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.

Hey there, Ghosties. In this episode, I'll be doing a live reading with one of my beloved listeners. Every Wednesday, listen in on an intimate conversation and get inspired as we explore perspectives on life, love, and the human condition. Along the way, we'll uncover valuable insights and practical lessons that you can apply to your own life. And don't forget to hit Subscribe or, at the very least, mark your calendars because every Sunday I'll be back with your weekly horoscope. And that you don't want to miss. Let's get started.

Jessica:            Zoe, welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about today?

Zoe:                 So, when I wrote to you on a whim, my question was that I am always struggling with feeling kind of like I don't belong in a place. And so, right now, the context is that I'm an immigrant in the U.S., cannot really go back home to where I come from because of political issues, and so it seems like, oh, the out of place issue is really obvious. But then my question is that, even before all of these things happened, before I immigrated, I still always feel that way, even in my family, even sometimes like I felt like I tried to find a sense of belonging in my long-term romantic relationship, feeling a little bit uneasy, like I should feel more comfortable and at ease, but I'm not.

Jessica:            And are you in a relationship currently?

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. And do you have that feeling currently in the relationship?

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. So, first of all, let me just share your birth data. You were born December 2nd, 1989, 4:48 p.m., Hong Kong.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. I was really drawn to your question because you referenced not feeling a sense of belonging. And I was like, "What does that mean?" So I wanted to ask you to a little bit unpack, what do you really mean when you say that?

Zoe:                 I think I always think that I'm supposed to feel more at ease in certain contexts. So, for example, I think the family one⁠—I know lots of people have family issues, right? But the dominant narrative, or like the dream, it's like when you hang out with your family⁠—and I see some of my friends have that. You say, "Oh, nice," and you feel this warm and cozy feeling, or in other kinds of relationships, you're supposed to feel this way. But I just always struggle with getting there.

                        And so, more broadly in life, I think as a woman of color in often predominantly white spaces, that of course is really heightened. But I'm kind of not even talking about that. It's like in moments where I'm supposed to feel easy and comfortable, but I'm still not.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. And when did you move to the U.S.?

Zoe:                 Oh, when I was 17.

Jessica:            Okay. So you had this feeling even when you were in Hong Kong⁠—

Zoe:                 Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            ⁠—where it was not at all about people being different or whatever? Okay.

Zoe:                 Correct. Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. There's so many levels that I want to try to address this on. So the first thing that I want to say is you have a stellium in Capricorn. You've got Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn all sitting on top of each other and Venus and the Moon sitting on top of each other. And all of that Capricorn can make you feel existentially aware of your own isolation from others. Does that make sense?

Zoe:                 Yes. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Capricorn governs a bunch of things in astrology, but one of them is your epidermis, the organ of your skin all around your body. It also governs your bones. In other words, it's the things that hold you separate and together. Does that make sense?

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Like separate from other people, and it holds you together. Your skin and your bones really do a lot of good work for your guts and your weird liquid stuff. Right?

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So there's a way that all of this Capricorn stuff⁠—it reinforces how you are separate in a very existential way, which can lead to feelings of isolation, loneliness, feelings of, "It's kind of down to me. I gotta figure my shit out for me." That makes sense, right?

Zoe:                 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Because a lot of times, when people reach out about feeling like they're born in the wrong time, feeling like they're born in the wrong body, I really immediately think about Neptune. And you do have an interesting Neptune placement, which we will talk about in a moment. But you didn't exactly frame it that way. It's more about belonging.

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so this is where I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you belong to yourself?

Zoe:                 I think that's something that I've been grappling with the last few months. Only in the last few months, I've had this strange awakening that, like, "Oh, I think all my parts are coming back to me." And years ago, you know, I'm going around life totally fine, but always super anxious. And now that I was like, "Oh, I'm starting to collect these parts that were inside but somehow was suppressed," I feel much more confident. So I think I only started recently to feel like I belong to myself.

Jessica:            Yeah. And have you experienced⁠—and there's no right or wrong answer, but have you experienced in these couple of months⁠—and this is all very tentative and very new in your human experience, but have you experienced, now that you're feeling a sense of belonging to yourself a little more, any difference in the feelings of not belonging with others? Or is it kind of two separate things, apples and oranges?

Zoe:                 I mean, it shakes things up a lot because I think, again, I used to feel like I need to belong to somebody else, to something else. And then, now, again, it's making me question more the primary relationship in my life. It's like, "Oh, but now that I can belong to myself, what does this relationship mean? What is at the core of them? And how do I want them to change?"

Jessica:            Yep. Okay. We're getting at it. We're getting at it. So let me say a couple things. The first is you are post-Saturn Return. So, in 2024, transiting Saturn will form a sextile to your birth chart Saturn. And the Saturn sextile to Saturn is a really important transit in the large arc of the Saturn Return cycle. So you're post-Saturn Return. Now you're an adult from the perspective of astrology. And Saturn forms a sextile to Saturn, which supports us in embodying all of the work that we struggled to in the Saturn Return. So it's quickly coming for you.

And you're very lucky in that you have an Ascendant or Rising sign at 28 degrees of Taurus, so Pluto is currently forming a trine to your Ascendant, which is a transit that really empowers you to go deep into your identity and to work through things that are painful, but to do it in a way where you feel empowered, where you feel like, "Oh, I'm making progress. Oh shit. This is clicking." And that might even mean having a chance encounter with someone that's just like⁠—it clicks something; it affirms something for you. That's what this Pluto trine to the Ascendant can do.

So going through this Pluto transit as you build towards your Saturn sextile to Saturn⁠—what I think is really happening is you are figuring out how to belong to yourself, and not just figuring out how to belong to yourself, but figuring out that it's actually okay that that's actually something you need to do because here's something complicated: you have this Moon/Venus conjunction, and this is a lovely aspect. Have you ever read any books that describe what the Moon/Venus conjunction is?

Zoe:     No.

Jessica:            It's like sunshine and lollipops. That's what you're going to read. It's just like people like you. It gives you a very agreeable nature. It makes it so that you can kind of just get on well with others; you're good at meeting people's needs, all that kind of good stuff. It also makes you really, really want to be liked and approved of by others.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            And it generally⁠—not always, but it generally coincides with having a parent who prized being very likable and being easygoing and not causing waves. They prized that really highly for you. Did you have that experience?

