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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In 2021, an excellent podcast came out called Relative Fiction, and it was created by my longtime friend, the illustrator and graphic novelist Nicole J. Georges. Relative Fiction was based on her award-winning 2013 graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, and it unravels the story and secrets of Nicole's childhood and family and the father that she never knew. In fact, Nicole grew up believing that her father was dead. That's what her family told her. But when she was in her 20s, a palm reader told her something totally different. Turns out the palm reader was right. It sent her into a tailspin, and she became an amateur sleuth.

On Relative Fiction, you can hear her piecing together different stories about her father, why he was kept away from her. It's amazing. And if you haven't heard Relative Fiction yet, you are in for a damn treat. So you should totally check it out. And if you already heard it, then you would know that I appear in an episode where I give Nicole a reading and talk to her father, who is now in spirit. And today I'm airing an extended version of that reading, and it includes our much larger conversation.

In this episode, you'll see we even get meta about the astrological timing of creating the podcast Relative Fiction. If you've already heard Relative Fiction, you're going to absolutely love this episode. And if you haven't already listened to it yet, you're definitely going to want to after this. Please enjoy.

Jessica: Did you ever meet him IRL?

Nicole: Not since I was a baby.

Jessica: Do you know what he looks like? Did you see photos of him?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Does he have a real kind of oval-square face?

Nicole: He has a real—yeah, like a real round kind of face.

Jessica: Okay. Not round. So not oval-square.

Nicole: Oh. I don't know about oval-square. No. No.

Jessica: He had a round face?

Nicole: Yeah, like a Belushi-ish look to him.

Jessica: Belushi-ish. I mean, basically, he's the Syrian side.

Nicole: No. My mom is the Syrian side. There are people with more square-ish faces from the Syrian side.

Jessica: Because there's definitely—you have somebody, and it's a dude, and he wore hats. Did you have any religious people in your family?

Nicole: I don't know. My grandfather was religious in a way, but it was like—

Jessica: Did he wear a hat?

Nicole: My grandfather wore hats, but more like a newsy, kind of page boy hat.

Jessica: Yeah.

Nicole: My mom definitely had a miracle priest that was in her life who passed away, who she always had pray for me.

Jessica: I don't know your religious background. Is it Christian?

Nicole: Yeah. The Syrian side was orthodox something I don't really understand.

Jessica: Okay. They're orthodox.

Nicole: Yeah. But then my mom went Catholic when I was in sixth grade.

Jessica: Yeah. That has nothing to do with your family. It has to do with your mom—because there is this hat I've seen—I'm not sure what the religious background is of the man that I've been seeing who has this hat on. It's kind of like you would see it more in terms of Christian people with orthodox—it's not a kippah. It's like a little hat. Is that her religious figure dude?

Nicole: Father [Rukie]?

Jessica: I don't know.

Nicole: I mean, yeah, maybe. It's all very old-school looking.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. And he's like a beige person.

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. Okay. For some reason, he's been around for the last two days. I haven't had a clear sense that it's your dad; it's just that I've known I was going to talk to you about your dad, so that's why I wondered if it was. So whatever. We can talk about that as the idea emerges, but I just kind of wanted to lead with that because I had a feeling that maybe it wasn't your dad. Yeah. So your mom must be quite controlling?

Nicole: Yes. She would like to be, but I don't—I've separated a little bit.

Jessica: I mean, yeah, not effectively. But it would make sense when you say energetically, "I'm opening myself up to being contacted by spirit," that on an energetic level your mom would be like, "Perfect. I've got just the man for you," because this is not a place where I think you would have as cultivated boundaries. Why would you? So this person kind of has been emerging. But again, I was like, "Maybe it's your dad," because it was a man and it was coming up and yada yada, but also, he's not nurturing. He doesn't have a dad vibe—I mean your dad vibe. But then again, your dad might not. So we'll see. We'll see. But that's just like a pregame show. Did you tell your mom you were going to do this?

Nicole: No.

Jessica: Okay. Smart. He had one of those hats. It almost looks like—this is not what it looks like, but the kind of thing I heard on my head was books on top, kind of like—

Nicole: Like a Russian orthodox kind of—

Jessica: I mean, that's not my point of reference, but sure, maybe. Yeah. To me, it looks more maybe like a Muslim cleric than a Russian orthodox Christian, but that's because I have more personal connection with that than I do with Christian anything. So I am not saying that that's who it is; I'm just saying that's the only visual. I don't know a lot about Christians. I put effort into not knowing a lot about Christians. No disrespect. But Christmas, check, keep on moving is my attitude. So I don't know. I don't know, but I think yeah, it's like a pill hat kind of thing. It's a religious style of hat, or it could be a cultural style of hat.

Nicole: Would this even be like an ancestor kind of person that I've never met?

Jessica: Yeah. Of course. It could be anybody. I mean, it's a dead person. They're dead in memorial. So yeah. It could be any old thing. But—

Nicole: Just as a side note, I have been invoking the Georges family name recently.

Jessica: That's your dad's side?

Nicole: That's my mom's side.

Jessica: That's your mom's side. Okay.

Nicole: So it would make sense that one of those people would come sniffing around.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. And when did they immigrate?

Nicole: Early 1900s or the—let's see. I'm trying to think. My mom was born in 1947—

Jessica: In the U.S.

Nicole: —in the U.S., and my grandfather was born in the U.S. and his parents came over. So he must've been born around the late teens, early '20. Late teens, I bet. And so they must have immigrated like 1900 to 1915-ish.

Jessica: And your family is pretty assimilated Americans, right?

Nicole: Yes.

Jessica: Yeah. This person is not super assimilated. So it either is an elder ancestor, or it could be the spiritual person that your mom used to be invested in that your mom still has some sort of a spiritual relationship with. So it is—my attitude with dead people is the same as my attitude with living people. I don't talk to men I don't fucking know. You know what I'm saying? I don't just trust people because they're dead. That's ridiculous. I think that we can investigate with him if it feels useful, but he also just might be the pushiest dead person that you have been unintentionally calling in.

But I am starting to see your father. I see what you mean by Jim Belushi face. Did he have a drinking problem too?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we can check in with your dad too, probably. He's very—yeah. We should totally talk to your dad. Okay. But let's do admin first and then get into it.

Nicole: Okay. Okay. Great. I know I had never thought about telling my family story until—like I just thought it was so kooky that there was a psychic involved and that I had called Dr. Laura, and those were the parts that I thought were kooky, not the family parts. So then, when a literary agent was like, "Would you do this as a graphic novel?" and I was signing the contract, I just had this moment of clarity because I was like 26 years old, and I was like, "I don't know if I have enough distance from this, enough perspective, to be able to tell this story."

I've been raised in a culture in my family of keeping the family secrets and that saying the truth is a betrayal and that saying my own feeling and how I'm reacting to something that's happening is a betrayal. And so the idea of me—because I needed money. I just needed money, and I had always wanted to do a graphic novel. And my family—because my mom has separated herself from her family money in whatever way, I just never had a safety net. So I just was like, "Yes. I will do anything for money."

And so signing this contract felt like making a deal with the devil in some way, like I was like, "This is as close as I'm ever going to come to making a deal with the devil," the feeling of exposing my family and exposing these secrets that my mom had so rabidly guarded my whole life. And so that's when I called Jessica and I asked, "Should I do this book now or wait until I'm older, when I have more perspective, when more has unfolded—maybe my mom's dead?" And then Jessica said, essentially, "If you're ever going to do the book, the time is now. Now is the time to do it, and it will take you somewhere you need to go with your family, whether it's good or bad."

And then I was like, "Okay. I'll do it, then." I was like, "Because I want to do it. And so, if this is the time to do it, I'll do it."

Jessica: And what year was that? Do you remember?

Nicole: It was like 2007.

Jessica: Okay. So the transits that are occurring at this time are totally different than the ones that were occurring at that time. However, you are going through not one but two transits by the planet Pluto. Pluto is squaring your natal Pluto, which is something that happens to everyone somewhere around late 30s, early 40s. And also, you have Pluto forming a conjunction to your natal Moon. And so this is going to deeply impact your family. This is going to dredge up major stuff within your family, which doesn't mean it's a mistake to do. It doesn't mean it's a mistake to do, but you're kind of like—the named concern of, "Oh shit. Is this going to trigger some things?"—yes. The answer is yes. Yes, it will.

It will trigger some things because this might simply be more—I'm not sure why on a material level. I mean, I could speculate, but I won't speculate unless you prefer that. I can say on an astrological level what you're going through now is triggering your Pluto/Moon square that you have in your birth chart—in other words, your control issues, your legacy of managing flight-or-fight mechanisms by managing the story, by controlling the narrative. That is something that you have in your birth chart as yours, but you got it through generations of that coping mechanism: failing and succeeding, failing and succeeding.

And so both this might be personally revealing in ways that you didn't emotionally anticipate, but also, I would be pretty fucking surprised—can I say fucking?

