decay is an essential part of death & rebirth
My friend reads Tarot cards. During a reading, she pulled the Death card which I learned was, paradoxically, the most hopeful card in the deck. It didn't signify literal death, but endings as prerequisites: change, transformation, rebirth.
Amidst difficulty, you often hear the refrain It gets really bad before it gets good again. It sounds almost insulting with its fake optimism. Then you live through it enough times, it starts revealing itself a pattern the universe refuses to break.
It's strange how suffering often precedes clarity, how collapse, catastrophic and gutting, signifies a drastic reordering of our lives. The belief that nothing truly new enters our lives without something else breaking is what carries me through my most agonizing days. I've learned to recognize decay as a sign of change.
Significant change demands disruption. The life you've built (habits, relationships, beliefs, routines) may have once kept you safe, functional, even happy. But some structures can expire, though we still desperately cling to them because of their familiarity.
Decay settles when something has overstayed its usefulness, and damn is it a profoundly uncomfortable internal state to be. I witnessed older version of my life beginning to feel embarrassing, fragile, and painfully inadequate, and I mistook those feelings as regression. I felt like a failure.
In nature, nothing blooms without decomposition. Soil is fertile precisely because of what has died in it, and I think the same is true for us. I know we're conditioned to dread endings, to interpret them as punishments or proof that something has gone wrong. Instead, endings ask: Are you willing to let this version of your life die so another one can exist?
Rebirth does't cleanly arrive with relief. It is discomfort, grief, and the unsettling epiphany that everything you once relied on no longer works. When my life begins to fall apart, I learned, before panicking, to ask myself What is being dismantled? And why? The Death card doesn't promise what's next is easy but that it'll be different. I hold on to that.