The Hermit, Taylor Swift, and Following My Inner Fire.

Finding light in the dark of Autistic burnout recovery.

I’m teaching a workshop on February 1st about learning to navigate the unknown with The Hermit, which is our collective card for 2025. This post explores some of the ways I’ve worked with the Hermit, which was my personal card for 2024.

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Autistic burnout recovery is truly a wild unknown.

Autistic burnout itself wasn’t conceptualized until 2020, which is not nearly enough time to build up the kind of experiential body of work that would provide accessible guidance to those of us trying to claw our way out of it. The process of recovering from Autistic burnout is also, by necessity, highly individualized, since it centers around identifying, making safe space for, and ultimately reclaiming and integrating core aspects of the Autistic self that have been suppressed and exiled through the survival strategy of masking.

In other words: while we can do so with the support and medicine of community and kin, each of us is going to need to forge our own path through the darkness, one tentative step at a time, which is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past two years. Consider this a dispatch from the field of Autistic soul embodiment.

I wasn’t entirely without direction when I stepped onto the path. I had a knowing deep in my bones that my body—yes, my disabled, traumatized, Autistic body—could be trusted to lead the way, even though I’d never really seen such a thing done before and had no idea that it would look like for me.

How do you orient yourself when you don’t know where the fuck you’re going, when you don’t even know what it will feel like when you got there?

Luckily for me, The Hermit was my personal card for 2024 (the math usually works out that my own card of each given year is the same as the collective card for the following year.) The lesson of the Hermit is that all of us will be called at one point to turn away from the noise, pressure, and accepted wisdom of the overculture, and to seek our own path and our own medicine in the wilderness.

The Hermit, our guide through the forest, is the weirdo, the rebel, the recluse, the one who seeks their own counsel and isn’t afraid to look for it in unconventional places. The Hermit archetype usually is illustrated with the symbols of a solitary, worn figure; a dark, unexplored wilderness; and the light of a lantern that allows us to track our own path through the woods.

I relied on this archetype not so much to show me where to go, but to teach me how to make my way through the dark of this wild unknown. And I guess the first lesson is to be open to the unexpected, because there was no way I would ever have anticipated just how much Taylor Swift would be instrumental (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) to the journey.

One thing was amply—and annoyingly—plain from the start: I would have to take my own medicine and delve into my own body of work for the tips and tools I would need along the way. That’s the thing about being a trauma witch: there’s only so much flailing and whining that Spirit (and your own wise friends) will allow you to do before (rudely) pointing out that Wait, haven’t you already been teaching this shit for years now?

(I know. I have. Leave me alone!)

In Soft Animal Magic—my aforementioned channeled body of work— the central concept is what I call the deep inner yes, which can be described as the somatic resonance of the spark we feel when the truth of our souls connects with the truth of spirit. It’s by no means a new concept—in fact it’s probably one of the most ancient facets of humanity—but that’s the name it showed up with for me, and the name itself feels like a deep inner yes. It feels true, clear and sharp as a sword, but is also warm and bright as sunlight.

The Hermit’s lantern is a symbol of the deep inner yes: it’s the light that guides our steps, that casts a circle of clarity showing us the resources available along the way. It is both companion and confirmation, showing us that we’re on the right path, and that we don’t have to make our way alone.

When you first cross the threshold into the forest of the unknown, you experience a profound sensory recalibration. It’s very, very bright and loud in the world outside the woods, where we are assaulted with advice and hot takes whether we’re looking for them or not. The plush silence of the woods, thick as fur, is both a welcome relief and an unnerving absence.

As The Hermit sets out on their journey, at first the lantern of their deep inner yes doesn’t give off much light to travel by. They take small, tentative steps while their eyes get adjusted to the amount of light given off by their lantern, inching their circle of clarity along further and further into the furred woods.

I’ve found it really hard to acclimate to the dimness of my own lantern at first. In the past, I’ve relied on being able to elaborate full-scale, long-range plans before taking a single step. It made sense to set my course on a certain imaginary arrival point, to draw up the map, and follow it, come what may, regardless of the obstacles or harm I’d encounter along the way.

That’s what trying to navigate according to the capitalist and ableist agenda felt like: you think you can see clearly where you’re headed, but in truth there’s absolutely no way to actually get there. Not in one piece, at least.

This is paradox of The Hermit: the only reliable and useful light we have to guide ourselves by—our inner spark, our deeper inner yes—is one we have been taught to fundamentally distrust. So we find ourselves having to learn to trust the light of our soul just as we’re facing the deepest darkness we’ve ever encountered.

There really is no other story than this: how the impossible becomes possible when we turn away from the known world, slow down, and trust the unprovable knowings of our heart.

Before I tell you about how any of this relates to Taylor Swift, we need to go over some back story.

