The Indecision That Felt Like Progress
I was stuck for almost a whole year, honestly. I wasn’t paralyzed by a lack of choices; I was paralyzed by two pretty decent ones, and I just kept juggling them in my head until my brain felt like scrambled eggs. The real problem was I wasn’t making any real movement on the thing that actually mattered, which was upskilling to get a better job.
I had this side gig, right? It was fine. It was steady enough to feel like I was achieving something, but it was a total dead end financially and career-wise. I was pouring about twenty hours a week into it—answering emails, doing the logistics, just all the little maintenance stuff. Meanwhile, I needed to master a new coding language and get certified, which was the actual ticket to a better life. I’d sit down to study and then boom, an email from the side gig would pop up, and I’d convince myself that the immediate task was more urgent.
I was basically hugging two big, equally heavy rocks. I couldn’t move forward because I refused to drop one of them. I needed to drop the side gig and run the other way toward the scary new career thing, but that felt like cutting off a limb.
The Two of Swords Slap in the Face
I was flipping through a deck one afternoon, not even doing a formal reading, just fidgeting. And there it was. The Two of Swords. Blindfolded, sitting rigid, two swords held perfectly still. I remember staring at it and getting this massive jolt of anger. Not at the card, but at myself. The message was loud and clear: you are pretending you can’t see the answer when you absolutely can.
The problem wasn’t the path; it was the avoidance. I was using the comfort and familiarity of the small, dead-end job as a giant, cushy shield against the fear of failing at the big, necessary job change. The blindfold wasn’t being forced on me; I’d put it on to keep myself from having to make the hard, uncomfortable cut.
The Clunky, Ugly Disassembly
When I finally made the decision, it wasn’t some glorious, cinematic moment. It was a messy, administrative disaster. You know how when you finally decide to clean up a big project, you find a hundred tiny little things you forgot were running?
I didn’t just quit. I had to systematically dismantle the whole thing piece by piece. It was like pulling out one of those old, massive desktop computers, wire by wire.
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I started with the stupid subscriptions. All those little tools and services that were basically running in the background. Canceling them felt like actual physical relief.
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Then I had to tell my small client base. I wrote the email like ten times. It felt like admitting total failure to people who didn’t even care. I finally just sent a short, blunt one: “Closing shop, moving on.”
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The hardest part was the inventory purge. Just packing it all into a box and sending it off to a friend to manage the final few sales. That action—physically removing it from my sight—was the real turning point.
I didn’t get this sudden burst of free time. For the first week, I just had this giant void where the low-level anxiety of the side gig used to be. I kept checking my phone for sales notifications that weren’t going to show up. That’s how deep the avoidance habit ran.
The Space to Actually Breathe
The real shift wasn’t that I gained twenty hours back; it was that I gained my focus back. That paralyzing feeling, the one that made me feel like I was fighting against heavy water every time I opened the coding textbooks, just vanished. The Two of Swords isn’t about finding a perfect third choice; it’s about realizing that staying still is the worst choice of all.
I finally hammered through the toughest parts of the curriculum in about a month and a half. The language that felt impossible started to click. I passed the certification exam on the second try—didn’t quite nail the first, but I got up and did it again fast, which is something I’d never have done before.
I realized the complexity wasn’t in the work; it was in the choice. Once I removed the blindfold and dropped the comfortable, but useless, sword, the path I needed to take was just sitting right there. Now I’m in the new job, and the demands are hard, but at least I’m not fighting myself anymore. The energy I used to spend on being stuck, I now pour right into the challenge. It’s hard work, but not soul-crushing the way that long, pointless indecision was.