Zoe:                 I think, on the surface, yes. But I think that particular parent figure I'm thinking of, in a private life, not on the surface, like wanting approval and recognition⁠—yeah, [crosstalk].

Jessica:            In the world, but not at home.

Zoe:                 Yes. Correct. Correct.

Jessica:            And this is very important because what this models, in a way, is that when you leave the comfort and the safety of home, you have to prepare yourself for the consumption of others. You have to belong to others. And that's the way to belong to yourself, and that's what empowers you to be able to do whatever the hell you want at home. Yeah. Okay. Now we're seeing it. Right.

Zoe:                 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see it. Yeah.

Jessica:            This is one of these things in your birth chart, the Moon/Venus conjunction in Capricorn, that is beautiful. It is a lovely aspect. But because it is so beautiful and it is so lovely and it is so high-functioning in the world, what happens is we tend to lean on it too much, and then it creates this kind of maladjusted relationship to it where, because you're so good at being liked by others, because you're so good at getting along, it starts to become an oversized part of your personality, which brings you further and further from belonging to yourself.

Zoe:                 Yeah, because it can get things done.

Jessica:            Correct.

Zoe:                 And so a big part of me is like, "Okay. So far, it's been working. So, if I drop this, then what on earth is going to happen?"

Jessica:            Correct. And on top of it, Capricorn is a zodiac sign⁠—and a lot of people don't get this about Capricorn, but I feel like your generation of millennials really just struggles with this, is that Capricorn wants to be approved of at all costs. So people are like, "Oh, Capricorn is curmudgeony." Sure. But one of the core drives of Capricorn energies is to be approved of. So you have this Saturnian drive to be approved of. "I'm going to be a good person. I'm going to do the right thing. I'm going to be beyond reproach."

And then you have that fucking Venus component, which is just like, "And it's really important that people like me and that they're comfortable with me." And so it makes sense that you would be⁠—and you haven't shared this, but I'm going to make an assumption based on your birth chart⁠—you would be a really high-functioning adult who is very good at navigating people and things, and then you go home and you're like, "Am I even empty? Am I full? What am I? Where am I?"

Zoe:     Yeah. On paper, everything is so fine and good.

Jessica:            Yes.

Zoe:                 Yeah. And so, then, sometimes then I start to question, "Oh, but on paper, everything is so good. So maybe I should just stop that part of my brain from always trying to poke at, 'Something is not quite right.'"

Jessica:            So let me reframe it in more Capricorn terms. You say to yourself, "On paper, everything's so good, so I should suck it up. I should stop being needy. I should stop having these feelings. I should suck it up." Right?

Zoe:                 Yeah, because it looks good already. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Correct. So this is where⁠—and this is a really very human thing, but I think it's something that this is where it becomes really important to identify that bullying yourself to suck it up⁠—that's a childhood trauma pattern. You know where you got those messages, right?

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            So the other thing is, because something looks good on paper does not mean that it feels good. And because something is good on paper, sometimes that means that's your coping mechanism. "I make things look okay. Nobody's worried about me. Everyone thinks I got this." And that makes you feel safer. But if you rest on that surface thing, that paper-thin thing, then what ends up happening is you don't sit with your own discomfort around, "Okay. So I've made everyone feel better. I am technically doing well. And I still feel these feelings. Now I need to investigate these feelings."

                        And this brings me to something else. What do you do for living?

Zoe:                 I'm a professor.

Jessica:            You're a professor. Okay. Do you like teaching?

Zoe:                 I do. I actually just came from teaching, and it's like coming off of a really high from a really good class. Yeah.

Jessica:            Excellent. Okay. Good. So there's a lot of things in your chart the point towards teaching. You've got Jupiter, and it sits right opposite your Uranus, your Neptune, and your Saturn. And Jupiter is like the higher learning and higher education. So you really love taking complex topics that are like⁠—do you teach philosophy or something that's heady and amorphous and all that kind of stuff?

Zoe:                 Yeah. I teach rhetoric, so yeah.

Jessica:            Rhetoric. Yeah.

Zoe:                 A lot of those questions with no answers.

Jessica:            Correct. Yes. That's exactly⁠—yeah. Check. You are doing what you were called to do. It is within your nature. Also, you're a Sagittarius. You have Mercury in Sagittarius. So great. Wonderful. You're doing what you feel called to do. Here's the only trouble in the context of this conversation. You go to work, and you perform intelligence. You perform understanding. You perform identity, which is your damn job. We're not criticizing. That's the job. You can't teach and be like, "I'm going to be completely myself all the time." That makes teaching about you. You'd be a terrible teacher, right?

                        So you're doing all these things. You found a really healthy and appropriate way to do what you're very comfortable with: being likable, being palatable, sharing big ideas, inspiring people, and performing competency. This is where things get complex because what you've done is created a life that is healthy and appropriate, and you're using your skills wisely and well. We don't want to change any of that. We want to validate all of that.

                        But then, when you come home⁠—and this will become more intensely true the older you get or the longer you do this⁠—the more effort you have to put into filling the space between what you're doing at work, which is really appropriate for at work but it's not appropriate at home⁠—so you get all these accolades for doing this stuff that is the right stuff to do at work. But then, when you're home, when you're with your partner, when you're with your bestie, when you're alone, it's like you have to experience the contrast. Does that make sense, what I mean by the contrast?

Zoe:                 That's something that I'm now grappling with.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Zoe:                 That's why it's just new and unsettling.

Jessica:            Yeah. It is new and unsettling. So let me just give a couple more words to this idea of contrast because whether or not we have a trauma history, but certainly extra if we have a trauma history, which⁠—I mean, I'll give you points for trauma history if you're in the market for them. When we experience high-functioning parts of ourselves and get, again, validation and we get reinforcement for them, but then we try to use those skills inappropriately⁠—kind of like we're talking about with you, right? When you do this in your personal life, it just leads to you feeling lonely and isolated and like you don't belong because you're abandoning belonging to yourself.

So now we are in the contrast. You're like, "Okay. There's these parts of me that are so mature and so well adjusted, and then there's these other parts of me that are not as well adjusted and not as mature and don't know what to do." And that contrast is fucked up. It feels like shit because you're operating like tens across the board, and then you get home, and you're like, "Oh, I got a five? Was that a four? What did I do?" Does that make sense, what I'm talking about?

Zoe:                 Yeah. But I often felt like⁠—I used to think that I would not be able to live past 30 because I'm so clumsy and suck at other parts of my life that's not work, that I'm going to get in some kind of freak accident and die.

