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.

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

EJ:    Hello.

Jessica:      Hello.

EJ:    Okay. So I'll just read the question that I sent you.

Jessica:      Great.

EJ:                   "Hi, Jessica. I have a question about bitterness. I find that I hold on to a lot of bitterness and often feel that things are unfair or that I am being unfairly treated, regardless of whether or not that's true. I tend to have an initially negative view of other people's motives and behaviors. It has gotten to the point where it affects the way I process my experiences, even good ones, and also colors how I view the people I'm in close relationship with. It takes up a lot of my energy, and I don't enjoy being this way. This mindset doesn't feel like it is in alignment with how I view myself, and I would love to get to the bottom of it. How can I understand where this bitterness comes from and learn how to transmute/let it go?" And it also feels like there's an element of maybe selfishness or entitlement to this that I would love to explore if you feel like that's relevant.

Jessica:            Yes, I do feel like it's relevant.

EJ:                   Cool.

Jessica:            I'm going to ask you to say⁠—give me more words. Is it they're⁠—the other people are selfish and entitled, or you're selfish and entitled?

EJ:                   I think me. Yeah. It feels like me, so how to tackle that.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm down for that. Let's tackle, tackle, tackle. Okay. So you were born December 30th, 1994, 9:11 p.m. in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So you say bitterness; I think Pluto. Put that in your head. Bitterness, Pluto. Bitterness, Pluto.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            That was like a call and response thing. Okay. I don't know if you heard it that way. That's how I heard it in my head. So, just as a hot tip, whenever you think bitterness, always look for Pluto.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            When you talk about entitlement, we can expand beyond Pluto. When we talk about resentments, definitely Pluto, but not only Pluto. But then the topic of fairness⁠—now, that we attribute to Venus or the zodiac sign of Libra.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            Now, in your birth chart, my fine young friend, you happen to have Venus conjunct Pluto.

EJ:                   There we go.

Jessica:            Let's start there by asking you, actually, a couple of questions.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            Okay? Question number one, does this come up kind of across the board in relationships, or with people you're dating, or besties, or strangers?

EJ:                   I think it's people I'm dating and besties, people very close to me.

Jessica:            Close relationships.

EJ:                   But I do find that my family relationships are often excluded from that. I don't think it comes up in my family relationships.

Jessica:            Interesting.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It doesn't come up in your family relationships. That is fascinating. Get ready for me to dig. Okay? Okay. Okay. Okay. So here's another question. Your parents are married?

EJ:                   They are.

Jessica:            The same two people who had you stayed together?

EJ:                   Yes. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And you get along well with both of them?

EJ:                   I do. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And did one of your parents lose somebody very close to them in the first seven years of your life?

EJ:                   Yeah. Both of my parents did.

Jessica:            So they had their⁠—their parents passed when you were little?

EJ:                   Yes. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay. And how many? Tell me what happened. [crosstalk] not the whole story, but⁠—

EJ:                   Yeah. So my mom's dad died when I was very young, and then my dad's mom died when I was very young, I think both around when I was one, so super young baby.

Jessica:            Super young. Okay.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And are the other grandparents still surviving, or did they also pass?

EJ:                   No, they also passed.

Jessica:            I'm sorry.

EJ:                   That's okay.

Jessica:            And was that when you were little or when you were a little bit older?

EJ:                   So my dad's dad died before I was born, when he was really young.

Jessica:            Okay.

EJ:                   And then my mom's mom died when I was like 20, I think.

Jessica:            Okay. So you were an adult.

EJ:                   I was an adult.

Jessica:            And do you have kids yourself?

EJ:                   No.

Jessica:            Let me tell you why I asked, okay? You got this fucking Venus/Pluto conjunction, and in between Venus and Pluto is your IC. Now, the IC is the opposite of the MC. In other words, it is the lowest point of the chart. And it refers to innermost psychological life, innermost life, but it also refers to really early developmental dynamics, like core root shit. And so, when we want to look at inherited or ancestral stuff, we look⁠— there's a lot of places we look, but one of them is the twelfth house. But we can look to the IC to see your roots. Now, you happen to have Pluto and Venus hugging your root system.

EJ:                   There we go.

Jessica:            There we go. And so there's a lot of ways this can show up. And you telling me right out the gate that you get along great with your parents and your parents are together⁠—it made me ask about the death in the family. I just want you to know that process because, a lot of times, when people have this aspect, there's mental health issues with one or both parents or addiction issues with one or both parents. But it sounds like that's not the issue for you.

