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:            Welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Guest:  Oh gosh. Okay. I'm going to read my letter that I wrote to you.

Jessica:            Yeah. You totally can. And also, I like that you called it a letter.

Guest:              "Dear Jessica, for as long as I remember, I've suffered some sort of body dysmorphia, specifically in my face. It's safe to say that is the root cause of most of my anxiety. I am an actress, so it's hard to escape the way I look when I have to see it literally all the time. It's manifested in a few ways. Sometimes it's anxiety about my acne and my constant skin picking, which I've consistently suffered from for 20 years. For a long time, it was about my nose, until I got my nose job two years ago. But truthfully, I still have anxiety about it.

                        "And most recently, it's been about my chubby cheeks. I've had a consultation with a plastic surgeon, and I can't decide if I want to go through with it. Some days, I feel so empowered that I am able to make decisions and change the way I look. And at the same time, I'm afraid of making too many changes and making myself feel and look even more deformed. It's mainly frustrating because I know it's holding me back in my career. I'm a performer who is dying to be seen, but when I finally get those opportunities, I self-sabotage. Is this a theme in my life that I will struggle with forever? How can I overcome this? Can I overcome this? Please help."

Jessica:            Oh. This is so human, and I'm so sorry. And so, before we get into the core of your question, you said that you sabotage professional opportunities.

Guest:              Yep.

Jessica:            How?

Guest:              I'll get an audition, and my skin will break out because of anxiety. I'm worried that my skin's not going to look perfect on the day⁠—I mean, now that we get to do a lot of online auditions, it's been a lot better because I have way more control over what they literally can see. I can adjust the lighting. I can shoot it on a day where my acne is cleared up a bit. So I have way more control.

                        But I sometimes will⁠—even if I book a job, I'll get on set, and I realize they're setting up the camera on the side of my face that I can't stand. And then I just start panicking, and I can't even think about the scene anymore. All I'm thinking about is how bad it's going to look, how I was really excited for this scene and this was going to be the big scene of the trailer, and now⁠—

Jessica:            I see.

Guest:              ⁠—I'm afraid to even see it.

Jessica:            So it's like anxiety is the self-sabotage.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Thank you for sharing/I'm sorry. I'm going to say I'm sorry a lot because this really does suck.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            And I'm also going to push you a little bit. When I say a little bit, it probably means a lot. So you⁠—and we've decided we're not sharing your birth info, but safe to say you have a Moon in the twelfth house. It's a Leo Moon, but it's a Moon in the twelfth house. And you also have three planets in Libra⁠—Sun, Mercury, and Mars. And you have a bunch of other things that are worth mentioning, but I'm just going to start with those two things to say that I'm a fucking Capricorn bulldozer. So, if at any point you're like, "I want to hear the information, but ouch. Give it to me slightly softer edges," you just tell me, okay?

Guest:              Hit me hard.

Jessica:            I mean, I will by nature, but also, it's okay if not. Okay? So I just wanted to start with that because this is such a tender, tender topic. But okay. I have to just start with this question. You mentioned deformed. Do you believe that you are deformed?

Guest:              There are days I look in the mirror and I'm like, "I'm gorgeous. Like, wow. I'm awesome." And then I'll see a picture, or I do a lot of social media as well, so I film myself a lot. And it'll be at an angle, and I'm like, "Literally, where is my jawbone? Why does my brow look so harsh at this angle, and my nose?" Even though my nose is awesome now, it's still like⁠—why does it—all of it together, I'm like, something about it⁠—it just feels wrong, and it's not⁠—it's just not, obviously, the quintessential, perfect little face, which⁠—I'm trying to let go of that. But I guess, in my industry, it's really hard when everyone's so pretty.

Jessica:            Yeah. So I'm going to just pull back and say, in those moments, do you feel that you're deformed?

Guest:              Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm glad that you're able to say it and, just as we begin, to just notice that when you're not in a state of activation, on a scale from one to ten, eight-plus, it's hard for you to identify with the word "deformed."

Guest:              Yes, because I'm in a good mood right now.

Jessica:            Right, because you're not there in that moment, right?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            But because you know objectively that, first of all, you actually have no physical deform⁠—you're not deformed, right?

Guest:              Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            So then want to pull even further back and ask you, do you know any people who are deformed?

Guest:              Currently, no.

Jessica:            Do you follow any people online, on social media, that have facial deformities?

Guest:              No.

Jessica:            I do. I have asymmetrical eyes. This is not about me, and I don't want you to feel any amount of guilt or bad feelings about this. This is not a time for guilt, so do not feel any guilt, because I could feel it. There was a really sharp spike. So, seriously, earnestly, don't worry. I hope you can tell from my energy.

Guest:              Okay.

Jessica:            Do not worry. There's a question I'm trying to get at where I'm trying to find out⁠—so you haven't clocked that you know anyone with a deformity, and you don't actively follow young women who have facial deformities. But you have a really negative belief about deformities. So, if you were deformed⁠—let's say your very worst fears are true, and your face is, on some level, deformed. What's it mean about you?

Guest:              It means that I can't work in my industry.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm going to push back on that because I'm looking at your birth chart, and I know this is not⁠—

Guest:              Oh, it means⁠—

Jessica:            This did not start because of your work. This is something else.

Guest:              I think I do have a really deep-seated thing of⁠—the way you look is in your power. It's powerful to be beautiful. And for whatever reason, my whole life, I've had this deep-rooted desire to be beautiful.

Jessica:            But what's it mean if you're ugly, if you're deformed? Because you're conflating deformed and ugly, right?

Guest:              Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            Which not everybody does. Most people do. But I want to hold space for I personally don't, but most people do. But let's stay with this. Let's say you are deformed, and again, I'm just going to say as your astrologer, you had these thoughts and feelings way before you decided to be an actor or way before it was realistic for you to be an actor.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            So this is not⁠—we can justify it through your terrible, fucking torturous, misogynistic industry. But really, this is your anxiety stuff.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            This is your stuff. So what do you think it is about⁠—okay, and I hate to do it to you because I know this is going to make you feel bad because you do not like to be mean to other people. But if you see somebody and they're fucking ugly⁠—you see their face, and you're like, "That lady is ugly. She has no jawline. Her nose is a tragedy"⁠—honestly, do you have bad thoughts or feelings about her as a person?

Guest:              No. I feel bad for them.

Jessica:            You feel bad for her because you feel like she's suffering as a direct result of her weak jawline.

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that must⁠—yeah. I mean, a weak jawline, I would say, is not the hardest one, but⁠—

Jessica:            Well, I mean, but it's on your list⁠—

Guest:              Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠—of why you should hate yourself. So I'm just⁠—

Guest:              Yes. Yes. Yes. If someone⁠—yeah. Yeah. I have extreme pity for them, and I'm like, "That must be really hard to go through life [crosstalk]"⁠—

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              ⁠—because children will stare at you. I know I'm not actually deformed, and I want to say that.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. Yeah.

Guest:              I know I'm a pretty girl. I'm within the realm of pretty girl.

Jessica:            Yes.

Guest:              But it's like this part of my brain that I can't shut off of being like, "If you could just adjust your bone structure slightly"⁠—

Jessica:            Totally.

Guest:              ⁠—"you would be so pretty."

Jessica:            Yes. Okay. There's a reason why I'm starting with these questions and I'm not starting with astrology, and I'm not starting with a lot of the things I could have started with. And there's a reason why. The reason why is because you have this ironclad narrative. It's very, very clear. 23 out of 24 hours a day, it's on, is what I'm seeing psychically. Am I right about that? It's, like, on.

Guest:              Oh. Oh my God. Yeah. It's all-encompassing.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's all-encompassing. And when you talk about it with people, you're not having the kinds of conversations where they're challenging you on it. You're having normal people conversations, right, where they're like, "Don't feel bad about yourself," but they're not helping you to unpack what you're actually saying, thinking, and feeling?