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Okay. I would be pretty fucking surprised if your mom didn't have feelings about this and you didn't hear about those feelings. I think that this is going to—maybe it's just going to be public in a different way than the graphic novel was. You have to choose to consume a graphic novel. You have to be the kind of person who's going to engage with a graphic novel, which is a really different demographic than your mom and her people, probably, whereas a podcast is a lot more accessible to an older generation or a different generation. So this is going to be revealing for you.

That doesn't mean you should or shouldn't do it. We're back to that, right? It's about recognizing that when you out yourself, you out other people. As queers, we know this. And I think that this is simply something that you're just going to be dealing with. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if it's going to change your relationship to audio publishing, period. I don't know if that just means that your preexisting podcast is going to maybe get picked up on a bigger platform or you're going to create a whole new kind of show. There is the potential for this to really blow you up. And that doesn't look completely comfortable. It doesn't look bad or good. It's only good or bad if you want it, right?

But it doesn't look completely comfortable because it's personal, because this is more personal. There isn't the same kind of separation that I think books can offer. So that'll be interesting for you, and it'll be therapeutic for you because of all the things with your family.

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah.

Nicole: Yeah. It's so interesting. I mean, I weirdly feel—I mean, this is neither here nor there, but I feel more—my relationship with the truth and my family through the years of therapy and trial by fire that had to happen after Calling Dr. Laura came out make me feel more prepared to deal with other people's freaking out than I was. It still affects me, but I—

Jessica: Of course.

Nicole: —just feel differently, and I'm able to see myself as a different person than my mom, whereas before, when my mom held this secret—and she held everybody in this secret, and I was an extension of her that she was like, "Betrayer! Betrayer!" And now I'm able to be like, "This is my life. I get to have my own separate life and my own"—I should've been able to have my own choice around whether or not I had a relationship with this person.

There is a part of me that—this is my last stand, it feels like, as far as autobiography goes. I could be wrong, but part of me feels like it would just be so wonderful to fade back and just do children's books for the rest of my life and animal drawings and just leave my personal life alone. Like, I've done that. I've been that. I've played dolls with myself. I've cannibalized my own experiences for—but then gotten something therapeutic out of it.

But I feel like that is a little raw. We talked to my sister, Mary, for so long about my father and keeping this secret our whole lives. And afterwards, she was like, "That was so intense." And I said, "You gotta take a nap. Have some sugar. Have some snacks." She talked to me a couple days later, and she said, "That was so hard. That was so intense." And I was like, "I know. This is what has happened every time I make my books." And my sister said, "You should really think about getting a different job." She's like, "How can you do that over and over again?"

I mean, for me, I had a weird life, and so I had a weird path to emotional honesty and being able to do that. And for me, if it had to be through workaholism or me having to do it as a community effort, like, "I'm doing this story so other kids can read it and get something out of it"—if I needed to use those as reasons to do it, that's just what needed to happen, because I wouldn't have made any of these discoveries if it wasn't for this comics auto-bio path, or this place that I was forced into of just, "I need to document everything that's going on because I'm gaslit everywhere else in my family life."

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, all I can say with certainty is that it would be really hard to predict what's going to come next because you are going through a transit right now that is triggering one of the more difficult transits of your life. And it's not bad. I mean, like you said, it's like part of you is like, "Well, maybe this is the last cannibalizing of my personal life that I'm going to do." This feeling of it being the end might be the thing that is actually—puts a little more pressure on you to really do it right in a way that honors your own process.

So I really don't mean—and I would tell you if I was like, "Oh, this looks bad." It doesn't look bad. It looks hard. I think that people's reactions are going to be different with an audio documentation than a written documentation for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them have nothing to do with you. That's the thing about all of this. Every layer of your story ultimately is—you're kind of confronted by these things that actually don't have to do with you. You're just the victim and subject of them, which is part of your own trauma pattern, which is why you've had to or chosen to kind of center yourself in your own fucking life and in your own story, is it's really a response to being decentered in your own experience, in your own family.

And again, this is a legacy or an inherited issue. It is not just about what your mom did to you. It is what's been done through generations in your family, and it's really important to name that it's a survival mechanism because it's a survival mechanism in you to out your secrets, just like for her it's a survival mechanism to hide them under a pile of coats in the back of the closet. And what you want to be able to do, ideally speaking, is find your middle ground where it's hung neatly in the closet and labeled with a beautiful label maker, and you can pull it out for others, or not, at your discretion.

And I think this experience that you're engaged in is going to facilitate clarity about where that's appropriate and where it isn't, and what you need from what and what you don't. It's redefining not in reaction to others or where you come from even, but instead defining for yourself. And this is related to the Pluto square to Pluto and the forthcoming Neptune square to Neptune. These are both generational transits that are associated with mid-age, mid-age crisis. And that's really where you're at, is engaging with the spiritual underpinnings of your shit, as was generated by your childhood and inherited experiences—both.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: So no big deal. Nothing serious. Super chill. Super chill.

Nicole: I am having that moment in my personal life of being able to recognize the conversations I'm having with my family that are public conversations are about things that are actually so sensitive, that are just the most sensitive. And so then, in my personal life, like getting to know people or whatever, I'm used to, after putting out the book, just barfing out this very intense story about my dad or whatever, and just like, "And my teeth rotted out as a baby."

But then I'm having a moment now, as I—I don't know if it's this transit or middle age or just what, but I'm having this moment of getting to know people and being like, "Oh, I don't feel like talking about that right now," whether or not it's public knowledge and they could Google it. They could Google it, but I don't feel like talking about it right now because it's actually very sensitive, and it's a bigger subject. And I've treated it, these big subjects, like something different because I've made them into art in a performance.

Jessica: Yeah. And I think this is, again—the thing that is a part of the human condition, from my perspective as an astrologer, is that if you grow up and you're raised by a screamer, then what most people do is they end up becoming either a screamer or a "I never get angry." It's a reaction instead of a response to childhood. And so the thing that is beautiful about being in your midlife—so late 30s to mid 40s—this is the region where we have enough experience with ourselves as adults where we can identify the difference between a reaction to childhood and a response to what's authentic.

It's a painful transformation because, in many ways, it's turning inside instead of outside. What we do in our 20s and 30s is we go into the world and we're like, "Hey, bitch, I'm not my mother. Hey, bitch, I'm not that person next to me. Hey, bitch, I'm not my ex. Hey, bitch, I'm not who I was six months ago." But what the midlife crisis is actually, on a spiritual level, an opportunity to do is to say, "I know who I am because I've struggled and I've made mistakes, and I've walked into walls, and I've erected walls and they weren't really there, and I've done all the things. And now I want to respond with greater intention to who I am and where I'm from," not this absolutist thing that is more of a young-person thing.

Some people never do this work and end up young and all that stuff—emotionally young—forever in that way. And I don't mean young as a positive thing in this context, unfortunately. But I think that doing this in public is not good or bad; it's an action with consequence, just like keeping everything in the back of your closet is not actually good or bad. It's an action with consequence. And your mom's action, with consequence, of compulsively needing to hide everything and to dominate the narrative—and yours is inevitably actually dominating the narrative by hiding nothing—they're not that different.

Now that you're in mid-age—and this is not what I would have said to you in 2007. But now in mid-age, now that you've had this career, they're not that different. And so how do you navigate cultivating greater moderation over your choices in the moment? And I think what you're saying is really right. Just because someone can Google a thing about you doesn't mean you need to lead with that in a personal relationship, nor does it mean that somebody should Google that about you. I have a strict "Don't Google a friend" policy, personally.

All to say this transit's going to kick up all the stuff. It already has been in 2020, so 2020 has been marked by these two transits. And so you probably have felt this greater intensity throughout 2020 around this particular topic. I mean, obviously, 2020 has come with intensities on every topic, but in particular, this "How much of my truth is for public consumption? And how do I locate myself within that? How do I actually keep something that's mine?" And I would just say that your mom has that same crisis through the opposite compulsion. And whenever somebody is mirroring our compulsion but in the opposite, it's very triggering. So I imagine your mom will be very triggered by this. And that's not, again, bad or good. It's an opportunity for you to locate yourself and to redefine the relationship again. That's just life. So yeah. There's all of that.

To be fair, and if I may speak on behalf of your mother for a moment, Nicole, based on your birth chart, the first reaction was really honest reaction. It was, "I resent you for putting me in the position of having to feel these feelings." And the second reaction was the cultivated reaction of, "I'm not going to seem like a bad person or a bad mother in public, so I'm going to give you a curated response that reflects how I want to be seen in this project and how I want to be talked about." Does that make sense to you, Nicole?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. So it's not that she's a bad person. It's that the unintended consequence of not excavating culpability and having the compulsion—not the desire, but the compulsion—to hide the truth is that whenever somebody brings up a truth that is painful to sit with, there is resentment. And that resentment is not the same as anger. Anger can be worked with. Resentment, not as much. And so there's this need to, I guess I would say, navigate—"I don't want anyone to see me resentful, so I'm going to curate how you see me." And that's an extension of the very issue.

