Learning How to Fall
Or, How Getting Relentlessly Thrown on My Ass Helped Me Learn to Love the Wheel
The Wheel of Fortune used to be my least favorite tarot card. I feared it more than the Tower, more than the 10 of Swords, more than the 5 of Cups. Upright or reversed, it didn’t matter; when it appeared in readings, I groaned.
Why? Because the Wheel represents things outside of your control. It represents the unpredictable—surprises, accidents, chance, fortune and misfortune. It’s the movement of forces and systems larger than us intersecting with our lives in ways we don’t see coming, don’t understand, and are often unprepared for. There’s a reason that Lady Fortuna was one of the most feared goddesses in the ancient world. Because when the Wheel turns, whether in your favor or against it, there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing stops the Wheel.
In short, when I saw the Wheel, I saw powerlessness.
2025 taught me I was wrong.
My personal year card for 2025 was the Wheel of Fortune, and our collective year card for 2026 is one and the same. Year cards are calculated using a numerology technique called reduction where you add the digits of the year until you get a single digit number. Or, if you’re using it with tarot, until you get a number between 1 and 22. That number corresponds to a Major Arcana card (with 22 as the Fool), and that’s the card of the year.
To find the year card for 2026, we add the digits 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 to get 10, the Wheel of Fortune. We could also reduce 10 further to a one-digit number: 1 + 0 = 1, the Magician. Some practitioners always reduce to the one-digit number and keep that card only, but I like to play with a full deck, so to say. So 2026 is a Wheel of Fortune year, with the Magician present as a background flavor.
Because my birthday (2/17) reduces to 1 (2 + 1 + 7 = 10; 1 + 0 = 1), my personal year card is perpetually one year ahead of the collective year card. That means I get to spend a whole year with a card before the rest of us do. Granted, a personal year card feels and operates differently than a collective one, describing personal life themes rather than collective/global trends and events. But I always find my experience with the card prepares me for the collective year in big ways, so bear with me while I tell you a story about how getting repeatedly thrown on my ass in 2025 helped me learn to love the Wheel.
I was not thrilled about entering my Wheel of Fortune year (understatement). Coming off of the 2024 presidential election, I felt brittle, hollowed-out, panicky, and deeply afraid. I’m a trans person queerly married to a trans person. I have a uterus. I was bracing for my rights to be relentlessly targeted, and my body-mind was in a near-constant state of low-grade fight or flight. On top of that, my personal year card was my least favorite in the deck. The Wheel of Fortune was going to run me over like an eighteen-wheeler and then back up and do it again, I just knew it.
And it did do that, for sure. But it also brought unexpected turns of fate that resulted in me being far happier and healthier and more myself at the end of the year than I was at the beginning.
In November 2024, days after the election, I went to a friend’s birthday party at a karaoke bar. Late that night, many drinks in, I had a conversation with another party-goer, Mariah, about that crushing sense of fear and powerlessness that had me in a chokehold. I don’t remember who suggested it (see: many drinks), but we decided that we’d take a self-defense class together. We exchanged numbers. The next morning, I woke up late with a raging hangover, but Mariah had already researched queer-friendly self-defense classes in Portland and texted me a link to One With Heart Martial Arts.
I didn’t really know Mariah. We’d only just met, and my memory of our conversation was fuzzed with alcohol. Taking a self-defense class with a virtual stranger felt intimidating and potentially misguided, but I had to do something. I couldn’t reverse the Wheel, but I could take steps to prepare myself for what was coming. Besides, the feeling of panic and powerlessness was frying my body from the inside out, and I thought punching things might help. So I signed up.
That’s how I ended up in a large, brightly lit room with mats on the floor in January, hammering the air with my fists and screaming “No!” at imaginary attackers. Just showing up that first day pushed me out of my comfort zone. I hadn’t seen Mariah since that night at karaoke, and I wasn’t sure if I fully remembered what she looked like. Everyone walking by outside the huge windows on Hawthorne was going to be able to watch me turn tomato-red and flail about with my noodle arms.
