...and I took that personally

This is going to sound like an obvious statement but bear with me: the personal planets in your chart (sun, moon, Venus, Mars, and sometimes but not always Mercury) FEEL PERSONAL when they are taking harsh transits from outer planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto). Meaning: stuff outside your control happens, and it often hurts. The transiting planet, the aspect in question, the planet being transited, the natal aspects of the planets involved, and the location of all of these things in your birth chart give a sense of the flavor if you’re the astrologer, as the chart owner will usually be acutely aware of whatever’s going on.

When I had transiting Neptune on my 12th house natal Venus-Mars conjunction, it was a 5+ year slog of bizarre events, which, at first, I took personally, but after a while I got so numb to the unrelenting waves of unpleasant things that I absolutely couldn't control, it's now a struggle to start to take things personally again, even a few years later (admittedly, a global pandemic didn't help much). If something nice happens, my brain is so used to automatically going "...but that doesn't mean anything" that I dismiss whatever it is.

What you'll find if you dig a little bit through various astrological literature is that during Neptune transits, you tend to lose things and people. This is true of Pluto, also, but with Pluto there's a finality: the marriage is dead, the car is dead, the friendship is dead, etc. In most ways, this finality is easy to understand, even if you don’t like it. In Neptunian times, people and things vanish and come back, usually to vanish again, but the vanishing tends to have nothing to do with any action you take one way or another, and there’s a lot of uncertainty about permanency. In Plutonian times, you know in no uncertain terms what you are dealing with, and in Neptunian times, the last thing you can be is certain.

During my Neptune transit (from hell) I got very used to people leaving, and they were people I loved a lot. I did not see the first abandonment coming and I spent the next two years trying to reconcile it, learning astrology in the process because I needed a distraction from feeling sad all the time, which was back when I was still in taking-things-personally mode. Once I had enough knowledge to be dangerous, I knew in the back of my mind that people disappearing was part of the textbook definition of Neptune transits, but do you think this made me me feel any better? No. Rational people want explanations and facts that they can use to digest the reasons behind the things that have happened. I was left wondering how awful I must be since the same thing kept happening over and over again.

Making matters worse, these people kept disappearing and coming back with various proclamations, which was emotionally overwhelming in its own right, because I was very mad at the people in question but was simultaneously plugged into the Neptunian wavelength of forgiveness. “It's all love, right?” asks Neptune. (With Neptune, you start taking the 5,000 year view instead of 5 days, 5 months, or anything particularly relating to linear time as experienced by humans.) Finally, and perhaps most insultingly, while you're still capable of rational thought, Neptune cranks up the volume on emotional whims, so you tend to do things that defy logic or your own normal patterns. There were points where I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I'm not a doormat, and I was acting like one.

What did I do when I exhausted my ability to care about things? A lot of wandering. I wandered in to and out of a variety of situations, pausing only occasionally to reflect on why I was stone-sober at a house party late on a Sunday night surrounded by people more than 10 years younger than me when I had work the next morning (this was something I didn’t even do in my 20s post-college, which should give you a sense of how out of character this was). Or how I had my palm read at a party by a guy who then wouldn't let go of said palm and then started channeling the voice of (who he believed was?) Jesus Christ toward me. Or how I found myself schlepping up the side of a small mountain being regaled with the sad tales of a man named Paul, who was proclaiming things like “I guess I never learned to love myself,” while I just nodded along. These things didn't make sense then and don't make sense now. Most of my life lacked continuity for a while, and I lived an out-of-control series of "...and now THIS is happening." and responded to whatever it was in the moment, as this was the best I could do. Planning was impossible, as was relying on any certainties.

I never thought I’d talk about any of this, honestly. I started a variety of times but then I stopped because I’d start thinking about specifics and remembering that yes, these things really happened—to me—and it would feel both very personal and very impersonal simultaneously. I’m slowly trying to learn to care again about things that are personal, but it's not as easy as it sounds. That part is a work in progress.

XO,J