It's great that she didn't try to stop the project—not that she could have. If she thought she could have, I don't know what she would have done. But I'm guessing that she's a realist, looking at your chart, and that she's not going to fight you because she knows it's not going to work, not because she doesn't want to. And so within all of this, again, is this continuation of this issue for you, Nicole, of "Which truth is the truth?" because there's the truth that you can feel about your mom, and then there's the truth that she expresses. Which truth is the truth?

There's the truth of what you say in a graphic novel, and then there's the truth of how you feel on a Tuesday at noon. Which truth is the truth? Sometimes they meet; sometimes they don't. I think that's part of being a human. And then, with your mom, she does not want anyone ever to have control over what is the truth for her. So this is going to be her own trigger. My guess is she won't listen to this, or if she does, that it'll bring a bit of a volcano eruption to your life.

Nicole: When we first talked to her, because she felt like her story wasn't being reflected through Calling Dr. Laura, she felt like it was so biased, and that was her one-star Amazon review that was like, "This book"—

Jessica: Did she really write a one-star review?

Nicole: Bitch, she wrote one-star reviews for both of my books.

Jessica: Yeah. That's what you want to see.

Nicole: She wrote it before she read it.

Jessica: I'm so sorry.

Nicole: She wrote it, but when she just read the description. She wrote and she was like, "This book seems to be more about the author than the people it's supposed to be about. It was a sad story. I put it back on the shelf. If her dad wanted to find her, well, why didn't he find her?"

Jessica: Wow.

Nicole: And her second one for Fetch just talked about what a shithead I was, and then my friends flagged it for abuse and it got removed because it obviously had nothing to do with the book and was just about my mom thinking I was an asshole. She did it under an assumed name, but you can see that it's her. If you just look in the Amazon history, "Oh, that's the same person."

Jessica: Your mom is not savvy. She's not one for nuance—

Nicole: No.

Jessica: —which is why I'm just like, you ask her the third time, you're not as likely to get that curated response. But he has other children.

Nicole: He has many other children.

Jessica: I see that. He has a lot of kids. And do you know them?

Nicole: I've met many of them. There's a couple I haven't met, but I've met four of them.

Jessica: And one of them is a girl?

Nicole: Three of them are girls.

Jessica: Three of them were girls. And one of them you like?

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. She's a lot like you.

Nicole: Yeah. She's like a dog-loving, funny lesbian.

Jessica: Yeah. She's like an odd, odd lady.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: I mean, from what I'm seeing about who this man was, he was different things to different people very much on purpose. And you're not going to get a central answer. I mean, I think to a certain extent that's true of everyone. I think all of my exes would tell you a different story than my current partner, than my friends, than my clients. That's inevitable. But also, he was really—he treated females very differently than males, so your brother or your stepbrother or whatever would have an incredibly different experience than any of your sisters, inevitably.

He was really, really, really different to different people. So, in terms of getting a finite answer, that looks tricky. In terms of it being really engaging and interesting and all of that, that looks like a yes. That looks great. But he's—I mean, he's just a little confused by what you're doing.

Nicole: He is?

Jessica: Yes. Yes, he is. Yeah. He's a—you're a lot like your father in weird ways. In weird ways. He's just kind of of the mind that, like—"What are you doing?" That's it. That's kind of the whole take on it that he has. It's just kind of like—wasn't that interesting? Basically, he got close enough, and then when things got to a certain point, something in him was like, "Bounce. Just bounce."

So he has this abruptness about him where he would—and you have this too. I haven't experienced it, but I'm seeing it very clearly energetically. It's just like things got to a place in a relationship, whether it's with a kid or a wife or a friend, where he just was like, "I'm done. We're done. It's done." And so whether or not he'd instantly leave I don't know. But he really shut things off at a certain point because of his own capacity for feelings. Does that check out with what you've been hearing and what you've seen?

Nicole: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica: And so the fact that you're trying to excavate a story with him is just—he's a little like, "To what end? What?" "To what end" is my language, just to be clear. But that's definitely the message. He's just very confused by it. He's not offended. He's not insulted. He's not hurt. But he's just like, "What?" I don't think it in any way occurred to him that he was important to his kids, in particular his female kids. He compartmentalized spectacularly, like really effectively. Gold star for compartmentalizing. And so he was just like, "Yeah, I wouldn't be a good parent. So check. Moving on." That's kind of his attitude. So that brother person really liked him, eh?

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Trusted him, liked him. And did he have relationships with all of his sons or just the one?

Nicole: All of his sons.

Jessica: Yeah. He liked boys. Boys made sense. You tell a boy to fuck off; they fuck off. You talk to a boy; they talk back. It's easy. It's a transaction that he understands. He actually didn't say "fuck off." He's uncomfortable with me presenting him that way, but that was the energy of it.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: It's like you tell a guy what to do, and he does it. And you tell him what to stop doing, and he stops it. And if he doesn't like it, he stops talking to you.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Girls he found very uncomfortable. He knew how to seduce women. He knew how to be in the honeymoon stage of women. And then he knew how to shake a woman loose. That was pretty much the extent of his understanding of females, and he wasn't interested in working on it.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: He felt that women were crazy, and that's because they would expect things from him that made no sense. Now, me, as a counselor, want to really hold his hand and explain to him, "When you promise someone that you'll be there at 7:00, they're not crazy for expecting you to be there at 7:00." But that's pretty much his thing. It's just kind of like, "Well, I say what I say in the moment because I mean it in the moment. That's enough," instead of, "My word has to be of value in this way." Now, he—did he work outside the law?

Nicole: Yes.

Jessica: Okay. Yeah, because this is—it's like this reiterated theme of, "Oh, you know, I'm going to do what I need to do. I'm going to do what I want to do." He does like being compared to Jim Belushi.

Nicole: He does?

Jessica: Yes. Yes.

Nicole: My mom referred to him that way, and she's like, "Oh, he's so hot. He looks like a Belushi."

Jessica: Okay. Ew. That's just not my association with hotness is why I ewed, but he agrees with your mom that he was hot. He thinks he's very hot. He thinks he's funny and smart and charming, and he wasn't the greatest guy, but he wasn't the worst guy. Moving along. Moving along. A lot of your most triggering qualities to your mother are just like your father, just like your father in some ways, in part because you didn't have him around to rebel against. You know?

Nicole:  Mm-hmm.

Jessica: But there's a way that you have a tendency to just be like, "Well, that's the story. That's what's happening. That's what we've done together. That's—okay, we're done now." And that's your dad through and through and through. And it's part of why your mom takes it so personally, because it was really personal to her with your dad, and it's a hard quality for her to compete with. Your dad—how long ago did he pass?

Nicole: 2010?

Jessica: Okay. Okay. About ten years ago, then. So he's not responsible for his death anymore?

Nicole: I don't know.

Jessica: He doesn't want you to poke around money—you don't want to get anyone in trouble. You know?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: I'll just focus on his personal life. That's fine.

Nicole: Okay.  Does he have anything to say about why he cut my grandma off and his side of the family—why he stopped talking to them?

Jessica: His own mother?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. They were awful people. That's his attitude. There was a lot of abuse on that side of the family, no?

Nicole: Well, I mean, I definitely know that she was married to somebody who didn't like him or didn't get along with him. But I haven't heard that she was abusive, but I have heard that maybe her husbands were, and that's why he kind of fled. But then he was in touch with her, and then at some point, he just cut her off.

Jessica: Well, that's his coping tool. But also, there was alcoholism. There was abuse. I don't think it was just abuse to him. I think there was abuse around him.

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: And you think your mom doesn't talk about things? Get to know your father's side of the family, and watch a group of people talk incessantly but not say a word about anything real and personal. They are talkers. They're a talking group. Have you spent time with them?

Nicole: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Have you experienced it that way as well?

Nicole: I've experienced them doing a lot of talking, but for me, since I have no information, all of it feels like great information to me.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. Your father—I mean your mother and your father had no chance because they're two people who were never going to push a conversation that needs to happen. They're both people who were just like—your mom's like, "Shove it in the back of the closet." Your father's like, "Burn the whole house down. Change states." Their coping mechanisms are so similar. It makes sense that you're compulsively excavating your own self and your own past and you're doing it in public, because it's like making sure you're not them. At a certain point, your father was just like, "This is obviously done. We're done. It's done." And that's it. He doesn't want you to think that there's something deeper there.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: He didn't abandon you. He just stopped working with your mom. That's his attitude. Very convenient. I don't agree with him at all, but that's how he holds it. It has nothing to do with abandonment. He's never abandoned anyone. He just leaves. There's a difference. It's not about him not caring. It's about it being done for him.

Nicole: Mm-hmm. I'm having a weird moment of feeling so sad for my sisters who had him as their stepdad for a short amount of time and got really close to him. Yeah, like me, I was a baby. So then my mom saying, "Oh, your dad's dead I'm going to tell you," is different than my sisters being like, "No, we know this person, and we know that he's alive. He's just not here."