Guest:              Say that one more time. Sorry. I want to make sure I got that.

Jessica:            Sure. I'm going to say it a different way.

Guest:              Okay.

Jessica:            You said you feel deformed, and when I pushed, you said weak jawline, bad nose. You weren't even that fucking serious about the nose anymore, but okay. Literally, that's what you said. So my guess is that, most of the time, when you express these thoughts and feelings, people aren't asking you to clearly delineate, where you'd have to say it out loud, hear what you're saying, look at your actual face as you're actually saying it. Is that correct?

Guest:              Yeah. I would say there are times with my close friends I'll be like, "Oh, you see this? This literal thing in this photo." I'll be like, "This is the photo. This is what I hate."

Jessica:            Yeah. Girls do that with each other. We're just like, "Can you believe fucking my part in my hair was off?" And your friends⁠—

Guest:              Yeah. And we one-up each other. And it's like, yeah, well⁠—yeah. So…

Jessica:            Okay. But that's focusing on the surface of the problem. And that's why I warned you at the very beginning that I was going to go a little hard Capricorn with you, because the surface of the problem⁠—we can talk about it till you're blue in the face. I'm sure you already have in your life. It doesn't fix shit. What really is important is for you to be able to get at what the beliefs that you hold are about ugliness and prettiness and deformity because deformity is a place that you return to.

And I am sitting in front of you and see a very symmetrical face on a very pretty young woman who's very conventionally pretty. You're not like⁠ I have to reach and be like, "Oh shit. Well, I can see in a certain light"⁠—no. You're lovely to look at.

Guest:  Thank you.

Jessica:            You're welcome. But that's not the point. It's how you feel. What I'm basically suggesting here, before we get any deeper, is this is an anxiety⁠—like a very maladjusted coping mechanism that is related to, but not exclusive to, anxiety that is absolutely based in the reality of being a girl in a misogynistic world. So it's not like anything you've come up with has no basis or anything that you've come up with has not been reinforced by the world around you. You're not making this up out of the clear, blue sky.

                        But when we come back to, "I feel pity for the deformed," what if you just have somebody who's ugly; you see just an ugly person, a person who's objectively not attractive to you, or you can't see that anyone would think they're attractive? Do you also feel pity for them?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And do you have⁠—

Guest:              I feel so weird about saying that.

Jessica:            That's okay. You know what? What we're doing right now⁠—and I want to be exceptionally clear for you and anyone listening⁠—is judgment has no room here. All we're doing is we're trying to find the truth because the truth is each and every one of us has really ugly beliefs about beauty. We all do, I think especially people who are nurtured as female and people who have to exist in the world as female. But we all do, and we all have maladjusted beliefs and feelings because the world is fucked up. If you want to judge later, we can do that later. But for now, we don't judge. We're just exploring what you actually think.

                        And I have to ask, do you have any ugly friends or family members?

Guest:              See, I feel cruel labeling them.

Jessica:            Sure.

Guest:              Yes, I do.

Jessica:            Okay. And are their lives objectively harder than yours?

Guest:              In certain ways. I would say things like dating were harder.

Jessica:            Okay. Is harder or was harder?

Guest:              Overall is harder.

Jessica:            Overall is harder. Okay. This is really important. So you have the kind of experience that people that you don't think are particularly good looking⁠—and again, I know this is a really hard conversation⁠—that they don't get love. Is that what you're saying?

Guest:              It's not that they don't get love. It's that maybe it's harder for them to find it because there's so much⁠—I feel like people are more likely to be mean to them, and maybe I'm thinking of when I was bullied as a kid.

Jessica:            So you're involving yourself in this. I'm not talking about you.

Guest:              I know.

Jessica:            You're not part of this conversation. We're talking about your ugly friends or family members. And I should pull up and say I have no value judgment on ugly. I know most people do. I don't think ugly is bad, and I don't think pretty is good at all. So, when I say ugly, I don't mean bad. I don't mean anything negative other than does not fit in any way into the conventions of beauty.

                        So, if we omit you from this⁠—you are not one of the ugly people, okay, even at your ugliest moments⁠—and you think about the people that you do know who fit into that category, do they have more anxiety than you?

Guest:              About their looks or in general?

Jessica:            Either. Either one.

Guest:              I think they do have anxiety. I don't think it's proportionate, necessarily, to their looks. But I guess all my friends have anxiety of some sort.

Jessica:            Yeah. I mean, it's 2024. So would you say they have more anxiety than you?

Guest:              No.

Jessica:            Okay. That's interesting. So they're not experiencing, internally, more suffering because they're ugly?

Guest:              Perhaps.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              I mean, I don't think I've gone up to the ugly⁠—oh my gosh⁠—the ugly people in my life. That sounds so bad. But I've never been like, "Are you really sad that you haven't been able to date that much?"

Jessica:            So you're conflating two things that I want to take away.

Guest:              Oh God.

Jessica:            I'm sorry. I'm going to pull them apart.

Guest:              I feel like a monster right now.

Jessica:            No, no, no. You're not a monster. When you talk or think about ugliness and beauty in relationship to you and you alone⁠—so the part of you, the anxious, activated part of you that wrote me the question⁠—it's like you're standing with your nose touching a painting. You are so intimate with what that painting looks like, you are touching it. You have no perspective. You cannot actually see the whole painting. You are too close to the painting.

                        So all of your beliefs and all the things you tell yourself and all the feelings you have come from having this narrative that is really old and really deep inside of you. And you have no perspective. And so the reason why I'm torturing you and forcing you to talk about it in regards to other people is because your ideas start to unravel a little, don't they? A little.

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's a little harder for you to believe what you're selling to yourself when we apply it to other humans with bodies and hearts and parts. So this is why I'm pulling you in this direction. I promise we'll get to the astrology of it. But I want to say you're conflating lovability and ugly or pretty, which kind of means that the person you're with would leave you if you got ugly. That's what that means unconsciously, right?

Guest:              Right. Right, right, right.

Jessica:            Do you feel that that's true?

Guest:              No. I don't, actually, with my husband. No.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              I mean, I guess we'll see, but…

Jessica:            Sure. But it's interesting to see where your unconscious survival mechanism beliefs point.

Guest:              Right. I mean, maybe that's why I ended up with him. But when I was dating, I was very self-conscious about the way I looked on dates. And I remember specifically, a couple times, having really bad acne breakouts, like the whole time could not focus. And one time, I was on a date with a guy who was like, "I wish I could release you of that anxiety right now."

Jessica:            That's intense.

Guest:              And I was like, "Whoa." And I was like 23. So whatever. But yeah. I definitely thought my looks were my value at that point, too.

Jessica:            But you don't now?

Guest:              Not in my relationship, no.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              I mean, obviously, I love looking hot for my husband. He's like, "Hey, what's up?"

Jessica:            Sure. Right.

Guest:              But⁠—

Jessica:            So you're now able to separate your lovability and your looks. You obviously aren't, because we've been talking for 20 minutes, and you haven't been able to do that up until this moment. But on some level, you clearly are.

Guest:              Yeah, at least with him. Yeah.

Jessica:            With him. Right. Okay. We're going back to the ugliest of the people you know, just the ugliest person you know. Again, I don't think ugly is bad, and I'm going to hold space for that, even though you have mixed feelings. Okay?

Guest:              Okay.

Jessica:            And no guilt here. This is not a guilt state. Do you think, in some way⁠—and I should pull back and say, so are all the people that you would put in that category also single?

Guest:              Not as of recent.

Jessica:            So no. The answer's no.

Guest:              No. Correct. No.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              But they were for a really long time, well into their 30s.

Jessica:            What's well into their 30s mean? Can you give me an age?

Guest:              Sorry. 32.

Jessica:            Okay. So would you say that 22-year-olds are well into their 20s?

Guest:              No. I don't know why I said that.