EJ:                   It might be a separate issue, but yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. So there is that as well?

EJ:                   There is that as well. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And give me a few more words on that.

EJ:                   So, actually, in both of my parents' families, there's a history of addiction. My mom's side, it's more drugs, and on my dad's side, it's more alcohol.

Jessica:            Okay. And do you drink yourself?

EJ:                   I don't.

Jessica:            You don't. Smart.

EJ:                   Thanks.

Jessica:            Your body just doesn't metabolize it well, it looks like.

EJ:                   It really doesn't. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah, which⁠—

EJ:                   I used to, but I don't anymore.

Jessica:            It's a gift for you to not metabolize it well because it's like your body is so uncomfortable processing alcohol, it's stopped you from having a problem that you actually could have pretty easily, it looks like. So yay. Again, checking things off the list. Say your full name out loud.

EJ:                   Okay. It's [redacted].

Jessica:            Okay. So this issue comes out of your matrilineage, not your patrilineage, first of all.

EJ:                   Interesting. Okay.

Jessica:            Yeah. Does that surprise you?

EJ:                   It does, actually. Yeah.

Jessica:            Tell me more.

EJ:                   I think I can kind of visibly see it on my dad more, if that makes sense.

Jessica:            See what? Bitterness?

EJ:                   No, like the mental health or addiction struggles.

Jessica:            Oh, I meant the bitterness pattern.

EJ:                   You mean bitterness. Okay.

Jessica:            The bitterness pattern is what I meant.

EJ:                   I don't think that's surprising, then, in that case.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay.

EJ:                   I don't think I've thought about it, though. But it's interesting, but not surprising.

Jessica:            And your mom does not have an active drug issue?

EJ:                   Mm-mm. No.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So do you date?

EJ:                   I do.

Jessica:            And are you with someone currently?

EJ:                   I am.

Jessica:            Great. What's the right pronoun for me to use?

EJ:                   She/her.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. And how long have you been with her?

EJ:                   I've been with her for almost three years now.

Jessica:            Great, so enough time for lots of bitterness to have built up.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Excellent. Excellent. Okay. Good. You're welcome. Okay. There's layers and layers of what I want to say. But before I do, I want to acknowledge something. I'm looking at you energetically, which is why I'm not making eye contact, and I⁠—man, you are one well-oiled machine. You have such a reflexive security system. You have walls. They're really⁠—I don't think you're like, "I'm going to have a reading with Jessica. I'm going to have walls up." That's not at all your thinking process.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It's just your reflex is⁠—your default is, "I'm not really sure what's going to happen. I have to just kind of hold back. I have to peek behind this wall and so I can see what the fuck is coming at me before it comes at me." It's a real defensive stance. Does that make sense?

EJ:                   It does. I don't think I felt that happen, so that's interesting to hear.

Jessica:            It feels to me like this is your default behavior. I don't think it's like you plan it. I think it's where you start. And there's a lot of reasons for it. And please do tell me if it feels wrong. Do you know what I'm saying?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So do tell me if it feels wrong.

EJ:                   I don't think it feels wrong, no.

Jessica:            Okay.

EJ:                   It definitely checks out.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Very cool. Sorry/yay. So this is the thing. When a grandparent passes away and you're a little kid, it just seems like, "Oh, yeah, old people die." But when you're a grown-ass adult and you think about your parents dying, it's not like, "Yeah, old people die." It's fucking terrifying and devastating and world-shattering, right?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, for your dad, it was like an orphaning event, and for your mom, it was its own tragedy. And it sounds like they were overlapping events. Were you the first child?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yeah. You have the char of a firstborn. So⁠—and then you were the first child.

EJ:                   Yes.

Jessica:            And so there's all that extra⁠—if you have any friends who have had kids by now, you have a sense of how people get when they have a kid. It's very new, and it's very big. And so what actually shows up in the birth chart is that you experienced this profound abandonment in your early developmental experience, and it was the abandonment that your parents experienced through the depth of loss of their own parents. And so this fear⁠—you did not say you have a fear of abandonment, but I actually think that's pretty deep in here.

EJ:                   Yeah. It's funny you say that, because I have said before, like to close friends, I feel like I have this fear of abandonment, but I have no idea where it came from because my parents have been very much with me my whole life. We've always gotten along. They're very supportive. So yeah.

