What If I Didn’t Start Again?
What happens when something ends and, for once, you don’t know what should replace it?
There is a particular kind of uncertainty you experience when you know something has to end but have absolutely no idea what should replace it.
I’m much better with a new idea. A new idea gives me somewhere to go. It turns the discomfort of something not working into possibility again. But what happens when there isn’t one? When the only thing you know is that you cannot keep doing this, and nothing else is asking to begin?
After I deleted Invisible Strings, that was where I found myself.
For years, reaching the end of one thing had almost always contained the beginning of another. I’d be disappointed for a while, wonder what had gone wrong and then eventually something new would catch my attention. I’d feel that familiar rush of possibility again and start imagining where it might lead.
Maybe this one. Maybe this was the thing I’d been trying to find.
But after Invisible Strings, there was nothing.
If you’re coming to this story here, I’d spent years trying to work out what kind of work and life I actually wanted. Invisible Strings had seemed like a breakthrough because it grew out of something I already loved doing: reading tarot, following questions and writing about what I found. Then, within a few months, I’d managed to turn it into another content machine I couldn’t keep up with.
So I ended it.
I didn’t know whether I’d made another mistake. I didn’t know whether Invisible Strings would ever exist again. Strangely, I didn’t regret stopping either. Something I’d started because it felt alive had become something I was forcing myself to keep doing, and by the time I stopped I was too tired to work out exactly what that meant.
Usually this would have been the point where I tried to extract the lesson, make a better plan and begin again.
This time I didn’t.
I went into what I can only really describe as a long winter.
I think I've often treated uncertainty as a problem that needs solving. If I don't know what I'm doing next, I should think harder, look for ideas, make a plan, find something to move towards. There is something deeply uncomfortable about leaving a space empty when you're used to measuring your life by what you're doing with it.
But for once I didn't have a better answer.
I only had:
not this.
It wasn't much of a direction, but perhaps it was enough to stop me walking straight back into something because I was uncomfortable standing still.
I had no secret plan for Invisible Strings 2.0. I wasn't quietly working out what should replace it. I didn't even know whether I wanted it back.
I had spent enough time by then looking at my tendency to begin, push, burn out and begin again that I couldn't entirely unknow it. Perhaps the most useful thing I could do was not rush to decide what this particular ending meant.
I could let it be an ending.
If something else wanted to begin, I could meet it when it arrived.
For several months, nothing did.
So I waited.
On 2 April 2026, almost exactly a year after the tarot reading that started this whole story, I sat down with my cards again.
I'd been thinking about that original reading for a while. So much of it had stayed with me: the idea of the spiral rather than the loop, the weight I'd been carrying, the possibility that the way I naturally wanted to work wasn't something I needed to overcome.
And, of course, Invisible Strings.
Except Invisible Strings didn't exist anymore.
I'd followed that reading into something, built it, burnt out, deleted it and then spent the winter not knowing what came next.
I wanted to go back.
Not to ask what I should do next. I think I'd finally had enough of that question for a while.
I wanted to know where I was.
So I used the same kind of layered reading I'd used the year before. I'd begin with a row of cards to see the larger shape of things, then go underneath them and follow whatever became interesting.
My question was very simple.
Where am I now, a year later?
I shuffled and pulled the Tower, the World, Death, the Eight of Swords reversed, the Knight of Pentacles reversed and Judgement.
I stared at them.
Whatever these cards were going to mean once I started going underneath them, this did not look like a reading about someone who had gone back to the beginning.
The Tower suggested something had fallen. The World looked like completion. Death was an ending significant enough that whatever came afterwards couldn't simply return to what had been there before. Then came the Eight of Swords reversed, a card I associate with being trapped inside our own thinking, turned on its head. The Knight of Pentacles reversed made me think immediately of that steady, disciplined, keep-going way of working I'd spent so many years trying to make myself better at.
And finally Judgement.
A year earlier I'd been asking whether I was trapped in a loop. Now I was looking at a row of cards that seemed to be asking whether perhaps I wasn't in it anymore.
This was strange because the year hadn't looked particularly impressive from the outside.
I'd started something, burnt out, deleted it and then spent several months not knowing what I was doing. If I'd measured progress by what I'd managed to build, I could have made a fairly convincing case that I'd gone backwards.