Jessica:            I do. I know what you said that: because⁠—

Guest:              Because I'm exaggerating.

Jessica:            Because all of this is about an exaggerated⁠—you have such strong feelings that you have woven a narrative that's exaggerated to match the feelings, even though as we put it under⁠—not even a microscope; we're just putting it on the table⁠— it falls apart very quickly.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            So she's 32. She's in a relationship now but wasn't for a lot of her 20s?

Guest:              Didn't have her first relationship till she was late 20s, 28, I think.

Jessica:            Okay. Let me ask you this.

Guest:              And he was fat. He was really fat.

Jessica:            Okay. Two questions, then. Do you know any skinny, pretty girls who are in bad relationships with bad guys?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Me, too. Do you know any skinny, pretty girls who had a really hard time getting boylfriends and dating?

Guest:              Yes. Me.

Jessica:            Me, too. Okay. Okay. So here we go. There's a false equivalency that you didn't come up with. You are not the originator of this big, ugly lie, but your anxieties and your unconscious beliefs have really just drilled into it as an inalienable truth, even though you actually have evidence in your personal life that's not actually factually relevant. So, when you see your skinny, pretty friends single and only dating assholes, you don't equate it to their beauty. But if you see somebody who's not conventionally pretty, you do equate it to her beauty.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Guest:              That's bad. Yeah. That's it.

Jessica:            It's good to be able to hold this because there's connections you're making that, again, just don't make sense, right? And it's really valuable for you to be able to understand this so the next time you see somebody who's really pretty, who's having a hard time with their husband, their boyfriend, or they're totally single or whatever, you can say to yourself, "And it has nothing to do with the way she looks." Whether she's skinny, fat, ugly, pretty, ugly, whatever the fuck she is, whether she's old, she's young, "well into her 30s"⁠—I'm putting quotation marks on that because she's 32, but you see what I'm saying. Okay. You see what I'm saying.

                        Say your full name out loud. We're going to beep this out.

Guest:              I was born [redacted].

Jessica:            What do you go by?

Guest:              [redacted]

Jessica:            Did your mom have an eating disorder?

Guest:              I don't think so. No, at least not now. She might have when I was younger. My dad has alluded to that.

Jessica:            Okay. I am seeing when you were growing up that she did have disordered eating. Let's maybe put it that way. Does that make sense with what you saw of her?

Guest:              Maybe. I mean, I don't think I have any memory of her eating habits at all. Mainly, my dad's eating habits I very much have opinions on.

Jessica:            It's interesting. What about your mom's relationship to skinniness and prettiness? Because you're not naming skinniness, but I'm seeing that this is a big part of it.

Guest:              My mom is very self-deprecating and does not think she's pretty, won't wear dresses, to my wedding would⁠—finding her something to wear was a very big deal. Getting her hair done⁠—she has very, very thin hair, and her getting her hair done was a big deal. It was an overwhelming part of the wedding day.

Jessica:            Yeah, because you had to deal with her internal noise about prettiness.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. So I bring this up for two reasons. One is for you to know it doesn't just come from society, and it certainly doesn't come from your jawline. It's an inheritance. It was modeled behavior. And so maybe your mom didn't tell you directly the way you look is directly related to how people are going to feel about you, but she felt that way about herself. This is articulated in part by your Venus/Pluto conjunction.

                        And the other part is, when you see the ways in which your mom handles how she feels about the way she looks, when you get evidence like you did over your wedding of the internal chatter and the self-imposed restrictions, you can see how it literally only harms her, and sometimes even the people around her, and isn't a reflection of her value, of her looks. I'm seeing when I look at it energetically, the way that you felt about the way she was behaving, where you were just really in the presence of her internal chatter during your wedding, you were just like, "The fuck? It does not have to be this hard."

Guest:              Yeah. I feel like part of it that's frustrating is she talks down on herself and the way she looks all the time, but then she puts in very little effort.

Jessica:            Oh. This is fun. This is fun. So that makes sense why you feel like plastic surgery is the answer, because it's effort. You're fighting the ugly. Is that right?

Guest:              Yes. Well, it's like my mom doesn't⁠—she has done her hair the exact same way for the past 20 years, and we haven't tried anything new. She wears clothes that hide her body as opposed to trying to find things that are really flattering on her.

Jessica:            So I'm going to jump in and say that what your mother does is the opposite of what you do. And if you've ever seen the opposite of something⁠—think of the heads and tails of a coin. It's a single coin. Girl, it's one coin. So some people's response to the anxiety about being not pretty enough or not thin enough, or whatever it is, is to do what your mom does, to be like, "I don't have a body. I don't have hair. If I don't put in effort and I look ugly, then no one can say there's something bad about me because, obviously, I wasn't trying." And then other people obsess on the way they look. They obsess on their outfits. They obsess on their skin, their jawline, their hair, their⁠—whatever it is⁠—in efforts to mitigate those same feelings.

                        But they're both a negative self-obsession and a limitation of the bigness of who and what you are based on how you look. Your mom does the opposite of what you do. She doesn't do something different than what you do. Does that make sense?

Guest:              Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. But it does explain⁠—because you and your mom have a similar struggle, and the way you've seen your mom handle it⁠—you're like, "Well, I'm not going to fucking do that. I'm going to do something about it. I'm proactive."

Guest:              I'm going to fight genetics.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Are you noticing⁠—because I'm guessing⁠—because you're in your early 30s, right?

Guest:              34.

Jessica:            Okay. Yeah, I would still call that early, but if you want to call it late, we can do that.

Guest:              Yeah. Oh yeah. Yes, the early 30s.

Jessica:            Okay. Your early 30s. Do you see⁠—because I'm guessing your mom's, what⁠—is she in her 60s? 50s?

Guest:              She's 70.

Jessica:            70. Okay. So, at 70, do you see how this anxiety makes even less sense in a human person? Or does it seem kind of the same to you as it did at 40 or whatever?

Guest:              I think it's the same. I don't think it makes⁠—yeah. I think it's the same. [crosstalk]⁠—

Jessica:            Doesn't make more or less sense.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. What we've uncovered so far, which⁠—I know you already know these things, but we're going to put them on the table again. You have really negative beliefs about deformity and ugliness, that they're basically a reflection of your value as a human⁠—your power, your value⁠. You said power, didn't you?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Power. Okay.

Guest:              Like a currency, almost, like it's like a woman's currency.

Jessica:            Yeah. Girl, you're going to have a really hard time getting old if we don't work this out, so yeah.

Guest:              Oh, I know. Let's dig in.

Jessica:            We're digging. We're digging. We're digging. So okay. So there's that. You do also extend pity to people who you think are butt-ugly or deformed. And you equate lovability with prettiness, even when there's literally very mixed evidence on that. But that's the compulsion, right? That's the compulsion.

Guest:              Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think people who aren't beautiful can have beautiful love and the same love that anyone can have. I just want to say that.

Jessica:            Yes. And also, really beautiful people are famously miserable in love as well.

Guest:              Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course.

Jessica:            Let's put all of that on the table, right?

Guest:              I know all these things, but it's like⁠—I don't know. My brain just can't always get there.

Jessica:            I mean, this is what you were talking about. You used the term "body dysmorphia." It's a term that literally refers to very disordered thinking about what you see when you look in the mirror. You're not telling me, "I'm super well-adjusted. I totally got this." So, again, I don't want you to feel any kind of guilt or bad about this, because we're talking about what you understand to be not the best-adjusted impulses in your brain.

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. We're there together.

Guest:              Okay.

Jessica:            So everybody knows. And the truth is some people could listen to this and be like, "Oh, this is so fucked up." A lot of people are going to listen to this and say, "Yeah, me, too." Maybe they'd be scared to say it out loud, but nobody would say it out loud without a Jessica pulling it out of them.

So, this all said, I'm going to have you say your full name out loud again. We're going to beep it out.