Jessica: And he did—what it looks like—I'm asking you, did he do exactly what I'm saying? It's like he's there, super there, and then all of a sudden gone, right?

Nicole: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. That's his move. He has no care around it. None. And it's not—I've seen so many people do the same pattern, so many men in particular do the same pattern, where they just bounce. And they're defensive or they know what they've done, and they feel ashamed of it. Your dad is just like, "That happened. It's over. It's not happening anymore. Ta-da." That's kind of it for your dad. I almost wonder if he has a borderline personality disorder because he's there, and when he's there, he's there. And then there's this moment that happens for him where he's like, "Oh, that's done." And then he's just not there anymore. It's over. And he doesn't have what your mom might have, which is a resentment or a guilt. He doesn't have an attachment anymore. His attachment is completed.

And again, I can see why women seem nuts to him, because women are like, "Hello. I'm a human person. I have feelings. Where the hell did you go?" whereas boys are just like, "I'm not going to say anything about it. I'll just let him come back or not."

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Had you been raised by him, you would have fought with him all the time because the two of you are so similar. You have the similar bullheadedness—this is what he's telling me, that you have a similar bullheadedness, this way of just being like, "No. This is how you do it. This is what's right." I mean, he's showing me now that he would have rejected you for it. He would have flat-out just been like, "Nope," and bounced on it. And he's glad that he didn't have the chance to do that because that would've fucked you up. It would've made you a lot less yourself.

He understands objectively that these are all very shitty things, but he doesn't feel it. So the story you're going to get about your dad is probably going to be really fascinating because he was without—he's not a sociopath. It's not like that, because he wasn't perpetrating great harm on others. He didn't take joy from perpetrating harm on others. Again, I'm not in the business of psychological diagnoses or anything, but this feels really classic borderline to me in that it's just his perspective is the only perspective, and what he's feeling is the only thing that's real to him. There's something of a psychic and emotional break that occurs for him, and when it occurs, he doesn't have to justify his behavior because it's just obviously the truth. That's just it.

So you're going to get really different stories from different people. There's not going to be a central story in some ways from him, and that's the story. And that's the story. And there's some really sweet pictures between you and your dad, eh? There's really cute pictures of him holding you. He really loved you. He thought you were a great baby. He couldn't make it work with your mom, and so that was it. My God, to be a semen carrier, just throwing around your semen like that, just being like, "Well, that was sex," instead of like, "I created a human life."

He really just—even now as we're having this conversation and you've been talking to him a ton lately, he thinks this is really interesting. And he doesn't have regrets. I'm sorry. I think that's really shitty and complicated, but he's not showing me regrets. He feels like he could've only lived his life in the way that he did, and he seems to absolve himself in that way. I'll also say, for somebody who's been passed for ten years, he's still really just himself, which to me is an indicator of a lack of spiritual excavation and evolution.

So this absolutely could change, and it could change in an instant. It could change through the process of this project, actually. It could change never. It could change tomorrow. You know what I mean? On a spiritual level, we're still alive. And so we are still connected to this life if we choose to be, until we do whatever needs to be done and then we move on. I mean, he finds this really interesting, but also, he's still not really clear because he doesn't understand how important he is to you and the children and adults that he touched. He doesn't see his value, not in a "I don't see my value; I have low self-esteem" sort of way, but it just doesn't—it doesn't seem relevant to him.

I think he has a lot of—it's like the more I'm sitting with the oddness of the way he is holding things, I'll say I think he must have been pretty severely abused or maybe had some serious mental health issues that haven't compartmentalized so intensely that he's still doing it in spirit. It's one thing to be like that in the body, but he's still doing it. And you don't have mental illness when you're dead, because mental illness is a physical illness. It's a body stuff. So this is like a spiritual fissure, if that makes sense.

So—okay. He doesn't want to hurt your feelings, and he understands that right now he's hurting your feelings. And he does feel bad about that. He wants you to know that he feels bad about that. He's not trying to hurt your feelings. This is why he doesn't like being around people. This is why he cuts ties, because he feels like then he's not hurting feelings. The reality is he's just not around for hurting feelings. But as we're sitting together and he's seeing—the way he's showing it to me, it's like he's seeing this tunnel into your heart. It looks almost like in animations where there's a hole in an apple where a worm has created. He's showing me this inside of you, this injury that he caused, and it's still really this huge injury that he's caused you, and how you've built up all of this life around it, but it's still in there.

And as he's seeing this, he's really sad about it, and he is sorry about it. But his attitude is like, "But there's nothing I can do about it. So what am I going to do?" That's kind of his attitude. And I'm sorry. Do you want me to shut up or slow down?

Nicole: No. I like it. It's good.

Jessica: Okay. Hold on. Okay. So he's kind of going away from me now because he doesn't want to be in emotions. He doesn't want to be in yours; he doesn't want to be in his. It's really that he doesn't want to be in his.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: This fucking guy. Who the fuck is this guy? Hold on. There's another guy. It's that religious dude. He's like, "You just need God. You just need God. Don't go to your father. Go to the Father."

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Does that make sense?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: I don't know who the fuck this guy is with the weird hat on. But—

Nicole: If it's Father Rukie, that's really in line with his thing. But he's very assimilated, though. So I don't know if it's someone who's older, older, older.

Jessica: I don't know. But I will say to you I think they're both right. I think your father's take—okay. So what your father is showing me is this. He's panicking right now. He's fucking panicking. So it's like—think of it this way. Earth, just packed-tightly Earth—panic, panic, panic, panic, panic in the center, and then more Earth. This is how you feel things, too, he's saying. You're a lot like him. He—wow. Wow. Okay. Your father has a very fucking hard time staying with responsibility and emotion. And it's like the more he sits—we've been talking for such a short period of time, right? And in this period, he can feel in the last several minutes that he really, really loves you and that you're his child. And he doesn't want to feel that way. It's not a rejection of you. It's really rejection of himself.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: He doesn't know how to feel. It makes him feel bad to feel even something good, which is why he likes the beginning of things, because it's about his potential, not about him. He says you're the same way. I don't know if that's true. Just because he says a thing doesn't mean it's true. But he says that you're the same way.

Let me just make sure I'm seeing this right. Hold on. Yeah. Weird. Cool. As we're sitting here, something broke off of him. It, like, broke off of him. I haven't seen this very often. Something broke off of him, like a shell, like an eggshell. I don't know why I'm getting such visual things with you. It's probably just because you're a visual processor, but—and this light started to come out of the shell. And he's very uncomfortable and emotional, but he doesn't want you to talk about him as an emotional guy in public.

He's not telling you what to do. He doesn't believe in that. He's not going to tell you what to do. He's scared that I'm telling you this because he's seeing it happening, and he's feeling it. And he's not resisting feeling this, but he's like, "Yeah, but I don't want you to say that, like in public. I don't want you to tell that to my sons." That's his kind of attitude. You don't have to respect that, and you can choose to. It's on you. There's not a right or wrong in this.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: But he's—have you talked to a medium? Have you talked to him through a medium before? No. I don't think so. We didn't. He's just not had a lot of conversations like this. He usually directs the narrative.

Nicole: Yeah. And that's true amongst every person we've talked to. There's not a softer side of Sears. We're hearing, "He's so charismatic. He's a ladies' man. He's so this. He's so that. He's so flashy. He's so"—you know. Here's his accomplishments. Here's what he said were his accomplishments. It's all that. It's not the emotional part of him that people are [crosstalk].

Jessica: He didn't have an emotional part. The thing about him is he's a survivalist. He just centered things around his own comfort and his own survival. He's a child of trauma for sure. I don't know what else happened to him, but either he was just deeply impacted by what happened to him and what happened around him, or more things happened than your family is ever going to tell you. He did not want to grow old alone. This is not a man who had any tolerance for being alone. So, while he never let anyone truly know him, notice he was never alone. There was always someone, something. Always someone and something.

So, within that and within this in general, you are being called to really look at the difference between what exists on the surface and what actually is. The thing about your dad is there's all this—you know, your dad, just flirtatious and charismatic and plays by his own rules and wild and charming and obnoxious. All these things that I quite enjoy, personally, in a person. But then, when you actually start to sit, there's a lot of trauma. It's kind of like The Labyrinth. It seems like there should be more ways out than there are. Not a lot of ways out of this one.

He's just really got a lot of compartments that are hard to access. That energy is actually really flat. There's no there there. Everyone loved him fiercely. Everyone wanted to take care of him. He may have been a perpetrator, but he was a broken puppy. And people love a broken puppy. People want to take care of a broken puppy, even when he is the perpetrator. I mean, I get it. I get it. You know, sometimes you want to just post on Instagram and you don't want to engage with the comments. I get that.

For him, his version is, "I want to procreate and then not have to deal with the child." So it is different, but I get it as a general template of he just feels like, "Why do I have to be accountable to what I did? It did it." It's interesting because he was cracking into the emotion just a few minutes ago. We got distracted into story, and now he's back to this defense. Rome, a day, not so much. So here we are.