Jessica:            You've got Jupiter in your fourth house. You've got your Moon in Sadge in the fourth house. You were wanted. I don't know if you were planned or not planned, but you were wanted and loved. And yet there was a lot of challenges for you.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And one of them was before you could talk, it sounds like, and it was that your parents did not have the emotional ability to be present for you as a tiny, needy little baby. And babies are supposed to be needy. That is not a negative thing. It is like a healthy, appropriate thing. But imagine going through a breakup, let alone the loss of a parent, when you have an infant.

EJ:                   Right. Yeah.

Jessica:            The lack of emotional presence is very real. And so what you experienced was the people who were your world, who were your safety, experiencing a level of grief and loss that nobody is prepared for and nobody is good at. And what it gave you was an innate, core understanding that you're never completely safe, that anything could end at any time, and that feeling of abandonment because your parents are supposed be there for you. I mean, again, it's important to think through⁠—so both of your parents have their very first child, and then they lose a parent, and that unfairness feeling, that, "Why me? Why now?" feeling.

EJ:                   Totally. Yeah.

Jessica:            And that is a meaningful part of what I think is kind of at core of this for you, this feeling of, "Yeah, I know that life isn't fair. I know that anything could end at any time, and there's no fucking rhyme or reason. I know I'm not safe, and when people tell me I'm safe, fuck them, because they don't know what safety is, because they can't know what safety is, because no one knows what safety is," because it wasn't like your mom cheated on your dad, and then you hated your mom for being one way or another. You know what I mean?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            This is like pure random unfairness.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Your eagerness, I think, is the scab that has settled over the open wound of fear of losing everything for no reason at any minute.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Sorry. I didn't warm you up at all.

EJ:                   You're just diving in.

Jessica:            We went right in. I know.

EJ:                   No, it's okay. I'm happy to dive.

Jessica:            I was trying to find a way to go in more gently to this, but I just was like, "There's no way except for in." Okay. So that's what we're doing.

EJ:                   No, I can handle it.

Jessica:            Okay. I see you can handle it. That's not what I'm worried about. It's just I guess I'm on a rough roll. Okay. So, first of all, I'm sorry.

EJ:                   Thank you.

Jessica:            You're welcome. Second of all, say your full name out loud again.

EJ:                   [redacted].

Jessica:            Here's the thing. You have Saturn in the fucking seventh house. You have Mars conjunct your Ascendant in Virgo. It all forms a T-square focusing on Jupiter, but we're not going to focus on that part yet. We're just going to talk about the fact that you have Saturn in the seventh house. You're nobody's bitch.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Mars conjunct the Ascendant⁠—people don't fuck with you. That's not a thing you do. You're not interested in being a victim. You're not interested in getting played. You're not interested in not knowing what's going to happen. You don't want to be played a fool. You don't want to be vulnerable. All of these things check out?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's not how you come across. I mean, we were chatting before we started the reading. It's not how you come across, but I look at your chart, and it's like⁠—do not fuck with you.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not a thing. And so, because you have this innate vulnerability and tenderness and fear⁠—right?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            ⁠And you have this very, like, "I need to be on top of things."

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            "I need to be the one who knows what's going to happen, and I need to make sure that I'm not taken for any kind of a ride." Right? If anyone's doing the driving, you're doing the driving. And so, because of that, bitterness is really actually quite useful to you. Let me contextualize before I explain. I am of the mind that every single one of our maladapted coping mechanisms⁠—every single shitty instinct, behavior that we have⁠—exists for a reason. Now, a lot of the times, it's terrible logic. It's like the logic of a two-year-old coping mechanism or something, you know, like a two-year-old human.

                        But it serves a function. And when we understand the function that it serves, then we're better equipped to decide, "Do I actually want to change that function?" Because the truth of the matter is⁠—here's the truth. Right here, right now, you do not want to change the function of your bitterness, which is to feel more vulnerable. You don't want to feel more vulnerable. Are you kidding? I'm sorry. Maybe you do. I don't think you do, though.

EJ:                   I don't think I do either.

Jessica:            I don't think you do. I don't think you're ready for that shit. But here it is, right?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            There's a part of you that could just sit and cry endlessly, and then there's the rest of you that's like, "I don't cry. I rein it in. I suck it up. I power through."

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And so that Venus/Pluto conjunction in Scorpio conjunct your IC is just in this obsessive-compulsive death loop, you know?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Sorry.