But sitting there with those cards, I started wondering whether something had changed in the apparent nothing.
Maybe I'd been looking for evidence of change in what I could point to. A new project, a better way of working, some visible proof that I had finally learnt whatever I was supposed to learn.
What if something had already changed before I knew what I was going to make from it?
Death was the card I was most curious about, so I asked what had ended.
I pulled the Fool.
Then the Five of Swords.
Then the High Priestess.
The Fool confused me.
Of all the cards I could have imagined appearing underneath Death, I hadn't expected the one standing at the very beginning of the tarot. The Fool is the leap, the new adventure, setting off without knowing exactly where you're going. Which, if you've been following this story, may sound rather familiar.
But I liked the Fool.
I didn't want the conclusion of all this to be that I needed to become someone who never got excited about anything again. I didn't want to stop following ideas or lose that feeling when something catches my attention and I think, oh, what's that?
So perhaps the beginning wasn't what needed to end.
Maybe it was the reset.
I'd spent years treating each new thing as though I was back at zero. New idea, new plan, new attempt, hopefully a new version of me who would finally know how to make this one work. Everything I'd learned from the previous thing seemed somehow to belong to the version of me who'd failed to keep it going.
Maybe that was what couldn't come with me anymore.
The Five of Swords made this feel even more plausible because the fresh start was never really the whole pattern. The argument came with me too. I'd begin full of possibility, then somewhere along the way I'd start questioning the way I was doing it. I should be doing more. I needed to be more consistent. Maybe I needed a better system. Why couldn't I just stick to things?
Eventually the thing I'd been excited about would become tangled up with the effort of trying to make myself do it properly.
I'd push, get tired, start wondering whether I wanted it at all and then, sooner or later, something else would begin to look more alive.
The new beginning looked clean, but I wasn't actually starting clean.
I was bringing the same argument with me.
That made the High Priestess interesting too. She is a card I associate with knowing that doesn't necessarily come as a neat explanation. Something recognised before it can be properly defended.
Maybe the work wasn't to finally find the beginning that would save me from everything that came before it.
Maybe I needed to stop abandoning what I already knew every time I began.
This is where I started becoming suspicious of the clean slate.
A clean slate sounds lovely. Nothing messy on it. No failed attempts, embarrassing old ideas or things you were once completely convinced about and now wouldn't touch with a bargepole.
But that isn't really how we arrive anywhere.
I had years of trying things. Ways of working I'd discovered didn't suit me. Things I'd loved, things I'd hated, skills I'd learned inside work I no longer wanted, questions that had followed me through several apparently unrelated versions of my life.
Invisible Strings Tarot had ended too, but even that didn't disappear simply because I'd deleted the Substack.
I had lived it.
It came with me.
And perhaps the question wasn't how to make the next thing completely different.
It was what I wanted to carry forward.
Invisible Strings did come back.
And after the long emptiness of that winter, when it did, it came back with force.
Suddenly I had an enormous amount to say and make. Things I'd been thinking about for years started connecting to each other. Tarot was there, but so was creativity and symbolism, all my questions about how we make lives that feel like our own, things I'd learned from previous work, ideas I'd followed and abandoned, skills I'd picked up in places I no longer wanted to be. It felt less like having another new idea and more like discovering somewhere all these apparently separate things could finally go.
I threw myself into it.
And I didn't only want to make the work. I wanted to build something capable of holding it.
That distinction feels very important because I'd wanted a real container for my work for a very long time. I didn't want another project that depended on me continually producing the same kind of thing, or another interesting idea that had nowhere to go once I'd made it. I wanted a functioning business. A place another person could actually enter. Something with enough shape to be understood and enough room inside it for me to keep discovering what the work wanted to become.
The idea of Invisible Strings as a Studio emerged in this period.
And I built it.
I made the website. I developed the Pathways. I worked out what someone could come here for and what I could genuinely offer them. I built the Inner Studio and kept changing it until its shape made sense. I wrote and rewrote and organised and reorganised. I made things, scrapped things, recovered things I'd previously dismissed and followed ideas far enough to discover whether they belonged.
It was a lot of work. Some of it became far more complicated than it needed to be, because apparently I was still me. But I don't think all that building was another version of the problem.
