I Was Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem

When do you need more discipline, and when are you forcing yourself into a way of working that doesn’t fit?

There is a version of the creative problem that looks very much like a discipline problem.

You care about what you’re making. You chose it. Perhaps you were even wildly excited about it at the beginning. But now doing it feels heavier than you think it should, and the obvious explanation is that you need to get better at showing up. Make the plan. Build the routine. Stop expecting to feel inspired and learn how to bloody stick with something.

I knew this argument extremely well.

At the end of the first part of this story, I was sitting with two tarot cards that seemed to put it directly in front of me: the Emperor and the Knight of Wands.

The Emperor is structure, order and authority. He builds things that hold. The Knight of Wands is fire and movement. He’s already on his way somewhere, probably because something interesting has appeared in the distance and he wants to see what happens if he follows it.

My immediate interpretation was that the Knight needed the Emperor. He needed to calm down, pick a direction and become more disciplined.

This was convenient because it was also the conclusion I’d been reaching about myself for years.

If you’re arriving here without having read the first part, I’d spent a long time trying to work out what I wanted to make of my life. I knew I wanted work that felt like my own, but the form itself had never been obvious to me. I’d tried lots of things, become genuinely excited about them and then, sooner or later, wanted to move again. Eventually I’d started wondering whether the problem wasn’t finding the right thing at all. Perhaps the problem was me.

The Emperor seemed to have an obvious answer.

Structure.

I had spent a lot of time trying to become better at it. I made plans and routines, designed systems, decided what I was going to do and how often I was going to do it. None of this is particularly remarkable. If you want to make something, at some point you do actually have to make it, and inspiration alone isn't especially useful if every idea remains an exciting thought in your head.

The annoying thing was that I was also perfectly capable of working hard.

I could make the structures work. I could be disciplined and push through resistance. I could keep going long after something had stopped feeling particularly alive, which meant it took me quite a long time to consider that perhaps becoming better at making myself do things wasn't necessarily going to solve the problem.

Looking at the Emperor and the Knight together, another possibility occurred to me.

Maybe the Knight didn't need controlling. Maybe he needed a better Emperor.

That thought changed something, because I'd been treating freedom and structure as opposites. There was the way I naturally moved, which was curious and excitable and prone to following things, and then there was the way I thought serious work happened. You chose, committed, became consistent and kept going. You did not mistake every fluctuation in enthusiasm for meaningful information.

Again, none of this is terrible advice. That's partly why it was so difficult to question.

There are plenty of times when the work is boring or difficult or you would rather be doing something else. I'm not particularly interested in a version of creativity where we decide every moment of resistance is our intuition telling us to stop. Sometimes I don't want to write because writing is hard and my phone is considerably easier.

But I was starting to wonder whether I'd collapsed two different experiences into one.

There is the difficulty of doing something that matters to you.

And there is the exhaustion of continually overriding yourself in order to do it.

I wasn't sure I knew the difference.

So I kept reading.

The Four of Swords reversed appeared, then the Ten of Wands, the Star, the Eight of Wands and the Seven of Pentacles reversed. There was a lot happening in that sequence, but what I remember most clearly is how tired it felt.

The Ten of Wands especially. A person carrying everything, technically still moving, technically managing it, but fucking hell.

Something very quiet started becoming obvious to me while I was looking at those cards.

I didn't want my life to feel this hard.

Even thinking that made me uncomfortable, because there is a version of that sentence that sounds like I wanted everything to be easy. I didn't. Things I care about are difficult all the time. Writing is difficult. Making something from nothing is difficult. Learning is difficult. Building something you don't have a model for is definitely difficult.

But perhaps difficulty wasn't actually the useful measure.

How much of the difficulty belonged to the thing itself, and how much came from the way I was trying to make myself do it?

I still think that's a difficult question, particularly if you're trying to make work or a life that doesn't come with an obvious template. "This doesn't feel good" can mean all sorts of things, including that something is difficult and you'd rather not do it. Unfortunately there is no card in the tarot deck that says THIS IS HEALTHY RESISTANCE, KEEP GOING.

