Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

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Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast, the place where we talk astrology, mental health, spiritual wellness, and real-life shit. Welcome. Welcome. So this week I have a question. It says, "Jessica, first of all, thank you for all that you provide to this world. You've helped me navigate difficult circumstances and feel less alone. I am an only child, and my mom is a single mother. My father has not been in my life since I was about three years old. I'm now 30. Two years ago, after being undocumented for over 20 years, I went to look for him in Mexico and was not able to make contact. His children and sister blocked access to him. I just received a message asking for my contact info from said daughter because he wants to hear from me.

"I feel anger because it seems I tend to allow other people's timelines to define my life. I don't feel like having a conversation by phone. I wanted to say what I wanted to say in person, and I'm really not sure what to do. I have a very strong presence, and I have tried to shrink, but your podcast has allowed me to push back and learn techniques to just be. Some have said I hate men. I don't think I do, and for the longest time, I have had to believe I didn't need my dad. After many years of therapy, the sadness has come out, and I cry a lot. Now I feel like I'm at a standstill, and the ball is in my court. And I just feel anger. Is it written in the stars for me to be sad and angry forever? Will I be able to have healthy relationships with men? Again, thank you for all you do. Le Sad Girl."

So this question is very important, and I of course pulled up your birth chart to try to give you some answers that you can work with. You were born on May 31st, 1989, at 4:53 p.m. in Mexico City, Mexico. As soon as I pulled up your chart, the first thing that I noticed is that you have this beautiful Mercury in Taurus in the seventh house. You also have a beautiful Moon in Taurus in the sixth house, and it forms a trine to your Uranus.

And so let me just straight out the gate get this out of the way. You are not destined to be sad. You are not destined to be lonely. Absolutely not. Are you capable of having relationships that are successful and healthy and loving and joyous? Abso-fucking-lutely. Are you capable of having that with men? Inasmuch as anyone is capable of having that with men, sure. Yes. You also have a beautiful Jupiter/Sun conjunction. It's in the eighth house in the sign of Gemini. You are a resilient person, and you know how to receive love. You do.

All of that said, you have some other things in your chart that I imagine you are identifying with more at this moment and when you asked me this question, the first of which is your Pluto conjunction to the Ascendant. Now, the Pluto conjunction to the Ascendant is often associated with that feeling that you're naming of being kind of too much, of people saying that you're too much, you take up a lot of space, you have a big presence.

It's also associated with control issues. So what you didn't include in your question is whether or not you let your father and the family know that you were coming to Mexico before you arrived. Did you give them that heads-up? Because what you're describing in your question is that you've allowed other people to dictate your timelines and tell you kind of when things were going to happen. And what I don't know is if you kind of did that to your dad and that side of your family, if you just kind of showed up and were like, "You have to deal with me now," without them being ready.

So, if you did that, I think that's just an important thing to acknowledge. I'm not saying it's the wrong thing or that it was a bad thing. I'm just saying it's an interesting thing for you to pay attention to. If you need space to determine when you take on heavy emotional content and what happens to you in your life, it is important that you also hold space for other people's right and entitlement to that.

Now, given that we're all in this global pandemic, this is not going to be the time for you to travel to him or him to travel to you, either way. And so I think that there's a really important question about, if you need to have contact with him only in person, are you willing and able to wait until the pandemic passes and it's safe to travel? If that's something that you feel comfortable with, I think that's a perfectly healthy and fair choice for you to make.

But I want to really say you're right that the ball is in your court, and you do need to make a choice. And here's the thing about agency and choice. When we recognize our options, we may look around and be like, "Okay. All my options are shit. This is shit. He wasn't there my whole fucking childhood. I showed up, and I was blocked. And now, all of a sudden, I'm supposed to show up? This is bullshit." And it is bullshit on lots of levels. Lots of bullshit, lots of levels.

But if you can accept "and here we are," and given the situation as it is, including the unfair bits, including the upsetting and hurtful and infuriating bits, these are your choices. All of your choices will have consequences. Which consequences are you willing to engage with? That's the point. That's the thing I want to encourage you to really orient yourself around in this situation, but in general in life, because the reality is life is a bitch. Life is difficult. Life is hard. It is not fair. So what are you going to do about it?

