Neptune clouds the issue

When you encounter Neptune in whatever form it takes (transit/progression/its existence in a general sense) you are going to need patience and an open mind, because you will encounter problems, and taking them at face value is not a good use of your time, because how things look vs. what's really going on often have very little to do with one another.

Most of the other planets operate in a top-down fashion: their energies create obvious problems, and as the more lengthy transits continue in time, you get to deeper layers of the issue until you find the root of it, face it, and move on. Neptune's the opposite: it creates discontent at the root of the problem and works upwards, so by the time things find their way to the surface, they are very big problems. In a weird example (and I apologize in advance for what you're about to read), most people, when they get cavities in their teeth, they start on the surface and work their way down if they're not addressed, so minor irritation becomes GREAT PAIN (then you go get it fixed). That's the top-down/typical transit situation. I know someone who has a weird (and genetic) situation where the cavities start on the inside of their teeth, so by the time you see anything outwardly, it's a dire mess on the inside. That's also how Neptune works.

(Neptune's the main problem involved with addiction, so again: think about how long addictions typically last before there are flashing-red "hey this is a PROBLEM" outer manifestations, and even then, enablers can continue rationalizing or excusing egregious behaviors.)

Neptune's an emotional planet that calls your attention to unmet needs by any means necessary. People tend to behave erratically when under its influence, but can almost never tell you the real reason they're doing what they're doing until Neptune's far, far away from whatever energies it's interfering with, by which I mean it becomes obvious years later what was really happening.

For example: you're on track to be promoted. Neptune comes along and hits your sun. Not only do you not get promoted, you totally lose career motivation and wind up doing a nomadic world-traveler thing for six months. Years later: you're in a totally different and less competitive career altogether, and you realize you pursued the original career because it's what your dad wanted you to do and not what you really enjoyed.

Other permutations:

• You fall in love with a total loser because they let you relive parts of your childhood, but when Neptune moves on, the relationship is totally unworkable.

• You spend time trying to rescue someone who can't (or, more probably, won't) save themselves because you, yourself want to be rescued.

• You have a crisis of faith AND find something new to believe in, that, after the fact, maybe wasn't a good use of your time (these transits are 2+ years long, so there's plenty of time to do all of this).

• You get completely lost in another person, place, thing, ideology, social media, or districting hobby that impedes your functioning in the real world (addiction or delusion, basically, and maybe both).

Concurrently: People usually develop weird symptoms or sensitivities that go away or resolve when Neptune moves on. Because Neptune weakens you.

I could fill a book with all of the different and spectacularly weird manifestations of Neptune I've seen so far, and hell, maybe I will someday, but this is mostly a caveat not to take life situations at face value where Neptune is involved. Where's Neptune in your birth chart? Do not believe the hype in that area. Personally, Neptune's on my midheaven, meaning that I encounter Neptune at work and with parents/authority figures. Doing intuitive stuff professionally is a good expression of having Neptune there, and I do, but in my day job, it means people at work act strangely and conditions are vaguely chaotic all of the time with occasional spurts of extreme chaos (a calling card of Neptune). I could also fill a book with these tales, but mostly I tell my friends at the gym while I'm waiting for it to open at 5:30 in the morning. Work can be soap-opera-ish with constant plot twists where I find out months or years later what was REALLY happening, but usually the presenting problem I'm dealing with is not the actual problem by a long shot. Similarly, the way I am perceived by others, especially at work, changes daily: while I experience plenty of internal continuity, anything on your midheaven correlates with how people see you, and Neptune clouds the issue. So I can go from being seen as a miracle worker to a horrible person overnight, and have! I've learned to not take people's opinions of me at face value, or to use most feedback to inform my self-image. And don't even get me started on my reputation. I have heard some wild rumors about me. (I wish I was half as interesting as my reputation.)

I was having coffee with a friend a few days ago, who told me about a situation with her parents where she was insisting that there was a major family issue they weren't seeing clearly for months, and by the time the rest of the family took it seriously, it was pretty dire. She has Neptune transiting her 10th house, which is one of the parental houses (the 4th house is the other), and I thought "this sounds like something I would say." (She has it temporarily, because it's a transit, and I have it for life.) With parents and bosses, I've said "hey this is a problem" and not been taken seriously, so I've just learned to say whatever it is for the record and not expect any action, but as with the cavities from the inside, when the problem emerges, it is a PROBLEM, but the issue is that it didn't look like an issue until all of a sudden it really was. Example: when I was a kid, there were raccoons living in the roof of my family's house. I complained about it for years, because I could hear them in the walls and the ceiling, and they woke me up at night. I was told "it's mice." I knew it was raccoons, because sometimes I woke up with one outside my window, looking right at me (meaning sometimes I woke up screaming because something was staring RIGHT AT ME). I mostly gave up trying to convince my parents, and slept with a baseball bat next to my bed so i could thump on the wall when they were too active at night (this would wake my mother up, and I'd tell her about the raccoons, and she'd tell me to go back to sleep). While I was in college, the raccoons chewed their way through my mom's closet wall and made a horrifying middle-of-the-night debut. I'd been telling the truth, but they couldn't see through the Neptune, until suddenly: big cavity. In a closet wall. With a little raccoon hand pawing through it.