Guest:  [redacted]

Jessica:            I'm going to go into the astrology a little bit. In your birth chart, you are a millennial. And you've got Uranus conjunct Saturn conjunct Neptune in Capricorn⁠—everyone of your little micro-generation. And in your birth chart, it's in the fifth house. That is the house of play and creativity. It's where⁠—the natural placement of Leo. And it sits opposite your Jupiter.

                        One of the things that this means is that you have a very heavy-handed way with yourself. You really, really enjoy playing, and it helps you get out of your head. So, whether we're talking about acting⁠—because, of course, this is the place of acting, but all kinds of play, like playing with music, playing with clothes, just fucking around, playing with the way you look. All of that, because of Uranus and Neptune there, is really like you actually genuinely enjoy it and can get out of your head and get out of all of these terrible thoughts and feelings when you're in a state of play.

Guest:              Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah, which we hadn't talked about yet but is worth naming. But there's fucking Saturn in the middle of your Uranus/Neptune/Saturn conjunction. Saturn is in the center. That means there's always a fucking consequence. There's this part of you that's like, "Okay. I'm playing with the way I look, and it's super fun." And then you just⁠—there's a small shadow on your nose, and you're like, "Uh-uh. Nope. Now you're going to fucking pay. Now you're going to pay. How dare you think you're pretty? How dare you have fun in your body?" Right?

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Because Jupiter is opposite these three planets, what happens is those feelings are big. Jupiter just makes things fucking bigger. And all of these planets form a T-square to your little Libra stellium. So that's your Mercury/Sun/Mars conjunction. And that part of you, that Libra part of you, is like, "I need to be liked, and I need to be liked by the things that are on the surface"⁠—kind of, in a way, starts that simple.

                        Because you have that Venus/Pluto conjunction⁠—of course, Venus being the ruling planet to all that Libra⁠—it does indicate that you were raised with really toxic beliefs about what it means to be a female person and how your primary value as a human is around how you get along and how pretty you are. And you have those two things equated. So you talked about love, and yes, the chart speaks to that, but it's not just love, is it? It's about being approved of by others.

                        Then we moved to your fucking Moon in the twelfth house. So were your parents divorced? Did your parents ever divorce?

Guest:              No.

Jessica:            Wow. That's impressive.

Guest:              You're the second astrologer to say that to me.

Jessica:            I'm not surprised.

Guest:              They have a very peculiar relationship. They've been married for a long time. They're really weird people, but they're still married.

Jessica:            Yeah. They made it work. Okay. So the thing about your chart is it does suggest that your dad really wanted your mom to be a certain kind of female, very traditionally speaking, and your mom bought in. She was all in at first. And she gave up her personal life. She gave up kind of the strength of her emotions because she's a really intense person. She kind of was like, "Okay. To be a wife, to be a mother, is to kind of put those things aside and to be more pleasing," and all of that kind of stuff. And she did do that at the beginning. Is this true of what you know?

Guest:              I would say yeah. I mean, I will say her career is incredibly impressive within all that that you just said. I would say, if anything, her number-one focus⁠—I mean, she worked hard as a mother, too, but I mean, she works. She loves her job.

Jessica:            She works a lot.

Guest:              Oh yeah.

Jessica:            But what about⁠—so none of this is about work for your mom. This is all about friends. It's all about her being able to have emotions at home.

Guest:              I always say I've only seen my mom cry, like, twice.

Jessica:            There it is. Okay.

Guest:              That's interesting.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, especially because you do know, if based on nothing other than what happened at your wedding, that she struggles with a lot of self-hatred, self-condemnation, keeping herself small. And that's like a trauma response. It's like a fear-based response, right?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            You were raised with this modeled behavior. Your dad was perfectly fine with it at the beginning. He was perfectly fine with it at the beginning because it centered him. So, at home⁠—maybe she went out when she worked, but at home, she still centered him.

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            And it was very consensual. I don't know that it is anymore. So, when we're looking at the birth chart, what we're looking at mainly, to see this stuff, is the first seven years. So this was all by the time you were seven. It was all consensual, and it was actually working. It wasn't really working, but the rails hadn't come off the train yet kind of thing. I think that happened later, and this is where a lot of compartmentalization occurred for both of your parents, which is for another reading.

                        But I want to say that what this modeled for you is you don't get to be totally happy. If you don't get to be totally happy, then you have to make compromises so that you can be happy enough. And if you're pretty enough, if you're agreeable enough, if you are likable enough, people will take care of you. And if you're taken care of, then you can go off and do whatever you want to do.

Guest:              I am teetering a little bit on that last one, but⁠—

Jessica:            Because that last bit's about how your mom took care of your dad.

Guest:              Yeah. Yes.

Jessica:            I don't want you to only identify with your mom in this, because your dad felt that he was putting up with a lot of stuff so that he could get certain of his needs taken care of and met at home. So he felt like he was some big guy who was making compromises⁠—not to say either of them are bad people. It's just the fucked-up shit that happens in relationships. He felt like he was making big compromises with his partner, and he was doing those things so that she will continue to take care of him in the ways he wanted to be taken care of. So I smooshed together the⁠—both of these parts.

Guest:              Yeah. That resonates.

Jessica:            Yeah. And does your partner take care of you a fair amount?

Guest:              Yeah. I actually think we actually do a really good job of taking care of each other⁠—

Jessica:            Good. Good.

Guest:              ⁠—in different ways. Yeah. There's a good filling in the blanks happening.

Jessica:            This is a part that I see that you really resonate with with your dad, is this feeling of⁠—this pattern of, "I understand that I have to compromise around x, y, and z in a relationship so that I can get my needs met and I can be taken care of at home," because the thing that is very clear⁠—I'm not saying that you are like your parents or that your marriage is like your parents', but the thing that is very clear is that there's personal and then there's public.

In other words, what you feel is not for public consumption. What you feel is personal. We don't need to tell anyone about that. We need to keep that shit under wraps, which is, again, part of why I started by challenging you on some of these beliefs and assumptions, because it's a coping mechanism that honestly is not terrible. I mean, it's not terrible. It's not like it's a bad coping mechanism.

But what it does in the context of struggling with the way you look is it enables some of your mental and emotional struggles. It's like the hinge of a door. It's not the door, but it's directly connected to the functionality of the door.

Guest:  Say it one more time. Sorry.

Jessica:            Sure, sure, sure. No, don't be sorry.

Guest:  I'm trying so hard to get every detail.

Jessica:            I respect you. I respect you. Don't you worry. So what I'm saying is this part of your nature that I'm referring to, how you saw your parents' marriage functioning⁠—it's not directly related to how you feel about your face. It's not the thing. But it's an emotional coping mechanism or a series of emotional coping mechanisms that enable and feed into some of the really strong feelings you have about the way you look and what it means because you have this belief that was modeled for you that how you really feel, like how you actually, really, really, really feel, like your actual worth, what the people who love you and know you really think about your power and your worth⁠—those things are private. They're in the super private space of home and family. And therefore, they don't get picked apart like so many other things do. Does that make more sense? It doesn't have to if it doesn't, but⁠—

Guest:              I think it does.

Jessica:            Let's come back to it if you still have questions around it, okay?

Guest:              I'm sure I'm going to listen back. This will be like, "Yeah, I get it."

Jessica:            Or not. You know what I mean?

Guest:              You know? But I'm taking in so many things.

Jessica:            I know. It is a lot. So okay. Let's actually slow down. Let's slow down. I want to just first come together with this fucking T-square in your chart. The T-square in your chart can be experienced in the way that you're experiencing it, that you have a really heightened anxiety response to the way you look and the way you think other people feel or think about the way you look. That is one way this T-square can function, as you are very well aware.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            But the other way that it can function is that you can develop a more spiritual⁠—thank you, Uranus and Neptune⁠—spiritual relationship to taking responsibility for the emphasis and power⁠—so taking responsibility for the emphasis and power⁠—now we poked Saturn⁠—that you give to the way you look on your whole entire life. So this is more related to the Jupiter and then all the Libra stuff.