But I did recognize Mariah, and having a friend there, even one I barely knew, helped. I quickly surmised that everyone else in the room felt like I did: a little timid, a little fragile, a lot afraid. But each of us had a spark of fight in us still. That’s why we were there, after all. Because we weren’t going down without a fight.
The five weeks I spent in that class, with women and nonbinary people of all ages and body types, changed me. We had class the day that Trump signed the very first executive order of his second term, which removed legal recognition of transgender and nonbinary people and declared sex binary and assigned at birth. I walked onto the mats on the edge of tears, feeling like I was going to break in half. During circle at the end, where we debrief about the class, I did cry a little. But I walked away feeling stronger, more resilient, more supported, and more determined than ever to not let this administration crush me and rob me of my joy.
That self-defense class didn’t just teach me to fight; it gave me back my fight. Before the final week was over, I had already signed up to continue training, along with Mariah and three others from our class. Soon after, I was given my white belt and started training in the Indonesian martial art of Pukulan Kuntao Silat.
Flash forward to the end of 2025. In December, I tested for my next rank, along with Mariah and our now closely-knit cohort of white belts who had trained hard together all year. Our bodies were pushed to their limits. We performed kicks and rolls and movements we thought impossible a year ago. We hit hard. Real hard. And in the end, we swapped our white belts for white sashes and graduated from beginner to intermediate. (You can view a photo of me, still tomato-red but slightly less noodley, about to backhand hammer fist a pad during my sash test here.)
I share this story because I never expected this. I never, ever, would have guessed that I, a life-long dedicated couch enthusiast who never met an exercise I liked, would start studying a martial art on the cusp of 40 with two bad knees. But this isn’t a physical fitness story. This isn’t a glow-up, muscle-building makeover story. My body has changed, yes. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life, yes. I feel hotter than I’ve ever felt in my life, yes. (In part due to starting testosterone in March—another Wheel of Fortune surprise, and one directly tied to Pukulan showing me that I could be strong and do things that scare me.) This is a story about finding agency and power when the world wants to take it away, finding a stable place inside myself amidst the chaos, and finding a community of generous, big-hearted, ass-kicking people to fight alongside.
It’s a story about the Wheel of Fortune.
I’ve always preferred the Wheel card from the Tarot de Marseille over the Rider Waite Smith’s more arcane design. The Tarot de Marseille shows a Rota Fortunae, an image that’s been around for centuries, with a king on the top of the wheel, one figure on the rising side, another on the falling side. Classic images frequently included a fourth figure, often depicted as an old man or beggar, being crushed underneath the wheel. The message is that sometimes you’re on top and sometimes you’re on bottom, but the only certain thing is that the Wheel always turns. In the Middle Ages, the Rota Fortunae was graffitied on buildings as a statement that even kings aren’t on top forever. Even they are brought low in the end. A necessary reminder for us today, perhaps, living as we are under the reign of a mad king.
2025 was a 9/Hermit collective year, which I wrote about last year here. The Hermit is the archetype of the idealogical rebel who questions the status quo, the philosophical and spiritual seeker who departs from the beaten path of tradition to pursue their own truth and light in solitude. In a big way, 2025 was a master class in the Hermit reversed. The idealogical rebel questioning the status quo becomes dangerous ideologue imposing a fascist agenda. Departure from tradition becomes ignoring the courts and dismantling systems and structures with no respect to their necessity or function. The search for truth becomes a warped funhouse of lies, conspiracy theories, witch hunts, censorship, and the rewriting of history. The solitary philosophical and spiritual seeker becomes a mad king at the head of a cult who tweets from his isolated throne about his fear that he won’t get into heaven and how he must perpetrate atrocities to get there.
But the Wheel of Fortune always turns, and 2026 is Lady’s Fortune’s year.
