How to Be Less Afraid of The Tower

Nobody likes The Tower. Anyone who says they like The Tower is lying.

The other night, I braced myself to have a tough conversation, knowing it would result in one of two outcomes: yes or no. I pulled a tarot card to help guide me, and flipped over The Tower. ‘OK,’ I thought. ‘That’s a no, then.’ Sure enough, a few hours later: ‘no’. I could have battled out the nuances of it, weighed a hundred different options, and chided myself for being so black-and-white about it all. And I did do all of that. But the beauty of pulling a card like The Tower, which is so obviously intense – even for people who have never seen a tarot card before – is that it’s quite simple. Not easy, but simple. Even simpler than ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Because The Tower doesn’t even let you choose. It makes the decision for you.

In this instance, The Tower showed me I had constructed a fantasy. It’s sad when fantasies end – really, really sad. But that sadness is in proportion to the investment you put into the fantasy, not the fantasy in and of itself. It takes a lot of time, energy, effort, and resources to build a tower, but it takes two seconds to be thrown from the top floor of it. That is the hard lesson, the wisdom, of this card. It’s a reminder that we don’t have control over everything. We have control over a lot of things, but not everything. Exerting too much control means we automatically lose our ability to listen, observe, and share resources – that’s essentially the Tower of Babel myth, which is beautifully retold in Ted Chiang’s short story Tower of Babylon.1 I wish The Tower would come for greedy billionaires more often than it comes for poor ol’ me, but unfortunately I cannot control that (though I really, really wish I could).

In the Bollywood movie Baazigar, which I loved as a child, a son tries to avenge the death of his father, who was cheated out of his fortune by his business partner. This plunged his family into abject poverty. As payback, the son tracks down his father’s former business partner’s daughter and seduces her. He love bombs her, drafts a suicide pact, and gets her to sign it, but then backs out last minute. (This is not a children’s movie, big lol, but it does have the greatest dance sequence of all time.)2 He then convinces her to get secretly married to him, so they go to the town hall and sign marriage papers. Then he takes her up to the roof, so they can celebrate their elopement by enjoying the view, and throws her off the balcony. She dies immediately, and he uses her signed suicide pact letter to make it seem like she killed herself. (I would not have wanted to see her tarot spread that morning – The Devil and The Tower and Death would have shown up. One of these is hard enough!!!)

After he kills her, the son switches from glasses to contact lenses. I think this might have been some sort of sophisticated product placement – or, at the least, the only time in the entire history of cinema where a camera closes up on a contact lens case to the score of dramatic thriller music – but movie positions it as the moment the loving son dies and enters full villain mode. Seeing this through the lens (no pun intended) of tarot, it’s the moment where he is so high up in The Tower of his own madness and rage that he is beyond the point of redemption; he is no longer human. Just full monster. And he will not be coming down from that tower, because that means he has to face the consequences of the heinous acts he’s committed, and he’s not willing to do that. He’s not willing to admit that revenge has nothing to do with equality or karma or setting the world to rights. He’s too lost in his own ego story. He’s lost the plot. And then comes the lighting strike.

I have also sort of lost the plot here, because I got too carried away writing about my favourite childhood movie (loooool send help), but the point is: The Tower kills whatever narrative you’ve built to keep you safe from pain, accountability, and acceptance that life is just unfair like that sometimes, and all you can really do is make peace with it, and try to live as good a life as you can, with whatever you already have. All those trite aphorisms you roll your eyes at because you think you are smarter than that, and that you’re too special for those to apply. The Tower says: Nope, sorry, you’re just like everyone else. It’s humiliating before it is humbling. And, you have it admit, a bit liberating too. Because you no longer have to try so hard to convince yourself things are working well when you know, deep down, they are not. Lean into that relief.

I hope anyone reading this isn’t as far gone as the son from Baazigar. (And if you are, sorry, that’s above my pay grade.) But if you are just going about your life and pull The Tower card, please try to stay calm. It doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophe will strike. But it does mean you will be asked to take stock of the lies you’ve been telling yourself, the fantasies you’ve been operating within, and consider whether they have trapped you in a tall tower that you are not sure how to escape. And then you just kind of have to let yourself be scared and sit uncomfortably in the unknown for a bit, and go about your life, trusting that the escape route will show up, even if it means being thrown out of the window due to some unexpected bit of news. Have faith that that time you spent bracing for the fall has made you tough enough to survive it.

In other words, the way to be less afraid of The Tower is to be afraid of The Tower, and trust that within all that fear, you will find courage. Because you can’t have one without the other. Courage without fear is just recklessness.

If you are interested in writing through fear, come to the Tarot + Creative Writing Salon I am hosting at Nourished Communities in Islington – ticket link here. If you are not based in London, please tell your London-based friends about it, and subscribe to this newsletter / like my posts. This stuff really helps, not just my ego, but it helps my content reach more people. And please read my novel, Ghost Chilli, which is a very spiritual book masquerading as a dark comedy of manners about being in your 20s. It’s also ‘all about loving your family‘ (IYKYK).