Jessica:            Fascinating. That's wild. Don't the people in your family live pretty long?

Zoe:                 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They do.

Jessica:            Yeah. And aren't there other people who are clumsy and accident-prone in your family?

Zoe:                 Oh yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Yep. Mm-hmm. Sorry about that. I don't think you're out early. I mean, you've already crossed 30, but I don't think you're going to get out early. Sorry about that. I think you're accident-prone, but it's mainly when you're not in the moment. It's when your head is all over the place, right?

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Here's the thing. It's uncomfortable to be in your skin when you experience so much uncertainty, and that's your work, is to be in the uncertainty and to not abandon yourself, understanding that your most effective and highly validated method of abandoning yourself is focusing on the other person.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm. Yes. Oh, that is very true. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's the problem here. It is very hard to break the habit of being likable and digestible to others because it really, really works and it makes everyone feel good, except for you. I mean, it makes you feel good in the moment, and then it makes you feel more empty and more the sense of distance between you and the other people in your life.

Zoe:                 Yeah, because I feel that nobody really knows me⁠—

Jessica:            Correct.

Zoe:                 ⁠—because if I don't even know who I am, then how can other people know?

Jessica:            Right. And so this brings us to a couple things. The first is you got a damn stellium in Capricorn. The other one is you've got a Mars/Pluto conjunction in Scorpio. Your Moon/Venus conjunction, and also the fact that you got a couple planets in Sagittarius, make you⁠—and also, I should add, your Taurus Rising⁠—make you want to be nice. They make you want to be fun. They make you want to be not high maintenance⁠—"I am cool. I can roll with this. I'm adaptable," all this kind of good stuff.

                        But you've got fucking five planets in Capricorn, which means you can absolutely get bogged down in heaviness. You are particularly sensitive to the weight of the world, and you can have a feeling of weightiness within your psyche, within your heart, that other people are going to think is a bummer. There's a reason why I call Saturn the boner killer. And I think that with all of this Capricorn, there is definitely a meaningful part of your nature that is like, "What's the point? Everything's heavy. I don't have to be in a good mood. What's to be in a good mood? There's nothing positive. Everything's heavy. Everything's bad. Where are we going?" Obviously, where are we going is bad.

                        Then, on top of it, you have a Mars/Pluto conjunction in Scorpio, and it's in your sixth house. So Mars is related to embodiment and your body, and the six house is also related to your body. So, when you really get in your body and you're not doing that people-pleasing and you're not performing all of your best qualities, but when you're really in your body, you experience your petty feelings. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Your petty feelings, your resentments, your terrors, your rage, all the shit that you're not supposed to feel, according to society. And it's in the body.

                        So what do you do when you experience that viscerally? You do what every human does. You're like, "I'm out. No. This is terrible." So it's like the depressive Capricorn vibes and then the most Scorpionic vibes you could possibly have. Pluto/Mars conjunction in Scorpio? OMG, that is so freaking Scorpio. So it really gives you this depth, this incredible depth that if we go back to how well adjusted your life is⁠—well, you're not just studying rhetoric; you're teaching rhetoric. So you're getting into ethical and philosophical inquiry deeply. You're hanging out in the dirt with concepts. And this is so healthy for you.

                        But when you're in the emotions of those things⁠—not the high-level Sagittarian concepts⁠, right? When you're in the emotions, this is where you feel that alienation and that lack of belonging to others, to self, to anything intensely. And I want to say, from my perspective, this is simply⁠ like— it's like a big, fat layer, but it's only one layer of what exists. It's just that I don't know that you've been able to sit with that layer long enough to get past that layer. Does that make sense?

Zoe:                 Yes. So I think that's what is going on recently, is that I'm starting to pick at this and then say, "Okay." But the things that are coming out, it's causing this potential upheaval in my otherwise really good-on-paper life.

Jessica:            Correct. Okay. Good. We're here already. Excellent. Okay. So we're going to get into whatever situations are really up for you around this, but I want to say this. Whenever we start to belong to ourselves, when we identify where we begin and end and our boundaries, when we start figuring out who we really fucking are and showing up as that and having the needs of that, inevitably, for every person on the planet, that will cost you relationships. That will cost you ideas. It'll cost you identities. And it does so because that is a massive change that you're instigating. Right?

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And I think it's really important to acknowledge that this is one of the biggest reasons why most people don't choose to change over the course of life, because if you're walking around town every day and being like, "I have a daisy in my lapel because I think daises are the nicest flower in the world," and then one day, you tell all of your besties, "Actually, I don't really like daisies. I'm really interested in thorny roses. That's all I really want is thorny roses"⁠—well, okay. Well, some people are going to be like, "But I liked you because I also like daisies, and this was a thing that we identified with. I hate thorny roses."

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            What I'm getting at is two parts. One is this is par for the course, and the other is, to take a bigger-picture perspective, sometimes when people are upset that we have changed, what we do is we focus on how it makes us feel and what it means about us. And it's like, "I'm trying to have this boundary, and I'm trying to heal." Okay. Yes. But also, if you take a bigger-picture view, you can have some empathy for, "I told them I like daisies. I actually don't like daisies. And I need to give them ample space to process not that I was lying, because I wasn't lying, but that I told them I like daisies and they liked me because I like daisies. And I need to give them as much space as I've taken," because you've taken better part of your lifetime to start to come into these things.

                        And so giving people that are close enough to us time⁠—not a couple hours, not a couple days, unless it's a really light relationship, but actual time⁠—to understand the change, I think, can really help you to not personalize the way people react initially. So, that said, what relationship or situation should we start with?

Zoe:                 Still, I have been with my current partner for seven years, and things are great.

Jessica:            Congratulations.

Zoe:                 Yeah. Thanks. But then it's like, just recently, then when I start to belong more to myself, that I start to think about, "Oh. What is the core of this relationship?" So we also recently decided to, like a few months ago, open up the relationship. So it kind of generated this question that's like, you know, if the core of it is not just that of our routine of owning a house together, of watching TV at this given time, then what is the core?

                        And so it's like, when I started to ask these questions, I'm starting to think that, oh, maybe I actually really want a partner who also is into these heady questions of looking at the world and people with wonder and openness. But before, I thought, "You know what? I'm willing to let that go if the stability and security, materially speaking, on the surface are really good." So now I'm kind of like, "Okay, but if I am not as okay about it, then what does this mean?"