In the past, I’ve ended these Year Card posts with predictions for what the year ahead may hold, but the thing about the Wheel is that you can’t predict it. Maybe you can infer the direction the Wheel is turning and make preparations so you’re not completely crushed when it rolls over you. Maybe you can be prepared for the moment when the Wheel finally turns in your favor, so you can leap onto unexpected opportunities and make the most of windfalls and lucky twists of fate. But Lady Fortune never shows her hand.
The surprises the Wheel brings sometimes seem inevitable in hindsight—me starting T, for instance, which probably everyone but me saw coming. Or writing a queer horror novel, which took me by surprise but is deeply unshocking to everyone around me. But frequently the Wheel turns in ways you couldn’t have guessed and never would have imagined. A conversation with a new friend you just met at a karaoke bar leads to saying yes to a self-defense class, leads to training in a martial art six hours a week, leads to more community than you’ve ever had, leads to more security and joy and well-being than you thought possible.
So if there’s one prediction I can make for 2026, it’s to be open to the unexpected. And if there’s any advice I can give, it’s to be ready to say yes to the chance encounter, even if it pushes you outside your comfort zone. Because the Wheel isn’t actually about being powerless. It’s about finding your power even in the moments when you don’t have much of it, when there’s so much you can’t control.
The night before the winter solstice, fresh new white sash around my waist, I spent four hours being thrown to the mat again and again by black belts. We were learning takedowns, and that means practicing on each other. I’d throw my partner to the ground; they’d throw me to the ground; repeat. It’s not pleasant, and at first it’s scary, but in Pukulan, they teach you how to fall correctly so you can get back up again.
Because fighting well isn’t just about throwing punches; it’s about knowing how to fall.
There’s a technique to falling, involving a forceful exhalation of breath to pad the organs and slapping out an arm as your body hits the ground, not to catch yourself but to offset and distribute impact (and probably for other reasons I don’t understand yet, frankly). It feels totally unnatural until you practice it so many times that your body does it automatically. And the only way to practice is by throwing your body at the ground repeatedly. The hardest part, in my opinion, is tricking your brain into it. Your brain really doesn’t want you to fall. It screams “Danger!” and tries to lock up your muscles. But 2025 was all about learning that my body could do things I formerly thought impossible, which always starts with pushing past that mental barrier, that limit that says, I can’t, and figuratively (or literally) throwing yourself at the ground. The moment before the fall is so much scarier than the fall itself. And once you know you can do it, something shifts in your brain. You build trust in yourself. The limits become porous. Or, as our head teacher Mas Guru Agung Janesa says, you become limitless.
There’s a connection there to the Wheel. As Major Arcana 10, the Wheel is about limits, to an extent. 10 is endings, conclusions, finality. But it’s also beginnings. It’s the 1 of the Magician’s limitless imagination and focused will, and it’s the 0 of the Fool’s innate possibility and grand leap into the unknown. The Wheel is ruled by Jupiter, planet of expansion. Under Jupiter, the limits recede, pushed toward infinity.
I don’t know how many times I was thrown to the ground that night before the solstice. I wasn’t counting, but it was certainly in the multiple dozens. I still don’t love falling, to be honest, but I always got up again. We all did. Bumped and bruised and sore all over, we all got up again, every time. And we did it smiling and laughing. And then we did it again.
So that’s what I want to leave you with as we enter 2026, the Year of the Wheel. An essential part of building power when you feel powerless isn’t just learning how to punch; it’s learning how to fall. Sometimes you’re on top of the Wheel and sometimes you’re not, but if you know how to fall, you can trust yourself to handle the impact. You can move the limits. You can fall and fall and come up fighting. Less afraid, more powerful, and stronger every time.
Charlie Claire, I wrote in my own newsletter that I chumbawumba-ed this year because I fell down and got back up again. I LOVE reading about you literally and figuratively doing the same. Thank you for your writing, and all the magic you bring to the world. I love The Gay Marseille wheel!
Fantastic essay in so many ways. I learned about the wheel, a card I usually gloss over in tarot readings. I am inspired by you as you identify yourself here and by your martial arts pursuit. I identify as a queer person. Finally, I am moved by your writing and by your story and by your good, generous heart.