When my mom found out I was Autistic and learned about the concept of Autistic special interests, she only had one thing in mind: Madonna, the subject of worshipful devotion of my 80s & 90s girlhood. The walls of my room were papered with images of Madonna: posters, pages cut out from magazines, even made a collage of tiny images of her face on my bedroom phone (and yes, that phone was plugged into the wall.)

This earned me sneers and derisions from my own family, who were no doubt sick of hearing about the finer points of the Blond Ambition tour choreo, and from older kids at school who nicknamed me “Madonna” (derogatory.)

(Picture this: me on my frozen ass, having taken a tumble while on a school ski trip, hearing older kids in the ski lift above scream HAHAHAHAHA MADONNAAAAAAA IS ON HER ASSSSSSSS. This actually happened.)

I’m a relatively recent convert to the charms of Taylor Swift. I didn’t really know much of her music before 2020, when Folklore & Evermore came out in the depths of the pandemic. To be quite honest, I fully looked down my nose at her. (I am an insufferable snob, which is ok, because I am wise enough to change my mind when I’m wrong.)

I went hard for Folklore & Evermore. They are both stellar, perfect albums that provide an excellent soundtrack for crying in the bathtub, which is most of what I was doing at that point of the pandemic. But I didn’t didn’t become a full-fledged Swiftie and start to explore her back catalog until last year, which brought us the release of the double album The Tortured Poets Department and the second year of the Eras tour.

Taylor Swift is a great artist to get into if you’re middle-aged newly diagnosed Autistic woman and have no idea what the fuck your life is supposed to look like now. The sheer VOLUME of SONGS and LORE offers an ever-renewing fount of shit to obsess and marvel about. Her music chronicles pretty much every single emotion you’re likely to encounter in a calendar year, from wretched despair to vengeful menace to childlike wonder and back again, and the fact that the same artist has experimented with so many genres and styles of music means you can keep the wolves of both ADHD (SHINY!!) and Autism (SAME!!) happy and fed without having to switch playlists.

Soon enough Taylor was my new special interest I was relying on her music for just about everything that felt difficult:

Need to get up off the couch and go make food in the kitchen? TAYLOR.

Need to coax yourself into the shower? TAYLOR.

Having a hard time transitioning to your partner’s house? TAYLOR.

Need to disappear into yourself during a family gathering? Go sit on the swing and TAYLOR.

Just had a meltdown in front of your mom for the first time IN THE CAR and you still need to drive home from there? TAYLOR.

Need to a way to process and express the sometimes overwhelming feeling of Autistic joy? TAYLOR.

Need to hang out with your journals and stationery supplies so you can feel like yourself again at the end of a long day? TAYLOR.

Awake in the middle of the night (again) and bored? TAYLOR.

Having my life changed by music isn’t anything new in my world—case in point, I was in middle school in 1991 when Nirvana’s Nevermind dropped. (I am old!) But the element that was most surprising about my initiation into Swiftieland is the very thing that made me sneer at her before: Swifties themselves, arguably the biggest and definitely the sparkliest of fandoms.

Growing up as unidentified, masked Autistics, we’ve learned that our love—the most powerful transformative force for good in this world—is wrong and suspicious because what, and especially how, we love doesn’t make sense to other people.

Taylor herself is arguably all about this kind of love: being weirdly passionate and intense about all-encompassing ideas and world-building and making the things connect to the other things. I am not super deep into the Easter eggs, but as any Swiftie can tell you, EVERYTHING in Taylor’s world means SOMETHING. From the color of her nail polish to the number of fingers she flashes for a second during a performance, no detail is too small to be imbued with meaning and connected to the whole.

Being swept up by the Swiftie wave and following the path of The Eras Tour healed the parts of my soul that had retreated into the shadows to lick its wounds and gave me permission to wholeheartedly love something so hard.

With each grainy YouTube livestream of a European show, with each surprise song mash-up, Taylor helped me reconnect with the wild, passionate, don’t-give-a-fuck 12yo self who adored Madonna and wore black every single day my first year of middle school. Tapping into her unapologetic brazenness has given me a new vision for what my life could feel like, and lit the fire necessary for the transformation.

Here’s one thing that The Hermit and Taylor Swift would both agree on: it’s not the actual thing that gives you the spark in itself that matters as much as it’s the force of the LOVE YOU have for it—THAT is what has the power to change your relationship with your body and your life.

THAT is what has the power to burn down the structures that separate and oppress us.

If you’re aching to reconnect to your inner fire of joy, I invite you to join us on February 1st for community, ritual, and reflection around the archetype of The Hermit.

LIGHT YOUR OWN PATH: FOLLOWING YOUR INNER FIRE WITH THE HERMIT

Saturday, February 1st at 12pm Pacific/2pm Central/3pm Eastern

$44

(Solidarity pricing of $22 is available.)

No previous tarot knowledge or experience is necessary as we’re primarily working with The Hermit as an archetypal guide.