Little Monsters

I think it's a human experience to have moments when you're not feeling your best and someone runs afoul of you on a bad day: those times when you take out your anger or frustration on an innocent bystander, just because they happened to be there at the time. Most people feel bad and apologize after stuff like that happens. But what if the innocent bystander internalizes what you said or did as a statement about them and their worth as a human being? What if you actually really hurt them? Even though it was unintentional?

What I've just described is as close as I can get to Chiron issues: what they look like and how they get passed on from person to person. Or, often, passed down from person to person, because a lot of what's in charts is familial in origin, and if you don't believe me, get charts of your relatives and feast your eyes on the things you have in common. Spoiler: it will be many things.

Anyway, Chiron usually describes what you don't have by sign and house and aspect (and it hurts). We all have glitches, period, the end, but Chiron's glitch is one that causes pain. Pain that you've pretty much always had. The question is: can you avoid taking that pain out on other people, just because you have pain? The answer is: it really depends on the person.

I've had tension headaches my whole life: since I can remember, I can remember having headaches. Fortunately, I also discovered early in life that if I keep up a decent amount of physical activity, I have far fewer headaches. I'm very good at headache management, but I also know that I'm not a nice version of myself when my head hurts, and I'm liable to say lots of things out loud that should stay on the inside, so now I avoid people as much as I can when I have a headache. But if I'm already stressed and I already have a headache and someone happens by with more bad news, they are in danger of having their feelings hurt by some real talk. It's almost worse if someone chipper crosses my path, because something monstrous inside me yells "FINISH THEM!!!"

Everyone has Chiron somewhere, ergo everyone has a trigger (or a set of triggers) that can turn them into a demon. Some of you are aware of yours. The less-evolved amongst us are not, and let me explain what that looks like: emotional explosions out of nowhere, in which something outside of you is "causing" you pain, even though the pain was on the inside all along, and the "cause" was innocent. If life had a referee, they'd stop the game and say "come on now" at the Chiron person: cut that shit out. But the Chiron person's pain tends to trigger your pain in a chain reaction that keeps going until it reaches someone evolved enough to stop the cycle. That usually takes a while.

We can have the chicken-egg debate here: am I Chiron-wounded because my chart says so, or was I always more sensitized to this particular wounding-type energy because of where Chiron is in my chart? I don't know. I don't always like astrology's rules. I just know what they are and try to respect them. Either way, you can think of Chiron as a factory defect and learn to accept it and work around it, because there is not going to be a recall of your model.

There are only a handful of books that cover Chiron, which was discovered and named in 1977. We simply haven't had enough time with it to know the ins and the outs of what it does, while we've had centuries with Saturn. Most of the books tread lightly on the pain aspect, because telling someone that their pain never goes away but how they deal with it can change is not lucrative (but it is the truth). Especially in our current Saturn-in-Pisces times, a lot of people are trying to sell solutions that will make you feel less sad about everything (because Saturn in Pisces is a bummer). My social media is filled with staggeringly un-credentialed "healers" and "coaches" when I really just want to watch stand up comedians give me a hot take on whatever's going on right now while I'm scrolling. Yesterday I saw a "coach" who helps people who have been ghosted: a ghosting coach. But I guess people will pay money for that?

I have a stunning history with people with Chiron conjunct their Venus (or in otherwise unpleasant aspect), enough so that I'm starting to get offended. Speaking very generally, it's not that these people can't love, but their ability to do so is somewhat muted by their endless insecurities about the vulnerability to pain that love brings them (because life and love have brought them that previously). These people are much more likely to turn into monsters when you're too nice to them, and they are also likely to play little games called "prove you love me," but not the dumb teenage kind: the kind where the unwitting other participant has to stand with their leg in a bear trap for an unspecified amount of time to offer proof of devotion. Do you really *need* blood sacrifices, monsters? They also tend to get angry about loving you, which is such a paradox, but I have been told to my face in total seriousness that a person loved me and as a consequence never wanted to see me again. Venus-Chiron, ya'll. But, since I'm me and I was being told to my face, I could see that the love really was causing them pain, and I felt bad about that. It hurt both of us in different ways, but credit where it's due to this one, who did not make me stand in a bear trap for very long at all.

We're social creatures, though. Occasionally, we'll find ourselves in blinding pain and someone will wander into our field and get shot by accident. I’d recommend dealing with this by understanding that bad shit sometimes happens to innocent bystanders and focusing on not passing it on to someone else when we've been wounded. If you can accept that it’s part of the human experience to be wounded sometimes, you’re more than halfway there. Otherwise it looks like pretending everything is fine 98% of the time while ignoring whatever stimulus sets you off, and acting like an unhinged asshole the other 2% (for most of the population, anyway--there are individuals whose percentages are wildly different and it shows). Which would you prefer?