Nicole: But I was in—I liked that eggshell.

Jessica: Yeah. It was a beautiful eggshell. It's a small crack, but there's a lot of light. This is the thing. Your dad—and I imagine some of your siblings—was really creative and dynamic and just weird and wonderful. And it got tamped down because you can't compartmentalize your whole life and not become twisted up from the effort. Just not one of the options of being a person. So he did that. How old was he when he passed? Was he young?

Nicole: I mean, he was younger than he should have been. He was—

Jessica: Yeah. He was in his 60s?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. He feels like he was in his mid/late 60s.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. Was it his heart?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: Okay. He's cool with it. He's real cool with it. He didn't want to be old. He didn't want to be infirmed. In fact, if he had known he would die so quickly and at that age, he probably would have done some more shit. Your dad. So your brother—there's one of your brothers that you have a relationship with, or no?

Nicole: Yeah. One of them I do. Two of them I don't.

Jessica: And the one that you do—your dad's so protective of him, like so protective of him. That's his baby. And if you really want to know your dad, your father is right now saying, "Get to know David." That's like his better self, because David's—he's a family man, David?

Nicole: Yeah. He's a very stand-up young man.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. His dad treated him real well, in his mind. I think your dad treated David like every one of you wanted to be treated. And for whatever reason, he decided he could with that child. Your father feels that David will give you the best version of him if you want to know about him. And he's like—okay. So what he just said was, "No. Don't start thinking that way." It's not like he chose David over you or chose David over the other kids. It just happened. Your father's not somebody who would question things. It's on; it's off. If the lights are off, I leave the room. The lights are on; I stay in the room. That's it. He's very, very literal. And it makes sense that your parents would choose each other.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: They made perfect sense. They were an amazing couple until he changed.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: She thought she found the love of her life.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: He really kind of destroyed something in her because he lied to her at every step of the way, but that's actually not what he did. He told her the truth until his truth changed, and then he didn't defend it, explain it, or hold her hand through it. He just left.

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: And that really was so painful for her. And your mom experiences you as reiterating that trauma. She's created that a little bit, but of—like you don't hold her hand. You just tell her, "I'm this. I'm that. You're this. You're that." And she has to just handle it. And that's just like your dad. But it's not, actually. That's just her twisting the story to justify a narrative in which she is the victim, and it allows her to feel like it's not her fault that she's being self-protective. It's not the same whether your husband or your ex-husband does it versus your child when a child is a child.

He didn't lie. He meant every word he said. He meant everything he did. He just changed his mind. Everything changed. And that's always the way with him. He really loved you. He still loves you. He understands now that he loves you, but he doesn't want you to need him. He doesn't want anyone to need him, ever. David needed him. For some reason, David needed him, and that was okay. That was the only one. Your dad had a brother or a best friend? I can't tell.

Nicole: He had the best friend—yeah, Dell.

Jessica: Were they best friends their whole lives?

Nicole: Up until he cut off that whole side of the family.

Jessica: I see.

Nicole: He had a brother, but he was estranged from his brother.

Jessica: So it's the best friend that I'm talking about, then. Okay, because he also really wanted to take care of that person until he didn't.

Nicole: He set that person up with his sister. He just wanted to set them up and have that guy be part of the family. He just wanted his best friend to be part of the family.

Jessica: Yep. Yep. Yep. Your dad has a lot of trauma, and you're not going to be able to excavate that. You think your mom's family keeps secrets? The thing about your dad's side of the family is there is no elephant; there is no room. What are you talking about? Your mom is like, "Yeah, it's an elephant in the room, but we don't talk about that." Your dad is like, "What are you talking about, elephant? I don't see an elephant. Point to me an elephant. There's no elephant." And then, again, burn the whole house down. Change states.

Your dad's really—I mean, I have to say, personally, some of the things that I really love and enjoy about you, Nicole, your dad has. Just fucking weird, funny, charming, weird, goodness. I want to share that because what you're doing is kind of going into all this intensity of him, but he—and I guess maybe you are actually hearing this from other people, but he's just charming. He's charming and smart, and he really didn't mean to hurt you or anyone else. He didn't. He didn't. He didn't relish creating harm. It's not that he's cavalier to it; he's dissociated from it, I think, more than anything. And so it becomes cavalier and it becomes cruel, but it doesn't come from cruelty. He didn't want to harm you or your mom. She tried to get him back, too. Is that part of what you know?

Nicole: I don't know.

Jessica: He's saying that.

Nicole: I'm sure she did.

Jessica: Yeah. She really loved him.

Nicole: Yeah. I think she was very heartbroken by him; then she just—

Jessica: How could she not be? They had an amazing relationship, and then one day, he just woke up different. And shortly thereafter, he was gone. Who wouldn't be heartbroken by that? And then she had a child who did nothing but remind her of him. I think she told you he was dead just as much to protect herself as anything else, just so she wouldn't have to deal with it, so she wouldn't have to invite him into her life again. It was like a way to punish him. It was a way to control the narrative.

This theme of controlling the narrative is really important for all of you. It's like both sides of the family. And then, ironically, here you are, a writer and a podcaster literally controlling the narrative. I mean, to be fair, you have perfected something that they started. So kudos to you. Hats off to you.

Nicole: I had that compartmentalization thing about him in my life, my whole life. I was like, "Well, he's just not there. So that's that. And I don't even know what I'm missing." But it is nice now, being an older person who's a little more in touch with my feelings, to be like, "Oh, he is interested." It's nice that somebody's interested, because the rest of my family is just threatened and pensive. And so to have somebody who shares that in common with me, who's like, "Oh, that's fun and interesting and weird. And I'm still me, and you can do that thing, but I"—to have him be interested is something.

Jessica: He is. It is ironic. It is ironic that he's scared of girls, because you are more like him than his boys are. You really are. He liked being alive, like a lot. He liked having a body a lot. He was a very visceral, hedonistic person. And he's enjoying following you through this. He's not enjoying being emotionally accountable. So we'll see if that changes because I think that could change through this process. We had a crack. We had a crack, and it's not going to be—I don't know what's going to come of that crack, but it happened just with this one brief conversation.

Okay. Yeah. He really likes it that you're just like, "Fuck everything." He likes that about you. Not all of his kids are like that. A lot of them are much more conventional. He likes it that you're just like, "Fuck all this. No, I'm not doing that." He really is proud of that.

Nicole: About what? Just about convention and—

Jessica: About—he says you're like that about almost everything. He's like, "You're just like, 'Fuck it. I'll make a living the way I want to make a living. Fuck it. I don't have to be religious if I don't want to be religious. I don't have to get married.'" He just likes it that you—all these conventions, these—honestly, it's like these heterotypical conventions—I mean, he was a very straight guy, and I don't know what his values are around queer stuff. But he's got essentially kind of a queering of his worldview. He doesn't want to have to be locked into—I mean, he doesn't have the language for monogamy or anything.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: You know what I mean? But he likes it that you're just like—you do what you want to do based on how you see the world—

Nicole: Yeah.

Jessica: —not based and how other people tell you to see the world. He really likes that about you. I will say to you—he's not saying this, but I will say this. I hope that this does not in any way make you feel like you should ask for less. It is perfectly acceptable for you to ask for more from him and more from anyone. Just because this man, who if he had been in your life would have been a great disappointment—and maybe a disappointment that you learned to love and have a good relationship with, but a great disappointment—you don't have to bend or cave to anything with him. You really don't. You really don't, and I want to just say continue to ask for as much as you want. Ask for more. He can say no, but you get to ask. And I think that's a really important part of being his child.

Nicole: What does asking for something from a spirit person even look like? I mean, it sounds like a version of prayer, almost.

Jessica: It is. Yeah. You are asking for tons from him right now. You are asking for—he's showing me that you've been asking for his blessing on this and that he's provided it. He's showing me that you've been asking for answers and for the path to kind of light up—this is not how he's verbalizing it, but he's showing it to me. You've been asking him for the path to light up so that you can have the information you need and unpack your own story. And within that, you sometimes—I mean, you're his child. So sometimes it has nothing to do with him emotionally and there's no spiritual connection, and sometimes, you really feel tenderhearted about it and it's really emotional for you. It's really one or really the other.

And in those moments where it is tender and it is emotional and he is your dad, whether or not he was there—in those moments, what I want to say is it's okay for you to have thoughts and feelings that are like, "What the fuck, Dad/person/human father person/Dad? Like what the fuck?" It's okay to be mad at him, sad at him, miss him, love him. I am saying I want to encourage and empower you to have the full breadth of your emotions and whatever thoughts, needs, questions emerge from that, even though what I have revealed in talking to him today is that he doesn't respond well to that. Fuck that. Fuck that.

He needs the truth. He doesn't need coddling. He's not your baby. You know what I mean? And that's what I'm saying. In those moments when you are in the fullness of your feelings, be in the fullness of your feelings, because he doesn't have that skill. And that's a real loss for him. Don't let that be your loss in trying to have this kind of spiritual connection with him. I think, in part, your capacity that is from him to kind of just be in the story and just investigate without a lot of emotion—it's not what your mom does where it's like hiding from the truth; it's what your dad does, which is being kind of unaffected by the story. It's just good for you to see that that's healthy for you. And the way he did it was not healthy.