Some of it was the answer.
I'd spent years trying things and wondering why I couldn't make myself remain inside them. Now I was taking what I'd learned from all of those attempts and using it as material. I wasn't starting clean. The years I'd spent writing, making, building, changing my mind, learning what exhausted me and noticing what I kept returning to were pouring into this thing.
I had wanted to know what kind of structure could hold the way I actually worked.
Now I was trying to make one.
And I think this is where something about the pattern had changed, even though I was nowhere near finished learning from it.
Every version had taught me something about structure. Sometimes I'd tried to impose too much of it and squeezed the life out of what I was doing. Sometimes I'd loosened my grip, followed what interested me and discovered something I couldn't have planned. Then I'd need to work out how to give that thing enough form to exist in the world. I kept moving back and forth between the two, learning a little more each time about what needed holding and what needed room.
The Studio wasn't the moment I finally abandoned structure in favour of freedom.
It was what all those earlier attempts had taught me how to build.
I wanted somewhere sturdy enough that everything didn't have to depend on what I happened to be interested in that week. Somewhere tarot could belong without having to become all of Invisible Strings. Somewhere I could write, make, talk, follow a question, change direction and let different forms of the work develop without each shift becoming another existential crisis about what the whole thing was.
I wanted the container precisely because I knew how much moved inside it.
And somewhere in all that effort, Invisible Strings became the thing I'd been trying for years to work out how to build: something real enough to function and spacious enough to hold an unwieldy creative mind.
Having that foundation underneath me would eventually let me loosen my grip in ways I don't think I could have done before it existed.
I wasn't there yet.
Because I would love to tell you that after a year of tarot readings and a long winter I had completely stopped turning everything into an elaborate system.
Obviously I had not.
One of the things I struggled with as Invisible Strings took shape was how to make it visible.
This is a fairly ordinary problem if you're making something you eventually want other people to find. At some point you have to tell them it exists.
But I noticed how quickly publishing became a separate job in my head.
First there was the work I cared about. Then there was the problem of turning it into content.
How do I explain this?
How do I make it interesting?
How often should I post?
How do I make enough things that people remember I exist?
It was alarmingly close to the machinery that had killed the first version. Except this time I could see it happening. Not immediately, obviously. That would be far too convenient for this story. But eventually.
And because the Studio itself now had a shape, I could begin to ask a slightly different question.
Perhaps I didn't need publishing to provide the structure anymore.
What if I could publish from inside the work instead?
I could share questions I was genuinely following. Tarot readings that changed what I thought. Things I was making. Ideas while they were still alive enough to lead somewhere I hadn't expected.
Maybe visibility didn't have to be machinery built around the work so that the work could succeed.
Maybe it could be another way I participated in the work itself.
I loved this idea.
Then I noticed something slightly ridiculous.
Tarot had gone quiet.
Not from Invisible Strings. Tarot was everywhere in the Studio I was building. It was inside things I'd made. It was woven through the way I talked about the work. I still read cards occasionally.
But I wasn't sitting down with them in quite the same way.
I'd spent months thinking about websites and offers and writing and how everything fitted together. I'd been making decisions, evaluating things, changing things and trying to understand what Invisible Strings was becoming.
Somewhere in all that building, I'd moved away from the thing that had started this entire story.
I missed reading tarot for myself.
I missed following the cards without already knowing what I needed the reading to become.
Which was funny, really.
I'd built a Studio around the kind of enquiry I'd discovered through tarot and then become too busy building it to do the thing.
Apparently recognising a pattern does not stop you doing it again.
But perhaps this was the spiral.
I noticed.
So I sat down with my cards and decided to do a proper reading for the Studio. One card for the larger theme, then I'd go underneath it and see what happened.
I shuffled.
Death reversed.
I actually laughed.
Of course it was.
The last time I'd pulled Death it had been upright, back in April when I'd asked where I was a year after the reading that started everything. I'd gone underneath it and found the Fool, the Five of Swords and the High Priestess. That reading had made me wonder whether what needed to end wasn't my desire to begin, but the cycle of treating every beginning as another chance to erase what came before.
Now, months later, after building Invisible Strings, changing it repeatedly, getting tangled in visibility and finding my way back towards the work itself, Death was here again.