If your plan is to just kind of cut off your nose to spite your face and you really do want to see your father and you do want to have contact with your father, and you're too pissed off to talk to him, you have the right to say, "I'm really angry. I don't want to talk to you, but I actually do want to hear what you have to say. I am ready to listen. I'm just not ready to talk." So saying to your father, "If you want to get on a video-chat call or get on a phone call and tell me what the hell happened to you over the last 27 years—where were you? If you want to talk to me about that, I'll listen. But I'm not ready to share, and I don't want to facilitate this conversation. I want you to do that." You have a right to say that, and he has a right to say no. He has a right to fail. I mean, that wouldn't be awesome. But here's the thing. We don't get to control people, even if we're right and they're wrong. We just don't.

I'm not saying that's fair or that's cool, but I am saying that's life. And so, if you can kind of accept that, then you can have your anger, but your anger doesn't have to turn to bitterness and resentment, because you can work with anger. Anger is an emotion that can be destructive, but it can also be very generative and creative. It is self-defense. It is passion. It is ambition. It is assertion. But resentment and bitterness often get pointed inwards. They are feelings and compulsions that cause more self-harm and external harm than good, whereas anger is not inherently like that.

So, my dear, consider if you are ready to listen, because if you're ready to listen, you have a right to say, "I don't want to talk to you, but I'll listen to you." I think it's also fair if you reach out to him and you say, "So you fucked off when I was three years old. Where'd you go? And then, when I came back and tried to find you and actually crossed borders and showed up, you fucked off all over again. I'm mad, and I want you to talk to me about what you did and what your thinking was." You have a right to do that.

Now, when we lead with anger, people have a hard time hearing us. That's also real. So there's this space between what you want to say and what you want others to hear. And it is actually your job, your self-care job, to navigate that space with awareness, with consciousness, and with some amount of grace. And nobody does that all the time. We all fuck this one up. But I do think that there is a value in saying to this person, "You have harmed me on lots of levels. You've harmed my mother. You've harmed me. And I am going to leave space for you to explain why and to start doing some form of care and love. You brought me into this world. Didn't ask for it, Dad. Okay, what are you going to do about it now?"

When I look at your birth chart, I will say you have a Neptune/Saturn conjunction, and that conjunction can be an indicator of great anxiety and depressiveness, a lot of stress—mental health stress. And it can indicate that you have a parent who is also very anxious. So I don't know if that was your mum or if that is your dad, but I will say this. We don't know enough—I said we. You don't know enough about your dad to know whether or not it was a gift from the goddamn universe to not have him around.

Whether or not you need your dad—because you mentioned this in your question, this question about needing your dad. Whether or not you need your dad, it sounds like you want him, but you don't know if he is somebody who's safe to want. So far, he hasn't been. You don't have to give him a chance. You really don't. But from your question, I can't help but wonder if you actually really just need this data; you need to give him a chance to show up to see what he does with that chance.

Whether or not you have issues with men, from your father or from living in the fucking world, that is fair. But what I really think is at the root of your struggle with your dad and with men in general is trust. It is vulnerable to trust. It is vulnerable to trust. And trust really, truly should be earned and not just inherently given. That said, the vulnerability of trusting is something that you have a hard time being present within because you've had bad experiences. It may not be the time for you to be vulnerable and emotional in the presence of your father.

That might be giving him too much power and trust. But I want to say it doesn't have to be an all-in or all-out situation. In other words, you don't have to have a conversation with him in which you share all your details and you get everything off your chest. Maybe you're not ready for that. Maybe that's what you were ready for in Mexico, but you're not ready for it now. That's fair. You get to decide. And so, in that way, you can say, "I will talk to you, but I don't know what I have to say anymore." And trust that if this is a relationship that is safe for you to cultivate in your 30s, there will be multiple opportunities for you to unpack your truth when you know that he can hold it in a responsible way.

So the question is, do you want to listen? Do you have questions for him? Are you ready to hear whatever his answers are? Because one way or another, it will change your life, and it will change your narrative. Are you ready for that change? When I look at your birth chart, I want to say I think you are. I really think you are. I think you've been ready for some time. But there is not a right or a wrong answer, and this is a really tender, emotional, and intense moment in the world.