Jessica:            That's really deep. Okay. There's a lot of pieces to this, right? One is you opened up your relationship. Was this for the first time?

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. And are there any rules to that?

Zoe:                 There are no particular hard boundaries about, like, oh, no feelings allowed, or anything like that. It was really just we are having ongoing conversation, but we do see each other as life partners. Yeah.

Jessica:            So there's no, like, you have to have safer sex with people if you hook up with them, or, "You have to tell me"⁠—

Zoe:                 Oh yeah. For sure. Yes.

Jessica:            You've verbalized that?

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Okay.

Zoe:                 So we have, definitely, safer sex, talk a lot about testing schedules, that kind of thing. And also, we have conversations about what kind of connections we're developing for folks. And so we definitely continue to have those dialogues. It is not a "don't ask, don't tell" kind of arrangement.

Jessica:            Okay. It's a "sharing is caring" situation.

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Great, great, great. That's way more your speed. I'm glad to hear it. I'm also really glad to hear you've talked about safer sex because so many people do not, and I always think that seems like the lowest hanging fruit here.

Zoe:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Great. Happy to hear it. I'm going to have you state your full name out loud and then his.

Zoe:                 So my full name is [redacted], and then his full name is [redacted].

Jessica:            Did you give me your whole name?

Zoe:                 I did.

Jessica:            Can you leave out the English?

Zoe:                 [redacted]

Jessica:            Look at you. You pulled a fast one on yourself, a little bit of a Sagittarian move if I've ever seen one. You were like, "Okay. I'm starting to make this massive progress in my relationship to myself and understand myself, and it's starting to kind of trigger stuff in my gut and in my chest about my partner." And then was it your idea to open up the relationship?

Zoe:                 At first, it is, but then he kind of took more steps recently.

Jessica:            Yeah. I thought at first it was. Again, I'm going to call this a very Sagittarian move here. You were just like, "Everything is changing all at once. I know. I'll tell my partner that we should just rip down the walls of our house and see what it feels like to live without walls." And this is a move that you pull in your life where you're just like, "I'm on the brink of figuring something out, and now I'm going to do everything all at once."

Zoe:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. So I want to say, next time you have that idea, wait on it. Give it a couple months because now it's really hard to track what's inherent to you, what's inherent to the two of you as a team, and what's a complication of this brand-new, unboundaried agreement the two of you have made. And I say kind of unboundaried because it is, and also, yeah, you're a fucking Sagittarius, but you got five planets in Capricorn. What are you doing without boundaries? You know what I mean?

Having a sense of, "These are the walls," is really important. And I think it's not important for you intellectually, and it's not important to you philosophically. It's important to you emotionally. So, again, we have this way that you've unintentionally deemphasized your own emotional needs for your ability to have a largesse of perspective. Ideologically, be a vegan. Be poly. Yes. But is that for everyone all the time? No.

And this is one of those moments where I'm looking at this and I'm like⁠—okay. Let me just tell you what I see when I look at this energetically for you. There's this large landscape, and you are facing it. And within it, there are tunnels. And there's tunnels, and when you look through these tunnels of light, you're like, "Fuck yeah, I want this. I want to be able to flirt with these people. I want to be able to explore what happens. Fuck yeah. That tunnel is delicious. It's solitude. It's a lack of pressure and expectation. Now I can appreciate my partner a little more because things are less expected and less predictable."

So there's all of these things, but there's all this kind of heavy, dark space all around it because it's not the most nurturing thing you could have done. And I don't mean you've made a bad choice. I mean the way you've made the choice that you made, which may be great or not⁠—I'm not actually considering that. But the way you've made the choice isn't as nurturing for your emotional needs and nature as it could be.

Zoe:                 Yeah. I think, initially, yes. I definitely have gone on to making decisions because philosophically, politically, I want that big picture. So then I push down and say, "Oh, but I'm feeling a little iffy about this." And then, "Nope. Keep on going." And then⁠—but all that's happened then leads me down the path of trying to figure out, "Oh, maybe I never belonged to myself." So then it became kind of not about the relationship anymore. But of course, you still have to deal with the main person in my life.

Jessica:            But it is about your relationship. It's that you're having self-discovery⁠—hold on. I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing, and you tell me if this feels right or wrong or if you're just not sure. I'm just going to be very blunt. Are you comfortable with that?

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. I think that, again, you are making massive progress figuring all this stuff out about yourself, and through that process, you become less certain about your partner and your partnership. And instead of sitting with it, again, you just tore down all the walls. And in a way⁠—I don't think you did this consciously, but I think you set it up to disappoint you so you could get out, even though you're not sure you want to get out.

                        And this is where it is really important to be able to acknowledge that big ideas⁠—ideals, philosophies, rhetoric, whatever you want to call it⁠—big ideas are essential and important to who and what you are. But if you organize your life around those big ideas without having a balance between sitting with how you feel inside when you're present with those realities, it's going to lead you kind of like, "Oh my God. I'm so close to myself, now I'm away from myself," because we are not ideas and concepts and ideals. I mean, that's a part of what we are, but really, at the end of the day, it is how we feel, how we feel in our hearts, we feel in our meat suits, that kind of stuff.

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Are you looking to level up your skills or expand your self-knowledge with astrology? If so, explore the classes on my website, where you can gain the expertise and also perspective that you seek with various topics, from manifestation to the twelfth house to outer planets and love or exploring mental health with astrology. There are so many classes that I have on the Shop page of my website. Just visit lovelanyadoo.com/shop⁠—that's lovelanyadoo.com/shop⁠—and learn with me today.

We all know how important it is to continue to mask in public indoor spaces, and that's why I want to tell you about projectN95.org. Their nonprofit mission is to protect communities and those who live and work in them by providing equitable access to resources that keep people safe through COVID-19 and beyond. If you're unable to afford high-quality respiratory protection, Project N95 may be able to help. And if you can afford to buy yourself high-quality masks, this is a great place to buy them. Visit project95.org to keep yourself and your community safe.

School boards and lawmakers around the country are banning and challenging books at a pace not seen since the 1980s. The American Library Association tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2021. And librarians have even been threatened with criminal charges and jail time in some places in this country for lending out challenged books. You can contact your representatives about this issue by emailing, calling, or tweeting at them. And above all else, buy banned and challenged books. Support the important work of authors who are being banned or challenged, and in the process, support independent bookstores. My favorite bookstore, Marcus Books, is the oldest independent Black-owned bookstore in the country and has a banned and challenged book list on their website. You can go to marcusbooks.com to see this list and to shop, or visit whatever independent bookstore that you love. Support banned and challenged books and authors today.