                        In other words⁠—I'm going to try to say it more simply⁠—you can decide that you want to change how you think and how you feel. And at this time, what you have decided is you don't want to feel terrible. You haven't decided that you're willing to change your beliefs or your ideas because then you would risk being ugly and having all of the terrible things that happen to ugly people, even though maybe objectively that's not true. But that's the fear, right? You haven't decided you want to work on the issue. You've decided you want it to not be there anymore. There is a difference.

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay.

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Jessica:            Let me just kind of slow you down and check in with⁠—you had this core question. We're speaking to it. We're speaking around it. But is there anything you want me to answer for you or address in any way, or is there anything I've said that you have questions about so far?

Guest:              I guess, in terms of answering my letter that I wrote in to you of how to overcome it, it's just like going on the spiritual journey of accepting it, well, as opposed to calling up plastic surgeons.

Jessica:            So here's the thing about the plastic surgeon thing. Your problem isn't actually your face. That's the problem with this. The problem with this issue is you got the nose job. You technically like your nose. But when you're activated in your anxiety, the same thoughts and feelings with the same fervor emerge. Right?

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            None of this is actually about the way you look. All of this is about anxiety. All of this is about your discomfort with being in a body. All of this is about unconsciously⁠—as well as consciously, but I'm more concerned with the unconscious parts⁠—placing an emphasis on the way things look over the way they feel, the way they are.

                        The truth of the matter is, when we go back to your work, do famous, beautiful actresses and actors have terrible acne? Yeah, obviously. Does that matter? Zero percent, literally zero percent, because it is not 1924; it's 2024. There's makeup and all the things. If somebody wants to get rid of acne, they'll get rid of the acne. I mean, you know.

Guest:              [crosstalk] has taken a lot of my anxiety away recently. We'll see.

Jessica:            I bet. I bet. But not so much that it's actually fixed the problem.

Guest:              Oh, no, because I'm still on set with it on my face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Correct.

Guest:              And that's what matters.

Jessica:            Yeah. And also, it sounds like it's not just about when you're on set. It's also when you're just fucking living your life or anything, right?

Guest:              Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And this is why I worry for you about getting cosmetic surgery, because I don't believe it will actually solve any of your problems. And as we know, because there are statistics about this⁠—which I don't have on hand, but there are statistics about this⁠—it's a slippery slope. People who get plastic surgery get plastic surgery. You know what I mean? Not all. But if you're being fueled by the level of self-hate that you are and unconscious judgments⁠—and I'm calling them unconscious because I think we've barely scratched the surface of what you believe about ugliness or what you believe about beauty. We've barely scratched the surface of your unconscious beliefs.

                        And there's no surgery that's going to fix this problem, because it's a mental anxiety problem. It's not a physical problem. You have a husband who loves you. You know what I mean? So that whole unlovable thing, it's like, well, that's trash. That doesn't work, right? You've probably heard me say this in different contexts a lot, but if we don't identify what the actual problem is, we will never come up with the solution.

                        Think of it this way. If you and your husband are fighting about something, and he thinks you're fighting about the dishes and you think you're fighting about being respected, you're never going to fix this problem. You're never going to fix the problem because he doesn't understand that it's about respect for you, and you don't understand that he doesn't understand that it's about respect for you. So you're not having the same conversation; therefore, it just becomes a fight that is an ongoing fight that doesn't stop being a fight because you can't agree on what you're fighting about.

                        I say this because plastic surgery is you having a fight with your face and not being realistic about what your fight is actually about. Your fight's actually about anxiety. And that doesn't mean that at the end of the day, you won't choose to get plastic surgery. I would suggest that from where you're at now, your motivation is not one of empowerment; it's one of anxiety.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            And there are multimillion/billion dollar industries happy to capitalize on that. But what a waste of your time and your health. And surgery is⁠—it's like a health risk. It's not nothing. So no shade on surgeries. Whatevs. Do what you want to do. But the motivation, I think, is really important because the problem is going to persist.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            What was the other question about surgery?

Guest:              Oh, I just wanted to know, energetically, is it just like anything, like it's great sometimes, bad other times, kind of?

Jessica:            That's a really great question. To me, it's really about motivation. It is really about motivation. And the truth of the matter is there's nothing wrong with using medicine and science in the ways that we can. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being like, "Okay. I want to look a different way than I look, and I'm going to take the actions that I want to take."

                        The problem is when we hold too individually something that is systemic. Can you really say that the way you feel about, let's say, your nose or your jawline⁠—or whatever the fuck it is⁠—is really just about you and not about⁠—I don't know⁠—the Kardashians or whatever beauty standards exist today? We can't.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not really just about you, and yet going under the knife is very⁠—I mean, that's a very real thing. So I don't personally think there's anything inherently unspiritual or unhealthy or broken or anything like that about getting a plastic surgery in general. But I'm saying to you personally⁠—and you didn't even tell me what this plastic surgery would be, and I just want to remind you of that, that you didn't tell me what you would be getting done. So I want you to know that I'm clearly not responding to⁠—I'm not like, "Don't get your earlobes done. Your ears will be weird." That's not up here. I'm just saying your motivation is purely anxiety, and the anxiety will not be fixed by medication⁠—by surgery.

Guest:              Surgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            That I want to say.

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            What comes up when I say that?

Guest:              Well, it's like I know you were going to⁠—I was like, "I know this is where this conversation is going. She's going to be like"⁠—it's not like, "You'll never be happy if you're not happy now." And I know that. I just⁠—it gets so hard when it's so accessible.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah.

Guest:              And I'm old enough to have the funds for it, and I'm like, "Oh." And I live in a place where it's easily accessible, with the best in the country. And I go on the internet, and someone's like, "Just got this done, and it changed my life."

Jessica:            Sure. Yeah.

Guest:              Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And also, I will say my nose job, too, I can be like, "Oh, you know, it still has a couple things that I wish it didn't have," but I mean it did also boost my confidence a lot. And so then I get into that point in my head where I'm like, "Well"⁠—

Jessica:            Okay. Let me interject on that. So it boosted your confidence, which is massive. But did you get more love?

Guest:              Well, I got more jobs⁠—

Jessica:            You got more jobs?

Guest:              ⁠—in my career.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              Yes.

Jessica:            So you didn't get more love, and you didn't get more like, but you got more jobs.

Guest:              Which I guess is more like, too, but⁠—because⁠—

Jessica:            Yeah. It's more attention. It's more positive attention.

Guest:              Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So it's interesting because when I ask you about love, you flip to work. When I ask you about work, you flip⁠—

Guest:              Well, I'm really obsessed with my career and the fact that⁠—

Jessica:            About career. I see. I see.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            That's fair. That's fair.

Guest:              Yeah. And I'm 34, and it's not anywhere near where I thought I'd be at this point. Then it comes back to, "Well, it must be the way I look. I'm not pretty enough."

Jessica:            I mean, I am not going to sit here and say to your face that most white famous women look almost identical to each other because they do.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            I cannot tell so many women apart, partially because I'm bad at this kind of thing, but also because there's a look that is⁠—there's a body type. There's a face type. There's a hair type. There's an eyebrow type. My God. So I'm not going to tell you that that's not real. Of course, that's real. But there's these beliefs you hold about the way you look, when you get to a state of activation where you're like, "I'm disgusting. I'm deformed. There's something wrong with me. I can't tolerate being in my skin"⁠—you didn't say that last bit, but I'm adding it in because I feel like it's true. That's how you feel, right?

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            None of that has to do with your work. None of that has to do with your work. It has to do with some kind of anxiety-based, self-hating thinking. And in those moments⁠—true story⁠—is your nose exempt from the hate parade?

Guest:              Not all the time, no.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              Depending on the day.