And so whatever I'm answering your question about your dad and kind of men in general, really, that is under the backdrop of all kinds of social upheaval and change and a global pandemic. And I want to just acknowledge that it is a lot, and it's okay if it's too much to handle in a healthy way. Maybe this is just not the moment. Ultimately, whatever you do, remember, just prioritize and center your own agency. You get to do this on your terms, and that doesn't mean that he will act in ways you want him to. It doesn't mean you'll get what you want. But you get to act on your terms—not in a perfect way, but within the situation you're in.

Now, my love, there's one last thing I'm going to say. Your sadness and your emotions are a strength. I know it doesn't feel like this. You signed it La Sad Girl. I know you do not want to be sad. Nobody wants to be sad. Being sad is the pits. But you have a stellium in the eighth house. You have Pluto on the rise. You have your North Node—it is in Aquarius, but it is in the fourth house. And you have Mars in Cancer.

All of this to say you are a deeply emotional person. Your capacity to do deep excavation and investigation is profound. You are a person who is capable of feeling and healing from a place of feeling, and that is not a liability. It's a strength. But it requires that you accept yourself and you make adjustments in the world and in relationship with others so that you have enough space and time to excavate what is true and real for you and not just the top layer of your reactions and emotions. This means that your capacity for sadness and for grief is great. It's huge. But along with it, your capacity for love and loyalty and joyfulness and play are also great. They're transformative.

When you shut down your emotions and your sadness and your vulnerability, as it sounds like you did in your 20s as a coping mechanism, you also limit your capacity for love and joy and reciprocity. And so the sadness that you're in through the tail end of your Saturn Return—because your Saturn Return is technically over, but you're in this phase of integration for the next couple/few years. And in this phase, I imagine you will experience more vulnerability and sadness so that you can develop a new adult relationship to yourself and those emotions so that you don't act around the elephant in the room of your emotions, but instead, you integrate that elephant into the circus of your inner landscape.

Here's the thing. Your sadness is a part of the transition of healing that you're in. I don't think it's your only destination in this life, and it's certainly not an inevitable one.

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My darlings, let's talk about the astrology of this week. We are looking a July 5th through the 11th of 2020. Now, I've talked about the Eclipse so much. If you haven't already heard Episode 120 and Episode 121, I talk about the Eclipse in both of those episodes. Episode 121 is a special episode only about the Eclipse. I mention this because July 5th, it is technically, in many parts of the world, when the Eclipse is happening. But it is happening really early in the morning for a lot of people. So you can go back and listen to those episodes if you haven't already keyed into your Eclipse vibrations.

The only other major transit that is occurring exactly this week is a square from Mercury Retrograde to the planet Mars. Now, this is a transit that I touched on a little bit during the Eclipse conversation because that transit was active in the Eclipse chart even though it wasn't exact, again, until the 8th. But I want to talk about it here. So, first of all, Mercury Retrograde—you don't need me to tell you too much about it, but I'm going to tell you something.

Mercury Retrograde, of course, is a time that is internationally known to be very annoying as computers and other forms of technology kind of go sideways on you. Communication is confusing. Things aren't as clear or as up front as you want them to be. On a more psychological level, Mercury is, of course, your mind. It's your thoughts. It's your attitudes. It's how you communicate. It's your friends. It's your neighbors. It's how you listen.

And so, when we are dealing with Mercury Retrograde, how we listen and how we communicate, these things are really up for us. And this is not just about communicating with others or listening to others, although for sure it's that. It's also how we listen to ourselves. Are you listening to your own ideas? It's one thing to have politics or ideas or theories, and it's another thing to actually listen to yourself, to listen to the wisdom of what you're learning or what you believe, and to embody your ideas. And this is where the square between Mercury Retrograde and Mars comes in because Mars is all about embodiment. It's all about the body, literally. As I always say, Mars wants visceral expression. It wants physical experience and expression. That's it's damn jam.