It's all about quantity. It's all about how much ego is a healthy amount of ego, and how much ego is too much ego? How much is not enough ego? It's the same kind of a concept. It's he had this thing, but he had it at like 89 percent. You have the exact same thing. It's a solid 40 percent. It's a healthy percentage for you. From my spiritual perspective as a medium, I think there's a real value in him seeing the embodiment of it that he can so easily recognize in you, but it's not at 89 percent.

This is what it looks like to have a healthy balance, you dumb man. I hope it doesn't make you feel bad that I'm calling your dad a dumb man, but he's a stupid, dumb man. And, you know—sorry. He thinks that's really funny. He agrees. He agrees. He knows. He knows. He knows. He knows. It's just that he's never really fixed it. He's a real hand talker. Was he Italian too?

Nicole: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica: Hand talker. Hand talker. He likes people saying no to him. He thinks it's funny. You know what I mean?

Nicole: Me too.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. You have that too. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole: Jessica, you're such a gift.

Jessica: Thank you. That's nice of you to say. You're a gift too. I adore you.

Nicole: This is all so helpful. Thank you so much.

Jessica: Oh my God. It's my pleasure. I can't wait to hear the show.

Compassion in Oakland was formed in response to the surge of anti-Asian attacks in California's Bay Area. It started with a simple social media post offering to chaperone anyone within Oakland's Chinatown neighborhood to help them feel safer. Since then, over 400 volunteers of all different backgrounds have come forward from across the Bay Area to stand against AAPI hate. Thus was born the movement for the community to come together to support and protect our Asian elders. Compassion in Oakland is now looking for volunteers to serve in several different roles. Check out their website to donate, learn more about volunteering, or start a Compassion project in your own area. Go to compassioninoakland.org. Link in show notes.

Darlings, darlings. Listen. I feel like I would be irresponsible if I didn't take a moment this week to reiterate that regardless of how much you want it to be so, regardless of how confusing it is out in the world, the pandemic is not over. It's not over in the U.S. It's not over in any country anywhere in the world. I know that many news outlets and governments and individuals and communities are acting like we're in the clear, but we very much are not. And I say this as a person who consumes news, both international and domestic, but I say this also very much as an astrologer.

So, astrologically, I want to reiterate what I've been saying all along, which is, first of all, that with the Saturn/Uranus square that plagued us through 2021 and is influencing us throughout 2022, it suggests that this is persistent and that we're not going to be done with COVID this year. So this means that we will be getting mixed messages and having kind of bungled responses to this pandemic throughout the year still. We can look to Austria right now. They removed all mask mandates and, two weeks later, put them back in place because the pandemic isn't over yet. And in fact, there's a new variant.

Now, more poignantly, if you listened to the year-ahead horoscope, you heard me talk about the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces that's happening in April. Now, as I've talked about in recent months on the podcast, I really struggle—I am a triple Capricorn. And listen. When a person's a triple, that means their Sun, Moon, and Rising are all in the same sign. So I have a pretty pessimistic or negative take on things, oftentimes, because hey, I'm a fucking Capricorn. Also, I have a realistic take, I like to think. A realistic take. I don't like to put fear into the world. I don't like to put negativity for no constructive reason into the world. And when I recorded the year-ahead horoscope is when all manner of people were like, "It's going to be over in the spring," at the exact moment when this Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces occurs.

And my concern then—and it's only gotten stronger since—is that it's going to be quite the opposite, that because people are feeling so resilient, so optimistic, so hopeful, so dissociated from the pandemic still happening, that we will then have big super-spreader events. And that could be people partying, people using public transit without social distancing, without masks. It could be refugee crises. It could be any number of things, and it's probably all manner of things. But I'm not trying to strike fear in your heart or anything like this. And of course, my perspective as an astrologer is not equal to that of the perspective of a public health official or an epidemiologist or a doctor.

But I will say this. The astrology is not great from my perspective, in the context of the pandemic. And so wear a mask. Wear a damn mask. They're exhausting. They're annoying. They don't go with every outfit. If you're like me and you enjoy wearing lipstick, wow, so annoying. It gets in the way, you know? But what's even more exhausting than wearing a mask is living through a pandemic. But here we are, living through a pandemic that is not over. So wear a damn mask. Show consideration for those who cannot get vaccinated because they're children or immunocompromised. Show consideration for people who are victims of disinformation and believe that the pandemic isn't real. And show consideration for yourself.

Very much related to this, I want to acknowledge those living with long COVID. I think about people living with long COVID every day—if I'm being honest, several times a day. It's a truly frightening disease. And anyone who's had a health condition that doctors don't know how to treat will attest to that. It's terrifying enough to be sick, to be exhausted, to not be right in your body, but it's extra scary when doctors really don't know exactly what's going on and therefore can't really treat it, or at least they can't treat it with confidence. And that's long COVID. And long COVID impacts millions of people.

As a reminder, you can get long COVID from a very mild case. You don't have to be hospitalized, and you don't even have to be terribly sick or symptomatic to end up with long COVID. So take care of yourself. If you have long COVID and you're hearing this, my heart is with you. And if you're being cavalier about COVID and how it could impact you or others, be a little more considerate. I know it's annoying. I know it's exhausting. I know you want your life to get back to normal. But each of us as individuals, we're not actually as important as all of us as a collective. Not in this context. Not in this context.

So wear a damn mask. Wash your paws. Wash your paws well. And social distance whenever you can. This is going to be annoying in the short term but actually make the pandemic over sooner in the long term. You know what I'm talking about, right? Come on. You know what I'm talking about.

Okay. Now, that said, we're going to get into the horoscope, but I want to give you a little heads-up that the astrology of this week has a lot to it. And so you may have been experiencing a fair amount of anxiety over the last couple weeks, and honestly, you might still be feeling a fair amount of anxiety with the transits that we have upcoming. Now, that said, we may be on the brink of World War III. We are dealing with this ever-shifting cultural and political landscape that feels so volatile, and we're in the beginning of the third year of a global pandemic with such mixed guidance and mixed feelings and twists and turns, and it's a lot. So, even if you're not thinking about these things, even if you're just tra-la-la-ing through your day and your thoughts aren't returning to these topics, you're likely to be feeling it because this is the world we're living in.

And then I could name a bunch of other things that are happening in the collective, and that's to say nothing of what's happening in your personal life. Your Saturn Return? You're going through a difficult Pluto transit? I mean, our individual lives don't stop just because the world is on fire. And so, again, you're likely to be feeling it even if you're not thinking it. So let me just give you a little bit of advice for coping with what I am kind of noticing for a lot of people, which is this persistent anxiety. So I'm not talking about clinical anxiety disorders. But for the many people who are just struggling right now, I want to give you three simple self-care reminders.

The first one, accept what you're feeling. I've seen an uptick in questions for the podcast from people describing what they're feeling, describing what they're needing, describing what they're going through, and saying, "Can astrology explain it for me?" And I want to say to you it doesn't matter if there's an explanation. If you already have self-awareness, if you know what you're feeling, you gotta accept it because an explanation isn't always necessary. First, you accept where you are, what you're feeling, and then, step two, use your self-care tools. You've got them. I know you have them. I know you have them. If you're listening to this podcast, I cannot be the only self-helpy, woo-woo, "take accountability for yourself" kind of person you're listening to or that you're reading content from or whatever.

So you've got tools in your tool kit. It's when you feel anxious. It's when you feel scared. It's when you feel hopeless or helpless or uncertain of what to do—that's when you need to use those skills. And that's often when we forget. Use your self-care tools when you feel anxious. Instead of trying to figure out why you feel anxious, first, nurture. Get yourself a little more centered, a little more grounded. Then you can try to figure it out. Okay?

And then the third simple step is do things. Action can be the antidote for anxiety. Again, I'm not speaking on clinical anxiety. But do things to help yourself, to advance yourself. Do things to help and advance the world or people around you. They can be tiny, little, small things. But small actions can have big consequences, and progress is progress is progress. We just need a little bit of progress.

So, if you find yourself feeling destabilized or anxious, accept it. Use your self-care tools to get yourself a little more grounded, a little more present instead of future or past. And then find actions that help to advance yourself, others, or the world. And that's it. I know it sounds real small, but it can have a real big impact. So "don't forget" is my advice.

Okay. That's it for today's preamble, and let us get into your horoscope. We are looking at the astrology of March 20th through the 26th of 2022, and it kicks off on the 20th with the first exact transit. It's a Mercury conjunction to Jupiter. Mercury and Jupiter are meeting in the sign of Pisces at 19 degrees of Pisces, 18 degrees and 45 minutes if you like to be specific. And this is happening on the day that the Sun moves into Aries. So welcome to Aries season. This is a time to kick stuff off. It's the start of spring. Welcome to spring here in this hemisphere of the globe. And it's an important time to temper your passions and your actions with consideration for others, your environment, the people around you.