EJ:                   That's exactly how I would describe it as well.

Jessica:            I'm sorry. It's terrible. We laugh⁠—

EJ:                   No, no, no.

Jessica:            ⁠—so we don't cry. We laugh so we don't cry.

EJ:                   Exactly.

Jessica:            Exactly. But it is like you are laughing, having fun, doing your thing, but there's always a part of you that's like worst-case scenario, running worst-case scenarios. What did you do when you were 12 years old to that girl? It was wrong. "I looked at her sideways. I'm such a bad person."

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            You go deep and hard on this.

EJ:                   I really do. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. I see you. I see you. I'm so sorry.

EJ:                   That's okay.

Jessica:            And so that open vulnerability is in part about not knowing how to cope with the unpredictability of endings, of loss.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And I am of the mind that if you really want to change your relationship to bitterness, you first and foremost need to change your relationship to loss and vulnerability because the bitterness is actually helping you. It's helping you not feel that way. So somebody must have told you more than thrice when you were little, "Don't be so emotional. Be a big girl."

EJ:                   Yeah. For sure.

Jessica:            Yeah. That was like a big thing. And I'm guessing it was your parents because they didn't have the fucking wherewithal to deal with other people's emotions. They were too busy handling their own emotions.

EJ:                   Yeah. I think it was that my parents didn't really directly tell me not to be so emotional, and there were a lot of situations where they actively supported my being emotional. But I think that there were also a lot of times where there just wasn't the space for it. It would be like, "I'm just going to go to my room and deal with that," or other people's parents or other adults telling me to calm down and not be so emotional.

Jessica:            So emotional. Interesting.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So, whether they said it expressly, they said it indirectly, or other people did it, you got the fucking message.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And you decided that that was the most important message, right?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And that's because you wanted to be mature. Saturn in the seventh house opposite your Ascendant, your Mars⁠—you wanted everyone to think of you as an adult when you were little.

EJ:                   Yeah. Totally.

Jessica:            Yeah, for better or worse, right?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so you were like, "Okay. I'm going to just be a big kid, and I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to be emotional. I'm just going to handle it." But of course, kids⁠—you're supposed to be emotional. You're not just supposed to power through. And what you found, I'm sure, is that, "Everybody else feels their emotions. Everybody else goes through whatever they want to go through. Why do I have to suck it up? That's not fair."

EJ:                   Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so the truth is not everybody else does anything. A lot of people go through what you're going through for various reasons in different ways. But that's not the point. It's, when you're wrapped up in your triggers and compulsions, all you feel is terribly vulnerable and stuck. You're cornered, right? And when you feel cornered, you have a coping mechanism. And that coping mechanism is, "I'm going to fight my way out." You fight yourself. You fight the person.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It doesn't matter. You're just going to fight your way out. You know what? It's a really high-functioning coping mechanism.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            What do you do for a living?

EJ:                   I actually do interior painting and wallpapering and murals and stuff.

Jessica:            Nice. And you're gainfully employed with this, yeah?

EJ:                   Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Mm-hmm. This coping mechanism is related to your career. You know what needs to be done. You execute it efficiently. You have adaptability, but you follow through. All of these same coping mechanisms that make you high-functioning in capitalism, actually, high-functioning as in the world of adulting, are the same coping mechanisms that are how you've wrapped up and twisted up on yourself emotionally.

EJ:                   Yeah. It very much feels that way.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so this is one of those things where⁠—you may have heard me say this before, but it's like my go-to is years ago I head a knee injury, and I went to this person who was giving me physical therapy. And at the end of every session, she would lean over to my uninjured knee, and she would whisper, "Teach your friend." And what she was saying is, "Hey, healthy knee. You know how to function in a healthy way. Hey, unhealthy knee, just function like the healthy knee." She was just trying to be like, "You know how to do this. Just learn how to do it with the other knee."

                        And so I want to say to you you have this great skill. It is a great skill. We do not want you to get rid of it.

EJ:                   Giggle.

Jessica:            Yeah. No, no, no. Keep it forever, okay? However, if you use a hammer to hammer in a nail into a wall so you can hang a picture, that's great. If you use a hammer to hammer your knee, it's bad. This is one of those things where you want to be like, "Okay, so I'm using the skill. I'm going to keep on using the hammer the way it was intended to be used instead of the way I'm using it against myself."