When we are looking at something like Mercury square to Mars, there is this challenge to actually embody your ideas and to take them from the place of idea and into actualization. Unfortunately, because we're looking at a square—squares are a 90-degree angle, and they represent some sort of conflict, some sort of uncomfortable push. Now, that uncomfortable push might be exactly what you need to go from a theoretical idea to an embodied idea. But it's not going to be comfortable. It's not going to be comfortable.

This transit brings up irritability and frustration. It can make you feel like you are being pushed beyond your comfort zone. It can make you feel like you're being attacked. It can make you be really irritable and easily agitated. The thing that's really risky with this transit is that you get into a battle of wills, a sort of ego battle based on who's better than who. It could be about gotcha stuff.

So here's the thing. If I'm wrong, that doesn't make you more right. We can both be wrong at the same time. And two wrongs, my love, do not equal one right. And so this is a time where you want to be careful about the battles you engage in because if you're fighting just to prove that you're right or, worse, to prove that someone else is wrong, that is corrosive to you. It doesn't actually serve you. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel agitated. It makes you feel all kinds of ways.

Now, the thing that you want to pay attention to under this transit is your physical, visceral desire to create outlets for your shitty feelings and thoughts, because you're going to want them. And so you just want to make sure that you're not looking for someone to take your shit out on. It's like a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It doesn't actually help you heal. It doesn't help you come to the truth. It's just kind of barfing out your feelings somewhere. And you know what? Honestly, sometimes that's the best you can do. Sometimes that's just life.

The other thing about this transit—and I think I've touched on this before. But this transit of Mercury square to Mars will reoccur throughout the month of July. It's not what you want to hear me say because it's a really annoying transit. We've been feeling it for a solid minute. Like I said, exact on the 8th. It's going to be exact again on July 27th. What that means is it's going to be a part of our whole experience of the month of July, this sense of defensiveness, irritability, agitation.

On the positive, this really strong push, either from within or from external circumstances, to embody your beliefs, to actualize on your attitudes, and to deal directly and consciously with your damn ego—here's the thing. The ego gets a bad rap for really good reasons. When your ego is repressed or overexpressed, everybody around you suffers, and so do you. However, in order to deal with most things in life, honestly, you need to have an ego. You need to be able to locate yourself and your entitlements and your rights and to be able to protect them. You need to be able to stand up for others. You need to be able to stand up for what you believe in.

Having a healthy ego doesn't mean not having an ego. It means being able to engage with it authentically so when it becomes a tiny little monster or a big old monster, either way, you don't shrink in the face of it, but instead engage with heart around it. And it's not a small thing. It's something that I think changes over the course of time for each of us as individuals. But given where we are socially and politically, I think it's a really important thing for us to take a moment to talk about.

In the context of something like the uprising for justice and the fight against white supremacy, we need to have healthy egos. If you're a white person and you are combating a legacy of inherited white supremacy, you need a strong enough ego to not make it about you, whilst also really unpacking the ways in which it is about you—to be able to determine the difference between them both so that you can learn things without needing to center yourself within that learning. If we are going to effectively fight white supremacy and its many branches—things like patriarchy, ableism, capitalism—if we're going to effectively combat white supremacy both in ourselves as individuals but as a collective, as a society systemically, we need to have resilient ego energy so that we can self-sacrifice when it's important, so that we can assert ourselves when it's important, so that we can care for ourselves when we need it.

We need to be able to center ourselves in a proportionate way. What that means for you or someone else at a given moment doesn't have to be the same thing. In fact, it shouldn't be the same thing. We need to be able to understand ourselves as individuals and to also understand that we are not a single flower sitting at the top of a mountain. We are a field of flowers. We are an orchard. And we must find ways of allowing ourselves to be individuals with individual feelings and needs and points of reference, and to have a strong enough sense of self that we can learn about other people, and that we can not always center ourselves—or, conversely, if it is appropriate for you, to learn how to center yourself, to learn how to not only care for others and center others but to figure out how to be one of the many important people in your own life. Mars.

Now, there's another way that it's really important having a healthy ego and embodying Mars in a healthy and appropriate way. And because Mars is in Aries, as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, and it will stay here until the month of January 2021—it's a long fucking time for Mars to be in the sign of Aries; let me tell you something. So I'm going to talk about this a lot more over the course of time, but let's talk about COVID-19.