Jessica:            Depending on the day.

Guest:              When I'm spiraling, no, it is not.

Jessica:            We'll 50/50 it. Okay. This is what I want to bring your attention back to because⁠—listen⁠—if you're getting a surgery because you're an actress and you want to make it in Hollywood and reality is reality, girl, I'm not going to fucking⁠—I'm not going to fight you on that. Who would fight you on that? That's not why you want to get surgery. I don't believe it, because when I asked you, "Well, how does it make you feel?" what I saw was sad.

                        There is this part of you that believes, "Oh, there's an answer to my problem. If I get the surgery, then I'm going to feel better and I'm not going to feel like fucking garbage." And when I said I don't think you should do this, there's this part of you that feels like, "You've just taken away the one thing that can fix me."

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Sorry. That sucks. But that is thinking to be investigated because if, in fact, any surgery could fix the way that you think and feel when you're activated, then I'd say get that one. But there's nothing you can do to your face, your boobs, your knees, whatevs⁠—there's nothing you can do that's going to change the anxiety, honestly, other than therapy. Sorry, because therapy is super slow, whereas surgery⁠—as long as it can take to recover, it's physical. It's not mental. You don't have to actually work through your fear, which is of being ugly. And I know that's related to work, but it exists before work and after work and outside of work.

                        I'm going to give you a little bit of homework, okay?

Guest:              Oh gosh.

Jessica:            Yeah. You don't have to write it down. You're going to remember this.

Guest:              Okay.

Jessica:            You're going to remember this. This is easy homework. I mean, I don't think it's going to be mentally easy for you, but it's going to be easy homework for you to remember. You spend a lot of time on social media⁠—Instagram, TikTok, one of those? Both of those?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. I mean, who's not clinically online, I ask you?

Guest:              I know. Well, it's also because I do social media influencing as a side hustle. So I⁠—

Jessica:            You have to be. You have to be online. Okay. You're going to start following⁠—if you take my homework. So let me restate it so I'm not being so bossy. I gently advise you to start following women who are around your age you think are ugly on purpose, okay?

Guest:              Yep.

Jessica:            And they can be fashion influencers. They can not be. You decide. I also want you to follow women who have facial deformities⁠—real ones, not "It only comes up in certain pictures" ones. Okay?

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            The reason why I'm advising you to do this is because it is too easy in this world to not see people who don't fit in to the conventional beauty stuff⁠—I'm guessing if your whole feed is perfect-looking, skinny, white girls who are somewhere in their 20s or early 30s⁠—again, I think you're in your early 30s⁠—you're comparing yourself to this monolith. So I'm also going to give you the advice to follow some older women⁠—not older models. Don't you dare, okay? Older women, because the truth is, if you are lucky enough to live long enough, you will become ugly by default as an older woman in society.

                        What I'm trying to get you to do is a few things. I want you to be visually exposed to different kinds of faces and bodies so that you hear your own thoughts louder because the thing about social media is I'm not just telling you to look at photos of women who you think are not attractive. I want you to hear them speak. Hear if they're miserable. If you have pity for them, is it deserved? Is it deserved? And sometimes it might be, and sometimes it won't be. But ditto for super conventionally hot ladies.

Misery knows no beauty, knows no ugliness. And I'm not saying that there's not privileges and power to conventional beauty, because there 100 percent are. But your anxieties aren't actually about that. Your anxieties go to a really extreme place of, "I don't deserve to be here. This is intolerable. I can't even fucking exist in my skin, I'm so ugly." And that is not really about ugliness at all. It's about feeling out of control in your meat suit and out of control in how your meat suit functions in the world.

You are fixated on things like beauty. And sure, that makes perfect sense. But it's actually not about how you look. And if you can find ways of unpacking the ways in which what I said are true, as well as the ways in which what I said is untrue⁠—because it's both⁠. Part of what I said is fucking wrong, and part of what I said is fucking right. And you're allowed, my Libra friend, to have a little bit of this and little bit of that, because what you have now is a lack of nuance. That's because you're standing too close to the painting, as it were.

And what I'm trying to get you to do is cultivate more nuance, which will at first look and feel like you being confronted by ugly thoughts that you don't like about you, about other people. I actually want you to think those thoughts and feel those feelings. Obviously, I don't want you to say those to people's faces because this is therapeutic. This is about you being able to hear yourself.

You know what? You would be with millions of other Americans if you were like, "Yeah, I believe this. This is true." I'm going to believe, because you listen to my ass all the time on a podcast, that you don't actually believe that ugly humans have no value and beautiful humans can do whatever they want and they are worth everything. You don't really believe that, do you? No.

Guest:  I mean, depends on the day, but no.

Jessica:            Right. The emotional anxiety response does believe it. But when we actually talk about it, when you actually think about other people⁠—

Guest:              Right.

Jessica:            So what I'm encouraging you to do will confront you with all of the ways that you think really mean, terrible thoughts. And I want to encourage you to stay with it, to really stay with those mean, terrible thoughts, so that you can make decisions about whether or not you want to try to change your thinking because changing your thinking is what will help you around these anxieties.

                        And if what you're really desperate to do is to get a surgery, a cosmetic surgery, then if you work on your disordered thinking and feelings, then what can happen⁠—and I'm using a psychological word. Obviously, I'm not a fucking therapist, and I don't deal with disorders. The thing I want to get you to do is to talk to yourself about this more so that you can make better-informed decisions about what you actually believe and who you actually want to be. Do you want human babies?

Guest:              Yes.

Jessica:            You do? Have you any worries about getting pregnant in terms of this issue?

Guest:              I haven't had worries.

Jessica:            Interesting.

Guest:              Should I have worries?

Jessica:            I mean, should you have worries? I mean, listen. You're asking a triple Capricorn if you should worry. First of all, "always, about everything" is my patented answer. But no, it's just interesting to me. The body dysmorphia you have is really unique to your psychology. A lot of people who struggle with a lot of the thoughts and feelings that you struggle with are also scared of pregnancy because you gain weight.

Guest:              Oh, I am worried about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. What did you think I meant, then?

Guest:              Oh, just like, "Am I going to be physically able to get pregnant?" because I'm 34. Everyone's like, "You better hurry up."

Jessica:            I know. I don't know. I feel like all my friends had babies in their 40s.

Guest:              Okay. Good. Yeah. We're thinking maybe next year, year after that. We're getting there.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Guest:              But no, I do have real anxiety about⁠—

Jessica:            That's what I was asking.

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah⁠—about, well, will my stomach stretch out really bad and I'll have to⁠—

Jessica:            Get a surgery?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. I heard it. I heard it psychically before you said it out loud. I saw you were like, "I'm not going to say that out loud." But I heard it.

Guest:              Yeah. No, but also, in my head, I'm like, obviously, that would be worth risking that, because I want to be a mother very deeply. But I'm like, if I had to, I could. I have that option to fix that if that were to happen and if I felt like I hated it or, you know, all these things. And I do worry about feeling fat when I'm pregnant, and my face. I'm worried about my face being fat because it will.

Jessica:            Yes.

Guest:              When I was on birth control, my face was fat. So I'm like, "Well, that's what's going to happen."

Jessica:            So there's a number of things I want to say. First, I'm just beefing up your fucking follow list. You're also going to follow fat girls, okay?

Guest:              Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            You're going to follow fat girls who work with style.

Guest:              I do. I do⁠—yes.

Jessica:            You do⁠—

Guest:              I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. I mean, it's less of your trigger because you don't struggle with your weight, so you can't give yourself that weird trip. Right?

Guest:              Yeah. It's not about the weight in my body when I'm pregnant. It's the weight in my face when I'm pregnant.

Jessica:            It's about the weight in your face. It's fascinating.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Isn't it fascinating? The thing that this is really all about is bodies⁠—I mean, they're literally suits made of meat. That's literally what they are. Bodies are, I think, pretty disgusting inherently. I mean, I'm a twelfth-house person, but I'm just like, "Ew." What are bodies except for meat suits with fucking tendons and muscles and oodge, so much goodge inside? They're so gross.