But back to this Mercury conjunction to Jupiter. So Mercury conjunction to Jupiter in general is just a lovely transit where you can feel more optimistic and more resilient in your thinking because Jupiter is optimism and resilience, and Mercury is your thinking. It's your attitudes. It's your cognition. It's also how you communicate with others. And so I will remind you, when I reference communication, I'm not just talking about you talking to others. I'm talking about how you listen to others, how you receive others, how you put yourself out to others, your tone as well as your message, their tone as well as their message.

So this transit can be a time where you just have lovely exchanges with people. It can be a time where you get good news or you give good news. It can be a time where you do as I was just referring to: actually use your self-care tools. You pick up that journal that's been collecting dust and start writing about your feelings or your thoughts. This transit is great for cultivating understanding and largesse of perspective. This transit can offer us a real bump because it increases our willingness and capacity to have understanding, and it increases our capacity and willingness to be empathetic, which broadens our perspective and often, again, aids in understanding.

So, whether you need to have more understanding of yourself, more acceptance of yourself, of the world, of others, of things you don't like or things you do like, this transit's really supportive. Now, is there a downside, you may be wondering? But of course there is. The downside of this transit is that it can lead to soapboxing, feeling like you gotta tell everyone what they're doing wrong or everyone what your perspective is and how it's the right perspective. It can lead to not listening to others and just focusing on your own attitudes and thoughts. This can be a time where you come across as arrogant or you're dealing with someone else who's coming across as arrogant or soapboxing at you.

And so it's an easy fix. Make sure you're listening as well as you're speaking. If you have an opinion, speak it. And also make sure you're not just talking at people. Do it online. Do it in your personal life. Do it at work. Make sure people are hearing you. And if they're not hearing you or if they're really clearly not interested in what you have to say, there's really no point in continuing. If somebody doesn't want to listen, then you're wasting your very precious energy by trying to convince them. Having a conversation is a back-and-forth thing. It doesn't just happen as a one-way street. So make sure your exchanges are just that: they're an exchange of ideas.

Now, the other thing that is a downside of this transit, again, is back to COVID. Don't let yourself feel social pressure to take off your mask if you are in environments where you feel safer with it on. Use your common sense, and I would say maybe add a little extra common sense to your common sense because Mercury and Jupiter in Pisces sitting on top of each other is not internationally known for common sense. It's known for optimism and resiliency. Yay. We love that. But in the context of a pandemic, be careful. Just be careful.

One more thing I want to say about this transit is, hey, you like to sing? Do you like—I don't know—using your voice as a tool for releasing your emotions? May I then suggest doing so?  On this date, but throughout the week, use your voice as a way to release energy, to release tension, to release stress. And so that might mean singing really loud when you're frustrated or when you're happy. It might mean allowing yourself to just make some damn noise. Use your voice. It's not just literally your voice. It's energy. It's vibration. It's a way of being better connected to yourself. And that can be really helpful. So just check it out. Just try it if that resonates for you.

Now, on the 21st, we have a Mars sextile to Chiron. This is a really great transit for dealing with, like actively dealing with, difficulties in embodiment, difficulties that you have in embodying your own energies, whether it's your ambition, your anger, your frustration, your sexuality, any of the kind of classic Mars themes—but also your place in the world, how you do or don't take up space, use your power, and engage with ghosts from your past.

In the context of the astrology of this whole week, this transit is going to function as kind of like a little bit of fire under your ass, a little bit of wind beneath your wings, so that it can support us in doing the work we need to do to be right with ourselves, to withstand difficult emotions and stay embodied. So that's the good news of this transit. The bad news is it's overlapping with the Mars square to Uranus. Now, that transit will be exact on the 22nd, Mars square to Uranus. And this transit I kind of talked about a little bit last week when we had the Venus square to Uranus, because of course Venus and Mars are quite close to each other right now.

And Mars square to Uranus is a difficult transit. So that Mercury conjunction to Jupiter, in the context of Mars square to Uranus, can make it really hard for us to act with consideration. We may just jump to conclusions. We may open our mouths without a whole lot of consideration for consequences. Mars and Uranus are the most individualistic planets of the zodiac. They're the "me" planets in different ways from each other but in meaningful ways. This is very individualistic, very male kind of energy. And it can, on a personal level, feel like you are being attacked. It can feel like if you don't act now to protect yourself that you're going to lose your personal freedom.

And so this transit can lead to power struggles, and it's not because it inherently has to. But if everyone is feeling kind of really touchy and defensive, then it's easy for there to be a conflict, an ego conflict between you and others. And that ego conflict may be one that you do not want to engage in or one that you're just chomping at the bit to engage in. But either way, you're likely to have to take a stand or to deal with frustration and irritability.

This is a time where you may become viscerally aware, so super aware in your body, that things need to change, that you need kind of an outlet that is new or different. And unfortunately, it's not one that tends to feel like, "Oh my goodness. I must change now. Let me be intentional about that." It's more like, "This sucks. Fuck this. I'm burning it to the ground." It's just a really impulsive kind of energy. And so it can be very upsetting. Now, listen. You might not be the one who's acting out that way or who's feeling that way, but it's a big world full of a lot of people, and you're likely to engage with someone who's feeling that way. And that person might try to cut you in line at the grocery store or cut you off in traffic or take credit for something you did just because they're having a shitty day and they're acting out.

The way that you deal with this is a reflection on your ego. It's a reflection on your sense of entitlement. We need a healthy ego, and we need healthy entitlement. Not too much, and not too little. Having too little, just like having too much, is a problem. Problems are part of life. So if you identify on and around this date—so it'll be the whole damn week, but on and around this date, if you identify, "Oh, wow. I'm playing small in situations where I know my rights," or, "I am acting out against people when it's really not necessary or appropriate," or, "I'm behaving in ways that are not how I want to be behaving," okay, cool. Now you've recognized there's a problem.

From this awareness, you can cultivate acceptance: "This is actually happening." And from that acceptance, you can start to figure out, what are your next moves? How can you constructively engage with this? Do you need help? Do you need to acknowledge harm done to someone else? Do you need to step into more of your awareness and embody the awareness instead of just think about your awareness? Nobody knows, but you'll find out. You'll find out on and around this date because Mars square Uranus is many things, but subtle is not one of them. So, for a lot of people, it's just going to be a frustrating day where you kind of are dealing with things you weren't expecting to deal with and it feels like a lot, especially if you already have a lot going on.

So, again, I come back to the resiliency that that Mercury/Jupiter conjunction can bring. We're still under the influence of it on the 22nd. So that's great. And the Mars sextile Chiron can really help to fortify us around our willingness to do the work and to do it in a way that's actually healing and helpful. So, wonderful, right? It's difficult, but it's not bad, this transit. The thing I love about the Mars square to Uranus is that it reminds us that we're alive, and it reminds us that we have agency. And so, while it's an uncomfortable transit for most people most of the time, it's also one that is incredibly constructive if we engage with it openly and honestly.

If you find that you're making mistakes—which, hey, we all do from time to time—give it 72 hours, at least, before you make final decisions about what you're going to do. Impulsive action is not well starred, though very likely this whole week. Jupiter and Uranus are both big on impulsive actions. They're the biggest on impulsive actions. And again, not the best approach, my loves.

Now, on a more social or global scale, Mars square to Uranus is explosive, quite literally explosive. So it's not great news in the context of war. In the context of war, combat, or conflicts, it can be people acting out impulsively and violently. It can feel like Mars and Uranus—again, these are the "me" planets in big ways. And so it's like, "My rights are X. I deserve X. I can do whatever the fuck I want because you've trampled upon my rights." Now, there's a lot of situations and a lot of people across the world. But it would be unrealistic to expect this transit to bring stability or to bring any kind of cease-fire situations. And you can apply that in any context that feels relevant.

So, in the context of this transit as well as the one I'm going to tell you about in a minute, as well as the Mercury conjunction to Jupiter, when reading or watching or listening to news, be very mindful of conjecture, of journalists saying, "This is the theory," or, "It's still developing." Remember that that means, "We don't know yet. The news isn't all the way in yet." It's very likely that as situations develop, and in our 24-hour news cycle that we live with now, we may get reporting that ends up being wrong. We may get the right details but the wrong story, that kind of thing.

So, again, it's just important to know this is the weather report. There's going to be a lot going on this week, and we want to allow things to unfold and develop before we definitively take action. And honestly, that's not always possible. A lot of times, we've got to take action and we've got to do our best. And that's fine. That's fine. You just want to keep in mind that between all of this Uranus, Jupiter, and I'm about to tell you about Neptune energy, matters are still developing. And it's likely to be really messy. So hold space for that, and do your part to not add to the chaos or the mess or the aggression in the world, unless that feels constructive to you, in which case, have at it.