In the context of Mars, Mars is one of the two planets that I would say are associated with individualism. Now, Uranus is the other one. And Mars in Aries is related to spread. Mercury is related to the lungs. If you're speaking, it's what comes out of your mouth. So having this Mercury square to Mars in the month of July is deeply concerning because of COVID, because there is an indication here that it could hasten the spread of COVID-19. We are at the precipice of something that I don't think anyone really knows how to conceive of.

And so I want to really encourage you, first of all, to just do the really common-sense, basic shit of wear a mask. Wash your paws. Have some damn respect for your body and for other people's bodies. If you feel like it's not that big a deal, I gotta say—okay, this is a little off topic of astrology, but bear with me here. Imagine—however long you've been living so far, add another 20 years, another 30 years, another 40 years to it. So you've been living your whole life, and then you get to this place where there's a global pandemic, and you're old. And the people that you have in your life cannot physically come near you because it could kill you. And so you are locked in isolation.

Now, keep in mind elder people who are at the highest risk of COVID-19, they are not demographically interconnected through the internet in the same way that younger people are. So their experience of isolation and loneliness is so much greater than a younger person's is who has access to social media and technology. Imagine yourself having lived your whole life to get to this point and to be isolated and confronting very real mortality issues. There are so many pressing things happening, but we cannot forget our elders. We cannot be like, "Oh well. They're old. Sucks. That's life." No. No. Uh-uh. It's not life, and we owe it to our elders to fucking show some care and respect.

If there is a way that you can show up for older people in your community, I encourage you to. I really encourage you to. We as individuals must make the decision to stand up for each other. It is really important that you do not forget your elders, that you do not forget older people, because they did not live their whole fucking life and survive all the shit they survived to be taken down by a flu that could have been avoided by you wearing a fucking mask or you not going to that party with your friends just because you're all in your 20s or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I'm talking to you. If you think I'm talking to you, then I'm talking to you.

Okay. So that was an aside, but I want to say something else about it. I want to speak to people in their 40s, the Pluto in Libra generation. If you have Pluto in Libra in your chart, Mars in Aries is going to fuck your shit up. Hello. So I'm talking to Gen Xers, of which I am one. So, if you have Mars forming an opposition to Pluto, it's going to confront you with really deep feelings and compulsions. So I don't know what that's going to look like. I don't know if that's just a societal shift that is occurring or if it's greater vulnerability to something like COVID. But I want to encourage my Gen Xers to be really conscientious about self-care at this time and to make sure that you are centering your physical wellness in concert with your need to show up for others.

Now, my loves, that's a lot of—it's a lot of words. It's also not as many words as I've used in the past. This is where we are. This is this moment. I want to take a moment to just acknowledge that the past couple/few weeks—the past couple/few months—have been so much. If you are feeling profoundly overwhelmed, yeah, that makes sense. If you are feeling more grief than you know what to do with, welcome to the club.

This is a period where your mental anxiety and anguish, your stress level, is being challenged. You can use your ego as a tool for overcoming your mental compulsions by having healthier boundaries, knowing where you begin and where you end, and setting limits and boundaries around that as a way to protect yourself and your capacity to show up for others. You can also kind of crumble in the face of your anxiety and act out in ways that actually creates more drama than it solves. And chances are high that you'll do a little bit of both and that you'll have to deal with people who do both extremes. This is life. This is life.

But if you know what's coming, if you have a sense of self-awareness about what you're dealing with inside of yourself, hopefully that will help you to show up with your very best self, even when your best self is very fucking mediocre. That's okay. You keep on learning. You keep on trying. You stay in the goddamn game.

My loves, if you're enjoying Ghost of a Podcast, I encourage you to check out my website, where I have some astrology classes for sale, shit like Inherited Conditions in the Birth Chart, The Outer Planets and Love, Saturn and Your Saturn Return. You can also learn tarot with me over at Patreon. Also on Patreon, I have a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast where I predict the month ahead and give you the daily breakdown.

Thank you for showing up here week after week, and keep on doing the work. That's all. Bye.