Guest:              So much liquid.

Jessica:            Oh, so much liquid. Too much. Too much. Bodies are a thing. Some people agree with us about that; some people don't. But here's what I can tell you. They're transient. The way you look now is not how you're going to look in ten years. And you may like the way you look in ten years a lot more than the way you like the way you look now⁠—or not. But it is, for sure, going to be different. The way you look will change. That is a certainty.

                        And the kind of way that your anxiety just kind of worked through your feelings about pregnancy, of, "Well, I'm worried about this, but I'm not worried about that. But what if I gain weight in my face? And da, da, da, da, da"⁠—all that kind of stuff is your mind doing Fred Flintstone car wheels. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know that cartoon with the Flintstones?

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            When their feet go in a big circle trying to get away from something?

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            That's what was starting to happen as you were working through what might go wrong if you got pregnant around this issue⁠—we're not talking about your health or a baby; we're just talking about beauty stuff⁠—is that you're trying to navigate away from the risk of not looking like a 25-year-old who could be mistaken for any number of actresses that are currently famous.

                        The truth of the matter is you're definitely going to have to deal with this if you want to have more peace in your soul. You're going to get older, and your skin will get thinner. All these things will happen. And what you saw with your mom on your wedding is how terribly this ages, how we get really stuck in our shit if we don't work on our shit.

                        And what I'm telling you to do is only to become more mentally aware of the terrible things you say to yourself and the things that you believe that you actually don't think are right, but you believe them when you're activated⁠—to become more aware of those things, even though your Libra self is just like, "If I'm more aware of them, then I'm a bad person and I'm mean. And I don't want to be mean, and I don't want to be a bad person. So avoid all of that."

But the problem is, by avoiding it, you're not cultivating the self-awareness needed to work through it because what happens when you have these thoughts and feelings is either you direct it against yourself, and then you torture yourself, and then you collapse⁠—am I seeing that right? You collapse?

Guest:  Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Sorry. It sucks.

Guest:  It's okay. Yeah. No.

Jessica:            You work yourself into a fucking tizzy, and then there's some sort of emotional, mental, or physical collapse. And that collapse makes you feel empty, and then you're just ready to go again. It just comes up again. It just doesn't change, right?

Guest:              Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just go to sleep.

Jessica:            Yeah. And then it can happen again the next day, or it might be a couple days.

Guest:              Yeah. It'll come back.

Jessica:            But it doesn't change. And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to think about it when you're not activated as well as when you're being activated. And I'm going to give you another piece of advice. Do you like writing lists or no?

Guest:              Oh, no, I love a list.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Your Saturn, good old Saturn. So what I'm going to have you do the next time you get activated⁠—about whatever part of your face or whatever it is⁠—is pull out your phone or a piece of paper, whatever's easier, and write a list of all the things that are bothering you. And then, next to each thing⁠—so maybe you're going to be like, "A bump on my nose," or whatever, like, "I look terrible in this photo because my hair was parted weird." I keep on saying hair parted weird because that drives me nuts about my hair, but okay.

Guest:              I know. I'm learning a lot about you.

Jessica:            Yeah. You are. You are. This is really like the parting of the bangs.

Guest:              Bangs will do it. I know that anxiety.

Jessica:            Bangs are hard work.

Guest:              They're hard. Yeah.

Jessica:            Anyways, we agree. And then, in a column next to it, what does it mean about you? For each item, what does it mean about you? So you have a bump on your nose. What does it mean about you? Literally, I want you to answer that question. And if you have an answer that is like, "I look bad/I feel bad," that's fine. If you can't really figure out what you think it means about you, that's okay. Make it a practice. Now, do you have a shrink?

Guest:              I'm on a pause from therapy⁠—

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              ⁠—because I felt like I wasn't looking forward to it anymore, and I thought maybe I need to get a different one. I don't know. It just felt like time to part. I was with her for like six years.

Jessica:            Oh yeah. Sometimes it's just time to move on. I think, if you're going to find yourself another therapist, finding somebody who specializes in body dysmorphia is going to be the move. Again, I'm not in the business of diagnosing such things. But I will say this really debilitating anxiety pattern that exists inside of you cannot function if you confront it more consistently. It just can't because you don't like having the thoughts that you have. You don't actually want to be a person who believes what you believe. You just believe it because you haven't confronted it yet.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            It's really hard to have a Venus/Pluto conjunction. I mean, you⁠—I have been⁠—

Guest:              Thank you for saying that.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's true. It's very hard. And honestly, that has not been the thing that I've focused the most on in our reading. It's been your T-square because your Venus/Pluto conjunction makes you want power, and it makes you want attention, and it makes you want to be hot⁠—pretty and hot. Not just one. It makes you want both, right? Because it's in Scorpio.

Guest:              It squares my Moon, too. I don't know if that does anything else to it.

Jessica:            Yeah. Sure. It sure does.

Guest:              But it makes me really emotional about it.

Jessica:            It gives you compulsive and obsessive feelings about it. Venus/Moon square is a really⁠—usually, when we have a square with Venus, it really ain't so bad. But the thing is this Moon/Venus square makes you feel like, "If I don't get attention for the way I look, then I am bereft. I am just alone and lonely, and I am unloved." And it's really rough.

                        But this, to me, is the reason why your anxiety/fixation points towards the way you look as opposed to other things because you must have noticed over the course of your years that you could, with just a little shove and a little shimmy, maybe develop the same kind of anxiety, terrible thoughts and feelings, about something else in your life or something else about you. Right?

Guest:              Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. This could spread like rust on an old car. This could be a very corrosive, catching problem. But because of your Venus/Pluto conjunction square to the Moon, it tends to stay focused on girl problems: the way you look, how likable you are, that kind of shit. So oh well. It's not good news, but it is the news, right? It is the news, and we accept the news so that we can work with the news.

                        So, again, the work here is, if we accept that you have this obsessive nature and that you do want to be cute and you do want to be pretty and you do want attention⁠—I mean, you want to be an actor. If we accept all of those things, then I want to point your attention towards your T-square. That's the tool kit you have for coping with those things, understanding that there is a disassociative element of this. You compartmentalize. That's what I mean by disassociative. You compartmentalize, and that compartmentalization allows you to believe things you actually don't believe, to talk to yourself in ways that you know you shouldn't talk to yourself. It allows you to do that because unless you're super activated, you're not thinking about it.

                        So all the advice I gave you was really pragmatic; it wasn't spiritual. So I said, "Work with your spirituality," but then all the advice I gave you was Saturnian. Let me tell you why: because if you work with physical reality, what's true and real, if you actually do⁠—some measure of exposure therapy is basically what I'm encouraging you to do⁠—then you can, over time, with effort, get to a place where you have more stability inside of you around this topic because you have more self-awareness and you're able to be a little bit more responsible to yourself, like able to respond to⁠—like, "Okay. I'm super fucking activated right now. That means I stop looking at a picture. It doesn't matter what my deadline is. When I'm this activated"⁠—when you hit a seven, girl, look away. Look away.

                        When you're at an audition, of course, you can't be like, "Well, I'm a seven. I'm going to leave now." That's obviously not what's going to happen. But in all other circumstances, you can⁠—when you hit a seven, to say to yourself, "I am in a state of activation. I need to deal with the activation before I continue to look at my face." If you make this a practice, which will be slightly hard⁠—okay, super fucking hard. It'll be super hard. But if you make this a practice, then you will get to the place where eventually you can develop a spiritual practice around it so that you can soften the edges of it. But if you start with spiritual, it's not going to work because there's too much disassociation around it.

Guest:              I was worried you were going to be like, "Meditate."

Jessica:            No.