But perhaps I didn't need a perfect test. I could at least become interested in the distinction.

There had always been a quieter part of me that thought my life should feel lighter than the one I kept trying to construct. Not effortless. Just less like I had to drag myself through it.

I didn't trust that thought very much.

Hard work was respectable. Discipline was respectable. Sticking with things was respectable. Changing my mind for the fifteenth time because something no longer felt right was considerably harder to defend.

So whenever those things came into conflict, I knew which side had the better argument.

The cards were making me wonder whether I'd been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking how I could become disciplined enough to make something work, what if I asked what kind of structure could actually hold the way I worked?

This was slightly ridiculous because I like structure.

I love organising ideas. I love making frameworks. Give me a complicated pile of thoughts and I will happily spend hours working out how they connect. I didn't want chaos, and I didn't want to spend my life bouncing between ideas without ever making any of them real.

I wanted something sturdy enough to hold the fire without putting it out.

Once I'd thought about it that way, I started looking back at my previous attempts differently.

Perhaps the interesting part wasn't simply that I'd become excited and then lost interest. What had happened between those two points?

What had I built around the original spark? At what point had following something become managing it? When had curiosity become obligation? When had I stopped responding to the thing itself and started trying to perform whatever version of me I thought the thing required?

Those questions were considerably more uncomfortable.

So naturally I kept going.

At some point in the reading, the Magician reversed appeared.

The Magician is the great maker of the tarot. Everything is there on the table: wand, cup, sword, pentacle. All the materials, all the possibility. Reversed, I found myself thinking about what happens when we lose contact with our own ability to use what's already there.

Perhaps I wasn't missing the answer.

Perhaps I kept leaving it.

This was particularly irritating given that the entire reading had started because I'd found an old diary containing things about myself I'd apparently known four years earlier and then forgotten.

Maybe forgetting wasn't an unfortunate side effect of my terrible memory. Maybe it was part of the pattern.

I would know something, then meet all the reasons that knowing wasn't practical enough, sensible enough, consistent enough or easy enough to explain. Slowly I'd start negotiating with myself. Just make this bit more sensible. Just stick with this. Just do what works. Stop changing things.

Eventually I'd move far enough away from the original knowing that I couldn't really feel it anymore.

Then, months or years later, I'd stumble across it again and think, oh. There you are.

The Queen of Swords and Queen of Wands appeared later in the reading, with the Five of Wands between them. I couldn't help seeing the argument I'd been having with myself in those cards. One part could see. Another had no particular problem occupying her own fire. And somewhere in between there was all this conflict about whether I was actually allowed to act on what I knew.

Maybe I didn't need another revelation.

Maybe I needed to get better at remembering myself before all the forcing began.

Something else was happening while I was doing this reading too. I was becoming increasingly interested in the fact that I'd got here through tarot.

Not because I thought the cards had diagnosed my problem or given me instructions from the universe about how to organise my working life. What they had done was interrupt the story I arrived with.

I'd started with a fairly convincing explanation of myself: I kept repeating the same pattern because I couldn't stick with anything.

Then another card would appear and make that explanation slightly harder to maintain.

What if repetition wasn't necessarily failure? What if enthusiasm wasn't the problem? What if structure didn't have to mean control? What if I knew more about myself than I thought and had simply become very good at arguing myself out of it?

I hadn't sat down intending to ask any of those questions.

That's what interested me.

The cards gave me something I couldn't entirely control: an image I hadn't chosen, a contradiction I had to account for, a reason to stay with the question for longer than I normally would. Somewhere in that process, I could see things I hadn't been able to see while thinking about the problem alone.

I wanted more of that.

I didn't have a particularly coherent plan for what "more of that" meant, but I did have a name I'd loved for years.

Invisible Strings.

And I had tarot.

So when the Knight of Swords appeared towards the end of the reading, charging forward after all that thinking, I wrote something considerably less sophisticated beside him.

Get going, girl.

And I did.

Not long afterwards, I started a Substack called Invisible Strings Tarot.