But upside down.
I pulled Temperance reversed next, which immediately complicated things. Then the Nine of Swords and the Emperor, who apparently wasn't finished with me either.
I kept going.
At one point the Four of Cups appeared and completely interrupted the interpretation I could feel myself forming, so I pulled underneath it and the reading moved again.
Eventually a reading that had started with Death reversed became a conversation about desire and dissatisfaction, possibility, the lives we don't choose, belonging, grief and what it might mean to actually inhabit the life we've chosen rather than continually negotiating with all the others we could have lived.
I hadn't known I wanted to think about any of those things when I sat down.
And I loved it.
I'd forgotten how much I loved not knowing where the reading was going.
Simply pulling cards. Following them. Letting one image change what I thought the previous one meant. Getting interested in the card that didn't fit rather than trying to make it fit. Finding myself somewhere I couldn't possibly have planned to arrive.
This was what I'd missed.
And there was something slightly funny about realising that because I still didn't want Invisible Strings Tarot back.
I didn't miss the Substack I'd deleted. I didn't miss trying to turn every interesting thought I had about tarot into something I could publish. I definitely didn't miss the point where something I'd started because I loved it had become another thing I was trying to keep going.
Ending it had been right.
But ending something doesn't mean every part of it was wrong.
I'd spent so much time understanding why Invisible Strings Tarot had stopped working for me that I'd paid less attention to why I'd started it in the first place.
I loved sitting with the cards. I loved following a reading further than I'd intended. I loved the moment an interpretation stopped making sense and I had to look again. I loved discovering a question I hadn't known I wanted to ask.
That part hadn't died.
I'd lost contact with it somewhere inside everything I'd built around it.
And now I could feel it again.
I didn't want the old Invisible Strings back, but I didn't need to leave everything that belonged to it there either.
This became important beyond tarot.
I'd tended to treat endings as though they required a verdict. It worked or it didn't. It was right for me or it wasn't. I grew out of it. I learnt the lesson. Now I move on.
But perhaps an ending could remain messier than that.
Something can need to end and still contain things we love. We can outgrow a form without outgrowing everything that lived inside it.
Moving forward might sometimes involve going back through what we've left behind and noticing what still has enough life in it to come with us.
The Death reversed reading itself kept doing this after I'd finished it.
I couldn't stop thinking about one of the places it had taken me: the unlived life. All those other versions of our lives that become impossible because we choose this one, including lives we once genuinely wanted and don't want anymore.
I started writing about it, and eventually another question appeared.
How might we creatively honour the unlived life?
I didn't know exactly what I meant yet, which was partly why I wanted to follow it. Could we write something? Make something? Give some form to a possibility that mattered even though we weren't going to live it?
And somewhere in there I noticed what was happening.
A tarot reading had wandered somewhere I hadn't expected. Something in it stayed with me, so I followed it into writing. The writing opened another question. Now I wanted to make something from that question.
I hadn't planned a sequence of content.
The reading moved, and I moved with it.
This distinction has become increasingly important to me.
From the outside, perhaps the two approaches can look exactly the same. A tarot reading becomes an essay, which becomes a creative practice, which becomes something else.
But one begins with the structure and asks the work to feed it.
The other begins with the work and asks what kind of structure it needs.
The Emperor and the Knight of Wands.
Again.
I hadn't solved the question.
I was learning how to live inside it.
By this point something else had become difficult to ignore.
Tarot was everywhere in this story.
The first reading had changed a loop into a spiral. The Emperor and the Knight of Wands had changed the way I thought about structure. The Magician reversed had made me wonder whether I kept abandoning things I already knew. A year later Death had changed the way I thought about beginnings and endings. Then tarot itself had gone quiet while I got very busy building a Studio that supposedly had tarot at its centre, and as soon as I properly returned to the cards, Death reversed sent me into a whole collection of questions I hadn't expected to be asking.
For a long time I'd described tarot as a tool for reflection. I still think that's a perfectly useful description, but I've become less interested in the word tool because it suggests I already know what I'm trying to do with it.
Quite often I don't.
I'm very good at thinking thoughts I already think. I can sit alone with a problem and construct an extremely convincing argument using all the assumptions I already have.
Tarot puts something else on the table.