Jessica:            This guy⁠—say his name again.

Zoe:     [redacted]

Jessica:            You said, "This is an idea. This is a concept. Let's do this ideal. Let's do this concept." And he really wasn't sure, but you really unpacked it for him and you sold him on it. And now he's like, "Okay. Let's do this," and he's a practitioner of this idea now. And that is not what you meant, it turns out. And I'm not saying, again, it was an error, but⁠—I keep on seeing him with bicycles. Does he ride a bicycle?

Zoe:                 Used to.

Jessica:            He used to. Okay. I was like, "Am I seeing something literal? Am I seeing a metaphor?" But I feel like some people have lots of ideas about the importance of bicycles in society from an environmental standpoint, from all these standpoints, whereas he's the kind of person who's just going to keep on working on his bike. He's just working on his bike. Does that make sense to you about who he is? Does that metaphor make sense?

Zoe:                 So I'm very big picture, out there, and he's just in the nitty-gritty, "What are we going to do?" Yep.

Jessica:            Yes. Yep. And so you said, "Go do whatever you want. Here are the two little rules." And he's like, "That's what I'm doing now." And I don't think the two of you are doing it for the same reasons. I don't think you have the same emotional or physical relationship to these concepts. And so, again, I come back to you were doing this really good experiment of living with yourself and getting to know yourself, and then you muddied the experiment by throwing in all of these mitigating factors that are really hard to track.

Zoe:                 Yes, because now suddenly it became very heady. And for him, it was just like, "Logistically, materially, we're just carrying out what we talked about."

Jessica:            Yep. Mm-hmm.

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So do you have a specific question, or do you just want me to rattle off?

Zoe:                 I think, right now, I feel like he and I feel like we're at an impasse.

Jessica:            Of whether or not to stay together?

Zoe:                 Correct. Yeah. And so I don't really know how to sort myself out and then also figure out whether this is a partnership that will continue to have both of us grow together.

Jessica:            Yeah. Here's my advice, and I don't think you're going to love it. And you live together, right?

Zoe:                 Yes, we do.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So close the relationship back up. Again, I'm not saying I think this is a bad idea. I think the timing is sus. You needed to get to this place where the two of you are actually talking about whether or not this is going to work for the next seven years or the next 20 years. This is where you needed to get to. You do not need to be hooking up with other people to have that conversation. In fact, that complicates the conversation. It muddies the conversation.

                        And this is the part where I just was like, "Okay, you don't want to hear this," because, again, you were the cheerleader for this fucking idea. You know what I mean? And, one, I am recommending that you have a conversation with him where you make an agreement to pull that out so that you can really focus on figuring out how you feel and whether or not things aren't working or you have simply done what all humans do at around the seven-year mark. It's called a seven-year itch. I don't know if you've heard of it. This is a thing. It's a Saturn cycle, seven years.

                        So it's, have you simply fallen into a rut and routine that, with intention and love, you could change and would both be better for it? Or have you fallen into a rut and routine that indicates that you've done all you can do together in a healthy way? And you cannot know that without being really present with each other, which requires being really present with yourselves as individuals, which you're having a hard time doing and, honestly, I think he's having a hard time doing, although I don't think he would necessarily agree with that. But I think he's having a hard time doing that as well.

                        And again, having the option to flirt with other people, hook up with other people, cultivate intimacies with other people is going to take you both away from uncomfortable work of really figuring this out as a team because you're still a team. Whether or not you're the highest functioning team in the world is a different conversation. But you're still a team. And do you still like having sex with him?

Zoe:                 Yes. So, right now, neither of us are seeing other people.

Jessica:            Great.

Zoe:                 We just did not have the conversation about formally closing it back up. But neither of us is actively searching for anything. But then there's always a part of me that do wonder how things would have turned out if I had given a previous relationship longer, if I had not broken up with this person⁠—

Jessica:            Correct.

Zoe:                 ⁠—that I dated years ago, longer. But then, at the same time, I'm also like I don't want to just jump out of this only to check somebody else out, because that's unfair to everyone involved⁠—

Jessica:            Correct.

Zoe:                 ⁠—and I also don't think I'll get an answer there.

Jessica:            I agree. The person from the past⁠—I'm not even going to look at them because I can tell you this really clearly is a distraction. You're trying to go back in time to figure out how you felt the way you felt when you were with that person.

Zoe:                 Uh-huh.

Jessica:            When you were with him, when it was working, there was a way that you were connected to yourself. You did belong to yourself. And you miss that part of you, and so you're seeking it in someone else again.

Zoe:                 I see.

Jessica:            So let me just say this. Your psyche is giving you a message, and you're a little misinterpreting it, from my perspective. You don't have to listen to me. I'm not the voice of your psyche or anything, but this is my take. You jumped out of the relationship too quick in the past, and now you're like, "Did I do the right thing?" And now, you're with this fucking guy. You opened up the relationship, and you're considering whether or not to go. Don't jump out too quick. You were with him for seven years. If it takes you a year to figure out whether or not you have a future, it's fucking worth it.

Zoe:                 Yeah. This is what I'm at right now, too. It's like I'm going to take at least a year.

Jessica:            I feel like it's worth the time. And I would also say⁠—I'm going to double down, and you do not have to take my advice. But I'm going to double down on closing the relationship back up because having this escape hatch is giving you a distraction from sitting with how you feel trapped with him sometimes. And you need to actually sit with that because I do not think he's trapping you. I think this is what comes up for you with people sometimes and with people that you're really close to.

                        And being able to really be present with the ways in which you feel trapped is going to either be the key to figuring out something about yourself and hopefully also something about the relationship⁠—but for as long as you have these beautiful⁠⁠—as I said, these tunnels into possibility, "I could flirt with someone else. I could hook up with someone else," it's distracting you from the reality.

                        And so put the walls back up on your damn house and tend to what's in the house. And then you can destroy the house if you want to. Then you can rebuild the house if you want to. Then you can take the walls down again. But it's a timing issue for me. It's not whether or not the two of you could do nonmonogamy or polyamory. I think it's absolutely very possible if the two of you were in a really stable place of loving each other and wanting each other and liking each other, but that's not really where the two of you are. You're stuck.

