When you can’t fight back, your body keeps on fighting

Lenormand’s Whip and a spiritual theory on two decades of autoimmunity

TW: Domestic violence, Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Violence

The latter of the two is Ring, card twenty-five. Ring anoints what can exist peacefully forever. Ring turns love into commitment. Ring renews your contract, sends your kids to the next grade, reorders your grocery subscription box.

The other is Whip, card eleven. Whip brings pain, violence, repetition, sex. Ruled by the Jack of Clubs, Whip brings a hard driving energy into a reading. Whip insists; whip forces. Whip will do whatever it did again.

Starting in early adolescence, I lived with an unpredictable man.

The extent of the violence he would deliver was also unpredictable. One moment he was focused on whether my legs were too open while I relaxed on the couch, the next he was punching our Dell computer through the screen, leaving pitty-pats of blood across the box he’d lifted it from the day before.

I was trapped with him, and I knew it. I’d run away sometimes, live with friends sometimes, but I was so tired. I slept through the weekends; I’d groggily completed my homework on Fridays before leaving school. I’d stay at other people’s houses for days, but inevitably, my mother would find me and threaten me and drag me back to my corner of the cage where we lived with an unpredictable man.

For the remaining years of my childhood, from twelve to eighteen, I worked hard to keep him from seeing me.

The violence could come from nowhere, without any spawning offence, sometimes in the dead of night. There wasn’t a soul willing to defend me. My mother always dragged me back.

But no matter where I was, my body kept on running, even when it was running on empty. At fourteen, I developed a limp. This made me an easy target for homophobic bullies both inside of my home and at school. By sixteen, the hair at my temples began to thin. By eighteen, I struggled to eat or walk without pain.

These cycles of abuse, violence, and illness are the essence of Lenormand’s Whip.

Was my body fighting to escape the exhausting, terrifying situation it was in — begging for a chance to survive? Had my body internalized my mother’s boyfriend’s violence, and become his accomplice?

Yes. At eighteen, I was so sick those around me seemed to be counting my days. I had preacher’s cysts on both wrists. I wrapped my ankles in Ace bandages and cinched them into signature combat boots. By twenty, I bought a leopard print cane. Those around me were at once sure I was faking, and that I was soon to leave this world for the next.

By this time, I had already attracted someone else to fill the role of my mother’s boyfriend, who I called a lover but who was not one. My body collaborated as it had been taught.

After years of anonymous emergency room visits, and doctors who only made things worse with their flippancy and neglect, I was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus.

It was not a relief. Since the condition emerged at fourteen, the doctor estimated that I’d likely make it no farther than twenty-five. So I took the pills, and I waited until twenty-five, where I found myself with yet another lover who was not one, far more violent than the first.

I was in a cycle and I knew it. I was trapped in a cage with an unpredictable man. At the time, I figured I always would be. The illness my body created when I couldn’t get away made me an easy target for the conditions that created the illness, and I still couldn’t get away. Until I did.

The Whip will not stop on its own. It must be broken.

The guidebook for Black Gold Lenormand by Grandma Baby Apothecary, my preferred Lenormand deck, and the one you’re most likely to see if you book a reading with me, lists Whip with the subheading “Sacrifice.”

“Are you willing to sacrifice your time, your money, your comfort, convenience, and privilege for what you want,” it asks.

Surviving lupus at twenty-five meant racking up unrepayable student loan debt so I could afford to flee this latest manifestation of home in the deep night with holey shoes toward god knew what.

It is not beautiful, it is not safe, it is not comforting to break the Whip. Still we break the Whip.

A read a story in the family book about a man enslaved alongside my Hairston ancestors, Sam Lion. Mr Lion knew a slave driver intended to club him with a “loaded” whip, the handle of which had an iron core. He had been chopping wood when the slaver lunged at him, ready to deliver a deadly blow.

He sunk his ax into the slaver’s chest.

The next thought, no doubt, was about his wife and children. How the only solution that could keep him alive, fleeing north, could mean permanent separation from his family. So he did not flee.

He stayed in the forest near Beaver Creek plantation for two months or so, no doubt helped by other folks enslaved there, and hopefully in the company of those he loved.

He turned himself in, and after a sham trial, the slavers hung him for the crime of loving his family and believing his life had worth.

The slavers killed him for saving his own life. This was a punishment for his wife, his children, and every other enslaved person who knew or heard of Sam Lion.

The cost we still pay included the epigenetic origins of disease, the internalization of punishment, the impulse towards violent overcorrection, and the sublimation of the body’s innate desire to fight back against oppression given no channel through which to find peace.

This is my spiritual theory of why I have Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, an ancient disease science is unwilling to relieve because it’s conveniently eugenicist to allow its continuation.

Illness is a natural part of life on earth, and like many other aspects of life, it has been exploited by capitalists as a means of social control. Both can be true at once. I insist on a disability justice politic that can hold both at once.

I’m not interested in a cure for lupus without a remedy for misogynist and queerphobic violence. I’m not interested in a cure for lupus that doesn’t come with reparations. I’m not interested in a conversation about lupus that doesn’t bury an ax in the hand that holds the Whip.

What is safety? Who is it for?

What does the body do when it exists in a reality where safety is a story other people tell to make sure YOU cannot be safe.

White queers are, increasingly it seems, OBSESSED with the idea of safety.

A white non-binary classmate cornered me in the private chat of the zoom to respond to a minor political disagreement. When I didn’t immediately adopt their way of thinking, they claimed I was unsafe, then violent.

I neither cussed, nor called my classmate out their name. I did not threaten them, follow them, or even call them silly. We had slightly different opinions on an oppression we both experience.

Yet this is violence to people who believe they are entitled to safety in a world they work hard to make perpetually unsafe for those around them.

This is something they have in common with the rest of their folks. The hyperindividual concept of safety they use is almost always divorced from the reality that safety likely can’t exist on the scale they’re hoping under our current system.

I’m sure my classmate knew that their language was the sort that could have big consequences for me. They hoped they would befall me. It was one more thing for the tank that keeps the engine of my disease running.

The Whip shows us how even the definition of violence can be violent. The Whip exposes that true power is the ability to decide whose violence matters.

It names which bodies will bear the burden of absorbing that violence in silence.

Some Resources That Helped Me:

Women Against Abuse

Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence

Anti-Violence Project

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Hey, I’m Cyrée

I’m a rootworker, diviner, and clinical herbalist. I believe that spirit work is an essential part of all movements for justice. I hope you’ll take a look around, there are plenty of opportunities here to deepen your connection with your gifts (with my guidance.)

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