Now, there's something else to say about Uranus. It is the planet the governs revolution, independence. And again, Mars is taking of arms. Mars is aggression. And so this may spark some sort of revolution in the world. This may be a time where people come together to fight for their rights. And this may be a time when people come together to overthrow other people's rights. Now, you can apply this to social and political conditions. You can also apply this to your damn individual life. It's all of it. So we just want to be on the lookout for what's going on in the world, and also, to the best of our ability, manage our own temper, our own ego, so we're behaving in ways that are constructive, that are helpful in the world, and also helpful in our lives.

Okay. I'm not done. On the 23rd, we have another exact transit. So, of course, this is very much overlapping with the Mars square to Uranus. It's another Mercury transit and another conjunction. This bad boy is Mercury conjunction to Neptune at 23 degrees of Pisces. So okay. All right. This transit is rough, my friends. It is rough. And it's rough because Mercury—the mind, communication, attitudes, friendships, all that kind of stuff, how we listen, how we speak, how we write, yada yada—is conjunct to Neptune, which governs anxiety and spirituality and dissociation. It can be associated with the desire or urge to give up all your power and to give it away, to give it to someone who may or may not have actually earned that power or that trust from you.

Mercury conjunction to Neptune, unfortunately, is an anxiety-provoking transit. I'm sorry to tell you that, because who needs it? And for this transit to be exact within 24 hours of the Mars/Uranus transit to be exact is not great news, because it's a lot of ego energy of the body and quite the opposite energy of the mind. This can really intensify our sense of anxiety because if you feel, really, the sense of urgency in your body to do something while at the same time the Mercury/Neptune conjunction is scrambling your thoughts or concerning you with what could go wrong or intensifying your insecurities, that's a bad combination.

Most people act the worst, perpetrate their worst behaviors, out of fear. Fear can be a valuable teacher. Fear can be an insightful resource. And it can also be a destroyer. It can compel us to acting in ways that are completely out of alignment with our integrity, that are lacking in empathy or consideration for others. So the nature of fear is going to be a big one this week and especially on and around this date.

So Neptune is a very spiritual planet, and it is the kind of high arts and high spirituality. On a spiritual level, what Neptune can do, it can increase our sensitivities. Sounds nice, right? It sounds nice until you realize that there's only so much information we can pull in and make sense of easily or organically. So when a planet conjoins Neptune—like Mercury, for instance—what can happen is you can start pulling in lots of information that you don't know how to process or make sense of, and this ends up becoming a messy bunch of anxiety.

So it may be difficult to decipher what's real and what's not real this week and on this date, which is especially destabilizing because of the Mercury/Jupiter conjunction that wants us to jump to conclusions, as does the Mars square to Uranus. Mars square to Uranus can give you fire in the belly, so you want to act out and you want to do something. And the Mercury/Neptune conjunction makes it really confusing to use your discretion to understand what it is that you really think, what it is that you're really hearing, what it is that you want to plan to do.

And so this is tricky. Be especially careful with conspiracy theories, with overly simple answers, and misinformation or disinformation campaigns or people—people passing off mis- or disinformation. This is not a good time for fasting, because with Neptune we always want to nurture and fortify. This is also not a great time for any kind of consciousness-raising drugs. I know I say that frequently, and on Patreon, people have been like, "When can I do my drugs again?"

And so, just broadly speaking, let me pull back to say, in general, Eclipse season and Neptune transits, and then in a different way Pluto transits, are not a great time for drugs, especially consciousness-raising drugs. Part of the reason why that is, in the context of Neptune, which we're talking about now, is because you're meant to access whatever parts of your brain or consciousness that you're trying to access through drugs—you're meant to access them just through the power of your own mind without a facilitator. And it becomes much more possible and accessible during a Neptune transit because, again, it thins the veils. It makes us a lot more sensitive. And using a facilitator when you don't need the facilitator can actually open you up too far and too wide, and that can have destructive effects.

So, all that said, people may be communicating in weird ways. They may be acting weird. They may be talking to you in a weird way. They might not be listening properly. They might be distracted. Or you may be that way. Because you're an astrology nerd, you'll be like, "Oh, it's that fucking transit, Mercury conjunction to Neptune." So you don't have to take it personally when other people act weird. And if you find that you can't help but take it personally, be direct. Say, "Hey, is something going on?" or, "Is there something you want to talk to me about?"

Unfortunately, this transit is very averse to conflict or confrontation, but we're still very heavily under the influence of Mars/Uranus square. So, hey, you never know. Be direct. Be forthright. Keep it simple. This is not the time to drop a million personal details in someone else's lap. It's not going to go well. Everyone is feeling anxious and burdened. So be aware of what you're asking of people when you do any kind of personal sharing.

That brings me to the next very important part of this transit, which is boundaries. This transit, Mercury conjunction to Neptune, is an excellent one to practice having boundaries in your thinking and in your communication. What that means is let's say you're like, "Okay. I'm taking a break from this friend. I'm having a friendship. It's going sideways on me. I'm taking a break." If you then obsess on that friend, if you look at their social media all day long, if you talk to everyone about that person all day long, then you're not actually having a boundary. You're just icing them, which—hey, maybe that's what works for you.

But having a boundary requires that you embody the boundary. If you're taking a break from the friend, then you take a break. Then you take a break. You don't give them all your energy. You don't obsess on them. You don't think about them all the time, because that's not you holding your own boundary. It's very likely this week that you'll be confronted with a situation where you have to have boundaries with yourself. You need to remember that eating sugar makes you feel like shit, so okay, you ate sugar this morning and now you feel the way you always feel when you have sugar. Okay. That's a boundary with yourself. It's like, "I know my body is related to my mind, and I'm listening to the feedback loop, and here I am."

The trouble here is that Neptune can create a lot of fear, paranoid thoughts, and a lot of confusion. It can also just make us feel exhausted. And so fortify your body, keep it simple, and practice having healthy boundaries. You'll more than likely have the opportunity this week to do so. So, for better or worse, practice your damn boundaries.

And speaking of boundaries, as I mentioned to you last week, I'm teaching another Plants and Planets class with Rachel Budde. This one is specifically about boundaries and boundary allies. It's happening on April 10th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. If you cannot make it, no problem. It's going to be recorded, and you can listen to the recording whenever you want and however many times you want. But in this webinar, we're going to be unpacking the astrology of the spring and how to make the most of it, and in particular the energetic, interpersonal, and social need for boundaries and how to best approach them. And, of course, you'll learn about the plant allies you can use to help support you through it all. Pricing will be offered on a sliding scale, and you can get tickets either on my website at lovelanyadoo.com or over at fatandthemoon.com.

Okay. Back to your horoscope. Now, there's one last exact transit for the week, and it is on the 26th. We have a Mercury sextile to Pluto. And much like the other sextile occurring this week, the Mars sextile to Chiron, it's going to function as a support mechanism for these harder, kind of more engaging or demanding transits. Mercury sextile to Pluto is excellent for helping us make connections, to confront difficult things, and to get deep in our thinking. So it's really a lovely transit. There is no downside to it other than you have to do something to stimulate it, to work with it. And what that looks like is simply putting in the effort, allowing yourself to get deep, to think about and be honest with yourself and others about things that are maybe difficult. If you do so, it's more likely to go well than if you try to act out or evade difficulties. Trust me on this, my friends. Just, I say, trust me.

So it's a lovely transit. Again, can be really good for socializing, communicating, researching, any of that kind of good stuff. So it's a nice little bump right on the heels of the Mercury conjunction to Neptune, which is quite the opposite. It's so confusing and overwhelming. So if you fear you've fucked things up this week, on the 26th, right around that 26th date is a good time to go back and check your work. And if you gotta be like, "Oops. I made a mistake here," you won't be alone. So don't be too hard on yourself.

And, my loves, that's the horoscope of this week. I'm going to run through the transit again, but before I do, I will of course remind you that if you are an astrology student, you should subscribe to Astrology For Days, the tool for tracking transits and taking notes so that you can deepen your learning and practice of astrology.

Okay. So, on the 20th, we have an exact Mercury conjunction to Jupiter. On the 21st, Mars is exactly sextile to Chiron. On the 22nd, Mars forms an exact square to Uranus. That's the one to look out for, as well as the 23rd; Mercury is exactly conjoined to Neptune. And then, finally, on the 26th of March we have a Mercury sextile to Pluto. That's what's happening.

If you've been listening to Ghost of a Podcast for a while and my words have helped you or been instructive to your process at all, I do encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. Give me a little five-star review or write a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it really does help, and it does mean a lot to me.

If you would like to learn more with me, join me over on Patreon, where I'm getting extra woo and talking more about energy work and ways of not only working with energy but doing it safely. I also, of course, get astrological and am teaching the tarot there as well. So there's lots going on over on Patreon, and hopefully you'll join me there.

My loves, stay safe. Take good care of yourself, as always, remembering that self-care is not separate from the world and doesn't require us to stick our head in the sand. True spiritual self-care is interconnected with the needs, safety, and dignity of others. So go out there and do your damn best, and I'll talk to you next week. Buh-bye.