Zoe:                 Yeah. So I thought we were there before, until all of these things happened.

Jessica:            You thought you were where before?

Zoe:                 I thought we were good. We know each other. We know that we're committed to each other. We can go the long haul and all that.

Jessica:            So you knew that until you opened up the relationship? No.

Zoe:                 And then I have all these self-discoveries.

Jessica:            Okay. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. Okay. Okay. Well, this is how you learned it. Again, I think you've opened up the relationship to get to this spot. And now, again, I would say there's something that's starting to emerge in our conversation where you're a little bit confusing the message with the meaning. You're confusing the way you got to figure it out with the thing itself.

                        So, in other words, let's go back to that ex-boyfriend. You had this time where you really belonged to yourself when you were with him, and so you associate him with that, when what it was was a combination of where you were at in your life, feeling loved⁠—because you did feel loved by him at that time⁠—and just being right with yourself in a particular way.

                        And you're giving him power and authority. You're giving him, kind of, props for how you felt in your skin when you happened to be with him. But I'm saying it's not because of him. It was because of you, and plus, plus, plus, but it was because of you. I think some of that is what's happening with your current partner. The two of you are⁠—you have, again, on paper, a perfect relationship. Everything's [crosstalk]⁠—

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            You guys are great. I mean, my guess is you're really great at dinner parties together.

Zoe:                 Uh-huh.

Jessica:            You're the couple everyone wants to invite because you're chill. You're not a bummer. You're not too couply, but you really clearly are friends with each other and respect each other. You guys are a great couple. But what's happening on a deeper emotional level? That's really the question. And I, when I look at it energetically, do not see clearly whether this is a problem that you are both having with your individual selves and so it's up in the relationship, inevitably, or if it's a problem in the relationship.

                        And I kind of have the sense that it's the first, that this is a place you both get to in relationships eventually because it's a problem you have with yourselves as individuals. So it's inevitably come up. And for me, that's the best kind of problem you can ever have in a relationship because the problem you have with yourself that you need to work with and come into healing and alignment with yourself⁠—if that's the problem you have in your relationship, then the problem of the relationship is helping you to heal, whether you stay together or you break up.

Zoe:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, as you're both evolving and changing⁠—or not⁠—the question will become, do you work together as you figure this out, or, again, is this, "I bid you adieu; this is the end"? I don't think that there's a right or a wrong answer. But I do think that this is a great relationship to work on and work for because the things that are primarily wrong with it are really just what's wrong with you and what's wrong with him.

Zoe:                 Uh-huh. I see what you're saying, and not wrong as in when we come together, something is wrong.

Jessica:            Correct. Right. And we've all been around couples and we've all been part of couples where it's like, "When we come together, it's wrong." But that is not the situation here. Again, this is part of why I think you unconsciously threw in a Molotov cocktail into the mix, because you're just like, "If we create some drama, then we'll find something wrong." And again, I bring us back to, when you come home from work or you come home from socializing or whatever it is that you do with other people or in the world, and you really figure out how to come into your body, there is a restlessness and an uncomfortability at best.

Zoe:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And that requires some measure of isolation or seclusion or alone time. And if you sit with those feelings and you don't distract from those feelings, then you could come to your partner, and you would be a heavier version of you than he's used to.

Zoe:                 Yes. That is⁠—yes. Exactly, so that's your metaphor earlier about daisies and thorny roses because I felt like, "Oh, then you won't like me anymore."

Jessica:            Correct. And the truth is he might not. And if he doesn't, that means you two aren't growing in the same direction. And it may be that he is uncomfortable because it's completely new and feels out of the blue for him, whereas you've been working internally on this for the whole time he's known you. But again, every time you make progress, what do you do? Your survival mechanisms are like, "Double down. Be nicer. Be lighter. Be funnier. Laugh more at his jokes. Put on a comedy."

                        And so he may not like it for a period of time, and that might not affect things in the big picture, or it may affect things in the big picture. The truth is that you might not like it. Who fucking likes feeling heavy? Nobody.

Zoe:                 Right. Right.

Jessica:            You know what I mean?

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Let's not even focus on whether or not he likes it. Part of why your psyche is saying, "He won't like me," is because you may not like you completely, right?

Zoe:                 Uh-huh. Yeah.

Jessica:            You don't want to be around a bummer, right? So okay. Sit with all of that and still honor how you feel. That's the work. And if the two of you turn out to be compatible through this, yeah, then you're going to spend your fucking lives together. Sure.

Zoe:                 Yeah. That's why I felt like if I can go through this and we can sort it out, then yeah.

Jessica:            Then you're just like, well, what can't you do? Part of the struggle here is that the problem isn't with him. The problem that you have is with you.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Look at him. He is really accustomed to you keeping everything⁠—you keep everything really chill. You set the tone, and you maintain the tone. And he relies on you for that. I think most people in your life rely on you for that.

Zoe:                 I provide a structure and a script that you just follow. Yes.

Jessica:            Yep. Yep. Capricorn, Capricorn, Capricorn.

Zoe:                 But right now, I don't want to do it anymore.

Jessica:            Correct. And as that occurs, not only are you showing up as more yourself, but you're asking other people to show up. No one is good at that all the time, and no one is good at that when they're all of a sudden destabilized because we go to a daisy field. We go to a daisy field. Seven years pass. We go to a daisy field, and all of a sudden, it's brambles. It's triggering. It's really triggering for people. It's disorienting for people.

                        And what will happen with this period of change, of disorientation for you and for others, is you will feel that people don't like you because even though that may not be the case, everything you do is to get people to relax around you and to feel held around you and to feel fine around you. So you're not doing that anymore; whatever they're feeling will be so different, so you're going to feel like they don't like you. And you need to tolerate that. You need to let people have their own fucking feelings and not manage other people's feelings as a way to make yourself feel more safe.

Zoe:                 Aha. Yeah. Yeah. That is really hard because I always want to feel safe, like if people like me, then that means they won't hurt me.

Jessica:            Correct. Who needs to hurt you when you're doing such a good job of hurting yourself? I mean, it's the million-dollar question, right? This is a very post-Saturn Return crisis you're in because you're realizing this well-adjusted coping mechanism that kept you afloat, that's had you survive your childhood and thrive as an adult, also the thing that you're doing⁠—keep yourself down and stop yourself from growing. It's a very adult, human crisis. And it's also very fucking personal and very hard.

