⭐ Grow With the Flow
What if the Tower isn’t here to break your life.. but to reveal a better one?
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One of the most annoying things I’ve learned about life is that it rarely asks for my opinion before rearranging everything. 🙄
I was talking with Rache Brand this week about layoffs, and I found myself saying something I never would’ve believed years ago: getting laid off was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I know. Stay with me.
I was laid off once while going through a divorce with a brand-new baby at home. Genuinely not great timing. I wanted certainty, a clear-cut roadmap, some kind of guarantee that it was all going to be okay. Instead I got a giant question mark and a lot of free time to worry about it.
What I couldn’t see then was that the layoff wasn’t the problem. I had spent years doing what made sense on paper while quietly feeling like I was wearing someone else’s shoes.
Not terrible shoes. Just not mine.
The layoff forced me to stop gripping a version of my life that had already stopped fitting.
It took me a while to find the words for what that kind of moment actually is. Then I came across The Tower in tarot, and something clicked.
If you’re not familiar, The Tower isn’t exactly the card people are hoping to pull. It shows up during sudden change, when the life you’ve built starts looking completely unrecognizable. Not a crowd-pleaser at first glance.
But I think it gets a bad rap.
Tower moments don’t show up randomly. They show up when you’ve been quietly ignoring something for a long time and life has officially run out of patience.
Think of it like trying to get your kid’s attention. First it’s gentle. By the seventh time, someone’s full name is being yelled at full volume. 😂
The disruption isn’t punishment. It’s redirection.
The Tower is asking the most uncomfortable question possible: what if letting go is actually the way forward?
At the time I would’ve laughed. Or cried. Probably both.
But eventually I got tired of trying to wrestle life back into the shape I wanted it to be. So I did something that felt terrifying: I stopped forcing it.
I mean, I wasn’t suddenly radiating peace on a mountaintop somewhere. I was still updating my resume and figuring out how to pay for things. But I made a quiet decision to work WITH what had happened instead of against it.
🌟 That’s where The Star comes in. If The Tower is the moment that changes everything, The Star is what follows. The part where you stop forcing the outcome and allow something in you to just soften.
Not because everything is figured out. Because you’ve decided to trust the direction even without a map.
The layoff eventually led to a better job. But the real gift was the extra time I got with my daughter during a season I didn’t know I needed it in. None of that was visible when I was deep in worry mode.
That’s the genuinely tricky part about Tower moments. They don’t arrive with an explanation attached. No little note that says this is happening FOR you, hang tight.
Years later you just look back and think: oh. THAT'S what that was for. THAT was the lesson.
Life wasn’t taking something away. It was doing a slow-and-steady rearranging on my behalf.
And I wouldn’t undo a single one of those moments. Not because they were easy, but because each one led me somewhere I never would have chosen for myself, and somehow, it turned out to be exactly where I needed to go. 💛
If you’re going through a Tower moment, breathe. Listen to what it’s trying to tell you. It may not be taking something from you. It may be pointing you somewhere you were meant to go.
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Joelene, the image of "wearing someone else's shoes" stayed with me because so many transitions become painful precisely when something that once fit no longer does. The layoff may have been the visible disruption, but your reflection suggests the deeper shift had already begun long before the job ended. I also appreciate your observation that meaning often arrives retrospectively; many of life's most important rearrangements make very little sense while we are living through them. Thank you for offering a hopeful perspective that honors both the difficulty of change and the possibility hidden within it.