Guest:              I'm like, "Oh my God. I need something really [crosstalk]."

Jessica:            No. Something very fucking physical. Yes. You do. Saturn is in the middle of the conjunction.

Guest:              I love to meditate, but…

Jessica:            Yeah. It's not going to fix⁠—if it was going to fix the problem, it would've happened by now.

Guest:              Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Jessica:            None of this is impossible for you to come to a state of healing with. I do want to reiterate that in this moment, from my psychic perspective, you do not want to fix this problem. And you don't want to fix this problem because you don't want to do anything that will risk you being ugly.

Guest:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Sorry. And so, again, we want to start with that Saturnian and Solar⁠—because you've got Saturn in the center of your three planets in Capricorn, and then you've got the Sun in the center of your three planets in Libra. So we want to start with the self-awareness, taking responsibility for, "Okay. In this moment, I do not want to change my thinking or my feelings because I"⁠—maybe we'll call it superstitiously⁠—"believe that those things keep me from falling down⁠—

Guest:              Spiraling?

Jessica:            ⁠—spiraling out of control around all the things that matter to you. So, again, what you want to start doing is just exploring that resistance. And maybe, as you explore this resistance, you will land in the exact same place you started. And that's fine. But I think that⁠—and this is kind of one of the last things I'll say to you, is that I looked at the transits you're going through this year in 2024⁠—very supportive.

Guest:              I know.

Jessica:            Tons of really supportive transits.

Guest:              And I'm having anxiety about it because I'm like, "I don't know if I'm ready." I want to make sure I'm manifesting the best version of this year possible because I'm not going to get transits like this again in a long time.

Jessica:            Oh. You have found a good way to make something good bad. As a Capricorn, I respect that so much. However, it doesn't matter if you make a teeny, tiny bit of progress, because progress is progress. It doesn't matter if you completely squander this opportunity, because there will be other opportunities.

What you need to know is, okay, you got a reading with me about this topic. It's a very hard topic. Let's say you explore the idea that you don't want to change. You want the absence of suffering, but you don't want to change. Okay. If you explore that and you really start to be honest with yourself about that, that's massive progress. And maybe that's the only progress you make this year. But what were you going to say?

Guest:  What would that look like exactly?

Jessica:            What you want is the absence of suffering, right?

Guest:  Yeah. I just want to be awesome. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. You just don't want to feel bad about anything. And instead of wanting to work on your anxious and⁠—I keep on saying disordered thinking, and I have mixed feelings about using that term because it's such a therapist term. But I guess what I'm trying to say is the thinking that ugly means bad and pretty means good seems really not true to me. And maybe you believe it's true. A lot of people believe it's true. To me, this seems B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

                        But you get to decide for yourself. What you have done at this point, at the age of 34, is you've not decided that. You've assumed it. You've taken it on. You used it as a baseball bat with which to hit yourself in the head. But you have not actually decided that you believe that and that it's true. And that's step 1. That's honestly step 1. I made you say things that you didn't want to say. And what you need to figure⁠—

Guest:              Yeah. I was sweating real hard.

Jessica:            You were sweating. You were sweating. And so what you get to sit with alone with yourself is, were you sweating because you don't like the way it sounds and you wish it were true?

Guest:              Yes. I'm embarrassed by it⁠—

Jessica:            Okay. Good.

Guest:              ⁠—because I feel like it makes me sound like a really mean, vapid person.

Jessica:            Okay.

Guest:              And I don't want to be that.

Jessica:            But what you need to decide is do you not want to seem that way, or do you not want to be that way?

Guest:              Both.

Jessica:            Okay. That's good. So, if that's true⁠—and I believe that's true, not 100 percent, which is okay. Again, nuance. The anxiety response you have is lacking in nuance. It's all or nothing. It's 100 percent or 0 percent. It's, "I'm gorgeous. I've got it," or, "I am the ugliest person in the world. I can't live." It's very extreme, Plutonian⁠—right? It's very extreme thinking. And whenever we're in that state of extremes, when we're not able to hold space for any kind of nuance, then we know, okay, you're in your activation when you're in extreme thinking.

                        So, again, when you hit that wall and you're just super fucking activated, to be able to say, "I am activated. I cannot look at pictures of myself. I cannot think about this because I know I can't trust my thinking because it reflects things I don't even know if I believe, or I know I don't believe"⁠—and what will happen if you do this is you will feel fucking awful, and you will feel the full weight of your sadness and your shame. I'm sorry.

                        And what I'm encouraging you to do is to feel your sadness and your shame and not to lose yourself in it, but to know that allowing yourself to actually emotionally feel it instead of what you're doing, which is starting to feel it, clenching up, and then putting words on it, putting these beliefs that you don't even fucking believe on it⁠—"This means this. This means that"⁠—instead of just being like, "Okay. I'm just going to stop chasing the thoughts. I'm not going to listen to my own thoughts. I'm just going to notice where I feel these feelings, and I'm going to stay with these feelings."

                        And from what I'm seeing, a lot of it's pure sadness. It's grief. It's shame. It's almost like, when I look at you energetically, it's like you keep on trying to make a table for people to come and have a meal. You just keep on trying to be a good entertainer. You try to keep on, "Make it nice. Make it nice. Make it nice." But that means no one ever gets to sit at the table. No one ever gets to enjoy the meal because you're too worried about the way it looks. So I don't know what the emotion for that is, but it's like a perfectionism inside of you that stops you from actually getting to enjoy.

                        I want to share with you just the energy of, like, yeah, we're all vain. You know what I mean? I'm vain. You're vain. We're all vain. Okay. Fine. We all have meat suits, and we want them to be pleasant and all the things. Okay. Fine. We want social power. Sure. Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. But also, ugly is okay. I love a lot of ugly things. I think it is possible to be like, "I have parts of myself that are ugly, and I love them as much as the parts of myself that are pretty."

I just want to share that with you as a possibility of how you can feel. And that doesn't mean you stop doing your hair and dressing for your body type and caring about the way you look. You can hold them both at once is what I want to say.

Guest:  Yeah.

Jessica:            So, again, we're back to nuance instead of extremes. I think that the astrology of this year for you, for you personally, is here to help you to grow into the adult you want to be. And that means you have to choose who you want to be, given the fucking world we live in. These are going to be incredibly supportive transits to help you do that.

                        Here's the thing about supportive transits, in particular supportive transits by Saturn, which is a lot of what you're going through⁠—it's not all of what you're going through, but it's a lot⁠—is if you decide to keep on doubling down on your maladjusted coping mechanisms⁠—by the way, which every fucking person does. But if you decide to do that, they will get stronger and more deeply entrenched.

                        Whenever we go through Saturn transits, it's like you are meant to prune your backyard. Prune your garden. Do you have a garden? Have you ever gardened? Do you know anything about it?

Guest:              I do.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. So it's about pruning your garden. And when the sextiles and the trines happen, we're like, "Oh, look at that. It's really growing here." And you're like, "Oh, wait. Shit. I can move this. That's not a big deal. It'll be super easy for me to tend to this garden." But what most people do is, when there's a sextile or a trine, we don't look at the garden. We're just like, "Oh, from the window, I can see everything's fine. Leave it alone." But what happens then is, when the square or the opposition occurs, then we're like, "Holy shit. If I don't dig this up from the roots and move it or whatever, then it's going to fuck up my whole garden." So it's harder.

So I'm basically saying all of this to say the period of life that you're in now, if you choose to think about what you're growing and you choose to be intentional about what you're growing in yourself, not just at work, but in yourself, then you will have an easier time making changes without working as hard than you will if you wait a few years until you won't have a choice, which is when Saturn squares all the planets that it's going to be [crosstalk] trining this year.

Guest:              Right. Right, right, right.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. So that's the move, is functioning out of self-love or functioning out of obligation. I mean, I wish for you self-love.

Guest:              Thank you.

Jessica:            You're welcome. You're welcome.