                        And so I don't recommend that you do this at a 100 percent tilt and with all your relationships all at once. I recommend that you titrate; that you do it a little bit and notice what comes up. And then, if you want to just be like, "Okay. I really want to crack a joke. Okay. I really want to lighten the situation," stay with your emotions and try to wait a minute before you crack the joke. Sit in the emotions. Sit in the discomfort for an extra minute. If you can tolerate a minute after that, great. If you can't, cool.

                        Be like, "Hey. You look great in that outfit." Do the thing that you do that makes everyone feel comfortable and confident, and fix the situation. You don't have to do it at 100 percent, because you are not a theory. You are an emotional being, and emotions⁠—you can't power through your feelings if you want to feel better, if you want to be more emotionally integrated. So give yourself permission to move through this a little bit more slowly than you would prefer, okay?

Zoe:                 Oh. Okay. It's so hard.

Jessica:            I know. It's stupid. I'm giving you terrible advice. I know. It's awful and offensive. I'm so sorry.

Zoe:                 It's just I want to be done and figure it out, and then we move on.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's really hard to heal yourself with the same tool that you injured yourself with. That's what you're trying to do. You're like, "I found a blunt object. It gets the job done. How come I'm not fixing myself with the same blunt object?" What you want to remind yourself is that you're not being called upon to stop being diplomatic, to stop having good social skills, to stop being fun and light. It's that you're calling upon yourself to develop other parts of yourself in addition, to develop other skills and tools in addition.

                        So, if what you need is to smooth things over and get along with people, yeah, you're always going to have that skill. It's never going to go away.

Zoe:     Right.

Jessica:            But you also want a relationship with yourself and with other people that doesn't exist at the expense of a sense of belonging to yourself and that doesn't exist at the expense of a person really knowing you, so that when you feel a sense of belonging with them, it has roots. It has depth. It has meaning, because with your partner, he really does get you. And also, he doesn't know you. It's both. It's both.

Zoe:                 Right. Yes. Exactly, which is what boggles our mind.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes. Yes.

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So that is largely because you haven't let him know you.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm, because I don't even let myself know myself.

Jessica:            Correct. Correct. Okay. Good. This is good. That's where you start from. You don't start from anywhere else. You just start from here. This is where sharing with him, "I don't want to be a bummer. I don't want you to not like me. And I know that may sound silly, but that's kind of the shit that's in my head that stops me."

                        Let me look at this dude one more time. Say his full name.

Zoe:                 [redacted]

Jessica:            Do you know if one of his parents had depression or was just kind of a really heavy-handed person?

Zoe:                 I know both his parents. What do you mean by heavy-handed?

Jessica:            Was an emotionally intense person when he was growing up.

Zoe:                 I think so, but I don't think⁠—I wouldn't say particularly intense. But high-strung, maybe.

Jessica:            High-strung.

Zoe:                 Uh-huh.

Jessica:            Let me tell you why I'm asking. I do think that there's going to be some trigger for him from his own childhood where, if you really show up with your heaviness and with the messy emotions, that he has a trigger that he has to drop everything and tend to you because that's what happened in his childhood. Does that make sense?

Zoe:                 So he has said in therapy that he's very afraid of making me upset. And I was like, "What are you so scared of?" "I don't know. I just don't like⁠—I just cannot see you upset." So he'd rather not do certain things or hide a certain part of himself so that I won't be upset.

Jessica:            It's this fear that it's his job to manage it and control it and da, da, da, da, da. And so there's a way that there needs to be⁠—the two of you have had conversations around nonmonogamy or polyamory. I don't know what you were calling it. Have those conversations about when you show up and your mood isn't lovely. What do you need from him? What do you want from him? Give him some ground rules. Give him some expectations. And if you don't know what those are, that's fine. You know how to have an exploratory conversation.

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And you know how to share with him, "I don't know what I need, so I'm not expecting anything from you. And if I realize what I need through not getting it, I'm not going to be mad at you. I'm not going to punish you." Part of why you work so well for him is because there's not a whole lot of surprises with you in this way, right? You tend to be pretty even keeled and consistent, all that fucking Capricorn.

                        And so, when he sees that Pluto/Mars conjunction in Scorpio in you, when he sees past all this, "Everything's fine. I've got it under control," he is scared because he doesn't know what the fuck to do, and you have trained him exceptionally well to not look underneath the hood. Now you're changing the rules. You're changing in so many ways. And I do think he's going to have some triggers around this.

                        Again, those triggers are not because he doesn't like you or because he thinks heavy emotions are bad. It's because he doesn't know what's expected of him, and he's scared of failing.

Zoe:                 Oh, that's so apt. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. And it's really important that you remember that we all have our own trauma shit where it's like the other person's like, "That's the thing you're worried about?" You know what I mean? But that's the thing he's worried about. And so, having so much Cap in you, you're so good at being a good daddy to everyone in your life, showing up and giving them what they need. And it can create a feeling of, "Well, this person doesn't know how to be a daddy to you. You're the daddy." You know?

Zoe:                 Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so you want to just hold space for that. The two of you are going to learn how to share power, which means he needs to step into a little more, and you need to let go of a little more. And the reason why you have more power is because you do it to control things so that you don't get hurt and no one gets hurt, right?

Zoe:                 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Jessica:            You're not doing it because you're power hungry.

Zoe:                 Correct.

Jessica:            But he doesn't do it, not because he doesn't want to, but because he's really authentically frightened of making a mistake and the harm that that mistake would cause. He's a very good little white boy. Can I call him little even though he's so tall?

Zoe:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And so⁠—okay. So the two of you have growth to do of coming into yourselves and being able to stay present with complexity. Again, this is the growth you both need to do as individuals together or separate, so you might as well fucking do it together, whether or not it brings you to the end or to a new beginning.

Zoe:                 Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Now, we are coming up on our time together. So I want to say one more thing, which is, are you still in relationship with your mom?

Zoe:                 Yes, but it's always tenuous.

Jessica:            Yes. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because⁠—

Zoe:                 Yeah. I wondered why.

Jessica:            Yeah. You're like, "Why the fuck?"

Zoe:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Because, you damn Sagittarius, once you start to make real progress with your partner, I could see you being like, "Now I'm going to work on the core issue. I'm going to contact my mother, and I'm going to try to figure this thing out." No. No. Don't do everything all at once is what I'm trying to say. There is going to be time, if you decide to work on his relationship with your mom, to do so. It will be more effective if you work on belonging to you and you feel really different than you do now because then you won't be turning to her for any kind of⁠—she is who she is, and she is not going to change.