A card I didn't choose. An image that doesn't fit. A contradiction I have to account for. Something that makes me ask a different question.
The cards hadn't been sitting at the side of this story helping me understand it.
They were part of the conversation that kept changing what happened next.
And I think this is where Invisible Strings finally started making more sense to me too.
Not as a business I needed to define perfectly or a container I could build once and then keep filling forever.
But as the container I'd built so this kind of looking had somewhere to go.
I didn't need the Studio to tell me what to make next. I needed it to be solid enough that I didn't have to reinvent the whole context for my work every time I followed something new.
Tarot could change what I saw. Writing could let me stay with it. Making something could give an idea a form and show me something else. And the Studio could hold all of it without requiring me to know in advance exactly where any particular enquiry would lead.
One of the things I made from all of this was Return, the first of three self-guided Pathways that now live inside the Studio.
Return began with a question that, by then, felt almost embarrassingly appropriate.
What does it mean to return to ourselves?
I wasn't particularly interested anymore in becoming someone who never lost the thread. I had enough evidence to suggest that wasn't going to happen.
I was much more interested in becoming familiar with the way back.
I let the cards into the making of Return too. Instead of deciding exactly what I wanted to say and then finding tarot cards that supported it, I read as I went. The cards could interfere, complicate something or take the work somewhere I hadn't planned.
In the final reading I asked what changes when returning becomes something we practise rather than something we perfect.
I pulled the Two of Pentacles, the Queen of Pentacles and the Ten of Wands reversed.
It was wonderfully ordinary.
Life continues. There are things to juggle, things to tend and things that pull our attention away. We forget. We get caught up. We discover ourselves doing something we thought we'd already understood.
Then perhaps we notice.
We tend to ourselves somewhere inside everything else.
We put something down.
And we return.
Which brings me, more or less, to now.
I’ve been telling this through my own life because that is where I have the evidence. I know what it feels like to want work and a life that feel like your own and still not know what form they should take. I know how easy it is to turn uncertainty into self-criticism, or something alive into another set of rules you have to obey. And I know how different a question can look once tarot puts something on the table that you would not have thought to ask yourself.
Invisible Strings exists because I wanted somewhere for that kind of looking to continue, but also because I wanted somewhere for what came from it to live.
I wanted the foundation.
And having spent so long building it, I can feel something changing again. I don't need every piece of writing to explain the business. I don't need every tarot reading to become content. I don't need to decide what something is for before I've had the chance to follow it. The structure is there. The work can move inside it.
None of that means I have arrived at a version of my life I no longer question. I’ll probably build things that become too complicated. I’ll get excited about something and change my mind. I’ll lose contact with things I know and rediscover them six months later as though I’ve had an extraordinary original insight.
I don't think the point was ever to stop doing those things entirely.
The learning has happened in stages. Each time I've found another place where I was gripping too tightly, another structure I'd mistaken for a requirement, another thing I thought I had to become in order to make the work work. And each time I've been able to loosen something.
Perhaps this is simply the next stage.
Only now I have something underneath me.
When I started going back through all of this, I thought the problem was that I kept beginning again. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. I like beginning. I like the Fool. I like the moment something catches my attention and I think, oh, what’s that? Let’s see.
What I want to lose is the idea that every beginning has to be a reset. That every ending needs a verdict. That every version of my life has to prove itself by becoming permanent.
I don’t think I believe in the clean slate anymore.
Too much comes with us. Things we’ve made and things we’ve ended. Ways we’ve changed. Things we once wanted and things we still want. Things we learned inside lives we no longer want to live. Things we thought we’d left behind and later discovered were still alive.
That is really what I have to offer through Invisible Strings. Not my answers, and not a route to the particular place I ended up, but a place to bring your own questions. Somewhere tarot can interrupt what you think you already know, where you can stay with what appears for long enough to hear yourself more clearly, and where whatever you discover has somewhere to go.
I’ve run out of past now.
There are questions I want to follow, cards I want to read, things I want to write and things I don’t know I want to make yet.
For the first time, I don't need to know what all of them are going to become.
I've built somewhere for them to land.
Let’s see what happens from here.
This is the final part of a three-part series. You can start from the beginning with I Kept Trying to Begin Again.