I began writing weekly tarot diaries. I read cards, followed questions, wrote about what I was noticing and shared it as I went. I didn't really know what Invisible Strings was going to become yet. Tarot was simply the thing that felt most alive, so that was where I started.

And people read it.

Not enormous numbers of people. But actual people I didn't know started finding the work and subscribing, which after years of making things that seemed to disappear into the void felt pretty incredible.

More importantly, I liked doing it.

For once, I wasn't inventing a business and then working out how to make myself fit inside it. I was sharing something I was already doing, something I genuinely loved. There was a lightness to it that felt different.

And, predictably, that gave me more ideas.

Tarot wasn't the only thing I cared about. I wanted to make things. I wanted to write about creativity and symbolism and all the other questions that seemed to be appearing around the work. I could see Invisible Strings becoming bigger.

This was exciting.

Until I started trying to work out what I was supposed to do with all of it.

What was Invisible Strings, exactly? Was it tarot? Was it something bigger? What should I publish? How often should I publish it? What did people want to read? How would all these ideas fit together? What was I actually building, and how might it eventually become a business?

I started looking for ways to organise it, and then ways to make those ways work.

The thing that had begun quite simply started becoming a machine.

I'd sit down with an idea and almost immediately start thinking about what it could become. A post. A series. Something for Substack. Something I ought to publish because I hadn't published for a while. I was no longer only following the thought. I was also trying to feed the thing I'd built around it.

I couldn't see that particularly clearly at the time.

What I could see was that something which had felt easy to move towards was becoming increasingly difficult to hold.

By August, I was burnt out.

Invisible Strings had existed for a few months.

A few months.

That was perhaps the most confusing part. I hadn't spent ten years grinding away at a business I'd grown to hate. I'd barely begun.

And I hadn't accidentally ended up doing work I didn't care about either. I'd chosen this. I'd followed something that felt alive. I'd started writing about tarot because I loved tarot. People were actually reading. I'd had more ideas precisely because I'd been excited about what else it could become.

On paper, nothing had gone terribly wrong.

I just didn't want to do it anymore.

Or at least, that's what it felt like.

I didn't want to think about what I should publish. I didn't want to keep trying to turn every idea into something coherent and useful. I didn't want to make myself sit down and work on something I'd created precisely because I wanted work to feel different.

And there I was again.

Wanting out.

This was difficult to admit because I'd thought I'd understood something important. I'd stopped trying to force myself into somebody else's idea of how I should work. I'd followed what felt alive. I'd built around it.

Wasn't that exactly what I was supposed to have learned?

I think there is a question here that matters far beyond whatever happened with my tiny tarot Substack.

How do we know when we don't want something anymore, and when we don't want to keep relating to it in the way we currently are?

From inside exhaustion, those things can feel remarkably similar.

Sometimes we really are finished. Sometimes the thing itself may still be alive somewhere underneath everything we've made it carry. Sometimes we're far too tired to know which is true.

I certainly was.

I tried changing things for a while. I thought about what might make it work. I probably tried to solve the problem with more thinking, because this is generally what I do when I don't know what else to do.

Eventually I reached the only thing I did know.

I couldn't keep doing this.

By the end of September, I deleted Invisible Strings Tarot.

All of it.

The Substack, the things I'd written, the version of Invisible Strings I'd spent the last few months trying to build.

I didn't know whether I'd made another mistake. I didn't know whether I'd misunderstood what I'd wanted in the first place. I didn't yet have the distinction between something being wrong and the way I'd been trying to do it becoming wrong for me.

I just knew I wanted it to stop.

Usually, when I'd reached this point before, there was another idea somewhere nearby. Even disappointment tended to contain a little opening towards whatever might come next. Eventually something would catch, I'd feel that familiar rush of possibility and I'd be moving again.

Maybe this one.

But this time there wasn't anything.

I deleted Invisible Strings and waited for the next beginning.

It didn't come.

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This is the second of three connected essays. Read part three, What If I Didn’t Start Again? next.