                        So you're going to change or you're not going to change. That's what's about to happen. You know what I mean? So I want to just validate don't pull any rip⁠—this is not the time to be blowing up your life further. This is the time to be turning inside and tending. And I do think you'll find your mom in there. I think you'll find core shit with your mom in there. And it's all about, again, you belonging to you, you honoring your relationship with yourself and in your body and in your heart. And you don't need to deal with her to do that work. I just really want to affirm that.

                        This pattern in your life that we've been talking about, I do think it comes out of your matrilineage.

Zoe:                 Yeah. I can see that.

Jessica:            Yeah. And whenever we're dealing with inherited ancestral stuff, we can deal with it psychologically. We can deal with it physically. We can deal with it emotionally. But there's also this part, this epigenetic part, that is in more than our brain; it's in our fucking fibers. And that just makes the work happen slower. That's all. It happens slower because it's not all cognitive. It's not all analytic. It's not all change your behavior, and everything follows. Some of it is just really giving yourselves space to evolve. And that⁠—it takes some time.

                        Another misconception about Capricorn, because Capricorn is related to time⁠—Capricorn is a very, very impatient sign. So most of your chart is in Sagittarius and Capricorn, two very impatient signs. So you are likely to be quite patient with other people that you care about but incredibly impatient with yourself. I want to say, okay, work with that. This is why I'm saying do what you can as you can. Don't add any new extra craziness. This stuff with your partner is really good work. It's just really good work.

Zoe:                 Okay. Yeah. Your advice is not blowing it up any further.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Zoe:                 It's hard to do, but I think I know that that is the correct answer.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. And listen. If you blow it up further in whatever way you have the opportunity, like sticks of dynamite or lighter fluid and a match⁠—whatever you do, learn from it. Right? You do your best; you learn from it. But blowing things up is a distraction. We can certainly see when we look at American politics how many fucking shitty people in politics set something on fire over here while they do something truly nefarious over there. They do that because it works, because it works.

                        And we, as individual humans trying our best, unconsciously do that same thing over and over again. We get fixated on this one thing that this one person said or this one relationship, and then we're really fixated over here while we're unconsciously abandoning ourselves. We're unconsciously feeding into old narratives or unhealthy behaviors or whatever it is. It's just part of the human condition, and it takes time to shift it because it's so unconscious and emotional. It's reflexive.

                        So be patient with yourself. This is not a big idea. This is something else.

Zoe:                 I see, because I've been thinking about it as a big idea.

Jessica:            Yeah, you have. Yeah, you have. I see you. But it's not. So I have this thing where I believe that ideas⁠—ideas, they can move so fast. And spiritual energy can move so fast. But emotions are like corgis with a cone on its head. Do you know what a corgi is, a tiny little dog that's low to the ground?

Zoe:                 Uh-huh.

Jessica:            Not the most graceful animal in the world. And with a cone on its head, it can't see side to side. They drag. They drag those cones, the poor little corgis. But emotions are so sweet. They're tender. You might want to snuggle them. But they're not graceful. They're slow, and they're lacking in perspectives because our emotions only have an internal perspective, which is based on past experiences as well as this moment. The mind is like, "My mind has been filled with concepts and ideas. It is agile. I learned all these things," but your inner corgi with a cone on its head really is just in the room you've put it in. You know what I mean? It's only been in the rooms of your house that it's been in, and it is not able to be agile because that's just not how the heart works.

                        And I don't think that's a bad thing. I mean, I don't enjoy it, Moon in Capricorn to Moon in Capricorn. I would prefer a quick, agile heart. But the truth of the matter is emotional maturity, emotional growth, emotional responsibility and healing, is all slower than mental versions of those things. And if you can give yourself the space to have that journey and to be gentle and kind to your inner corgi, life gets better. It really does. It doesn't get easier in the short term, but it gets easier in the long term.

Zoe:                 Yeah. I'll remember this corgi.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. I'm so glad. So we've done what we came here to do, didn't we?

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm. We did.

Jessica:            I feel like we did. I feel like we did.

Zoe:                 We did.

Jessica:            I want to say, just kind of as a summary, this feeling of not exactly belonging⁠—I imagine on some level it will evolve with you instead of completely go away. And that is because the human condition is one of separation. And that's because we're all in our individual bodies, and we're not connected by a neural network. We actually⁠—on a very high level, spiritual level, we absolutely are, which is where the pain of separation comes in.

                        And you are wired in a way where you are emotionally and energetically connected to that reality and to the kind of heavy, karmic existential grief that is inherent to the human condition. And while it's not awesome, I also think there's something very mature and associated about it if you can hold it in a way that doesn't require you to abandon yourself.

Zoe:                 Yes. And I think I will have to kind of dwell in it to see how it plays out.

Jessica:            Yeah. I don't think you're going to have an answer to how it'll play out for quite some time. And sorry. You're so good at coming to answers. This is not a question with an answer. This is a question that requires a reorientation, and that's like a whole other ball of wax. And so I actually think that you are going to reorient and do the work required to reorient in a way that actually really works for you.

                        And again, Capricorn Moon to Capricorn Moon for a moment here, that feeling that is at the core of your question that you originally wrote in, sometimes it's sad; sometimes it's bad. Okay. Fine. But there's also a way that it's just real, and if you don't personalize that feeling and you recognize it as just a reality of being a person, there's something very freeing in it.

Zoe:                 Yeah. I know what you're saying. Take myself out of it and just see it as a condition that we're all experiencing to some degree. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes. There's a freedom in that. And I think if you continue to find ways, cultivate ways, of belonging to yourself, you will experience more of that freedom because, yes, you've got five planets in Capricorn, but you have a Moon/Venus conjunction. You have Jupiter opposite your other planets. You have the ability to access these lights at the end of the tunnel. You have the ability to hold pretty heavy concepts quite lightly. It's just a practice to get there.

Zoe:                 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Zoe:                 That is helpful.

Jessica:            Yes. It is. It is. Yeah, which⁠—you know, I don't always in my readings⁠—I hope that's not my move. But I feel like it's valuable for me to do that with you because it looks like it's true.

Zoe:                 Oh. Thank you.

Jessica:            It's my pleasure, my darling.

Zoe:                 Yeah. It's just nice to hear. Thank you so much. This has been really good.