. When I stopped turning every blade against my own heart, and instead started using them to sever the bonds that held me, everything changed. Swords aren’t inherently evil or heroic. It just depends what you use them for. Sometimes they’re actually quite mundane.

I’ve come to see the Queen of Swords differently now. Yes, I still admire her perfectly balanced mix of badassery and openness, as well as her ability to set boundaries. But I no longer wish to become her. She is a mindset I can utilize when needed, but not an ideal I should always be striving for.

I didn’t need to grow harder against a world that hurt me. That’s never what I needed.

I didn’t need to erase my softness. I just needed to protect it and help it heal.

While sharpness is still not my favorite attribute, I understand its merits now. I recognize and honor that I can utilize its pointed tips; I don’t have to be terrorized by them.

So, each day, I’ll continue to pick up my sword, to reckon with the blades inside me, to try to open myself to curiosity and knowledge. In the endless journey of shape-shifting and becoming, I’m finally learning the power of sharpness.

My softness is still incredibly sacred to me, so there’s no reason to fear my new form, whetted and fierce as it may be.

That said, do mind my boundaries. I’m kind, but I’m no longer taking shit.

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about madeleine Gunhart

Madeleine Gunhart is a writer, witch, and Tarot reader from Seattle. She enjoys helping folks connect with themselves through empathetic Tarot readings and writing fiction that empowers and enchants. You can find her on Instagram at @madeleinegunhart.

TarotCecily SailerEthereal Visions Tarot, Intuitive Night Goddess Tarot, 3 of Swords, 9 of Swords, 10 of Swords, Queen of Swords