EJ:                   Yeah. I'm definitely hammering my knees.

Jessica:            You're hammering your knees. You're hammering your knees. You are. And so I'm going to have you give me an example of when this fucking shit comes up in your relationship or whatever relationship feels most accessible to you, and then we're going to unpack it from there.

EJ:                   The feeling will often come up if I feel like my experience or feelings are not being considered by somebody else. And it's usually in really small examples. A really silly one would be if a friend takes the booth seat instead of the chair.

Jessica:            Yeah.

EJ:                   You know? It's something like that.

Jessica:            Yeah. Something⁠—okay.

EJ:                   Something really just meaningless, basically, and it'll pop up.

Jessica:            Okay. So here we go. So I'm going to push on you a little bit more in a second, but let me just tell you why astrologically.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            Because you are hypervigilant⁠—thank you, Saturn, right? That hypervigilance that allows you to be gainfully self-employed in a creative field and all the things. So you're hypervigilant. So you are clocking, the second you walk into the restaurant, all the seats, all the advantages and disadvantages. You are clocking, "Oh shit. That server looks like they're already overwhelmed. Maybe we should sit in this seat instead." You are thinking about thinking while you're thinking.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            You're just doing all the work. 98 percent of people are not doing that, and they're not not doing that because they don't care about you. They're not not doing that because their life is easy. They're just not Saturnian in the particular way you are. They're not Plutonian in the particular way you are. And that's all it is. And so somebody else might take the booth because they think that having the more breezy seat is actually more pleasant because they're running hot. You don't know is the problem. And let me tell you why you don't know: because you don't state what you want and need.

EJ:                   Yeah. I really don't.

Jessica:            So here's the funny thing. You can be like, "The booth is the best seat. Everybody knows the booth is the best seat. And maybe I agree. Maybe I think the booth is the best seat, or maybe I think booths are sticky and uncomfortable, and I'm taking the booth because I'm trying to be considerate to you." We don't fucking know. But what I know is, if in your relationships you don't practice articulating your needs and your preferences and your desires, then you will always feel like people aren't paying attention to you because nobody is going to work hard to be functionally psychic, which is what I would say about you. You're not psychic, but you might as well be, because you're so fucking hypervigilant and observant.

EJ:                   Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Right. So people are like, "Oh my God. You're so intuitive." I don't know whether or not you're intuitive. You're observant as hell.

EJ:                   Yeah. Yeah. It seems to me more like perceptions. Yeah.

Jessica:            I mean, it might be psychic. It might be intuitive. To me, it doesn't matter because it's for sure also perceptive.

EJ:                   Totally.

Jessica:            And that is what's relevant to this conversation, right?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And so there is a way that instead of saying, "Can I sit next to you in the booth?" or, "I don't want to be weird, but can I have the booth today?" or whatever⁠—unless you do that, then your friend will never know that they're taking something from you.

EJ:                   Right.

Jessica:            So you're smiling and you're being agreeable, but you think it's rude or bad to be persnickety or high maintenance or to ask for something, yeah?

EJ:                   I do. Yeah. I really do feel that way.

Jessica:            And do you feel that way when other people ask you for what they need?

EJ:                   It depends, but honestly, sometimes. I don't love that, but it does happen. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Do you have any friends who are chronically single, and then they also don't go out of the house a lot?

EJ:                   Yeah, I do.

Jessica:            And then they kind of complain about how hard it is to meet people, but they functionally never really leave the house?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            You're doing that, just in a different context, okay?

EJ:                   Right.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. So you will persist in having this problem unless you change, and that's a choice you have. And you don't have to make the choice to challenge yourself to change by letting people know a little bit more about what you like. And so you can, if you have actually close friends⁠—and you have actual close friends, right?

EJ:                   I do. Yeah.

Jessica:            You could practice saying, "I got this annoying reading from fucking Jessica, and she told me that I'm supposed to be more transparent about my preferences. And so I'm going to tell you things I like or things I don't like that you would never know if I didn't tell you, but I feel like you do know."

EJ:                   Oh. I like that. Okay.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. And you can blame it on me. I'm cool with it. I'm cool with it. So you can be like, "I like the booth seat. I don't like pizza with mushrooms." You know what I mean? Just do the stupid⁠—the petty list. Do the petty list.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And it is a petty list. That's okay that it's a little petty. It's 2024. People love pettiness. You're okay with that. Do you know what I mean?

EJ:                   I'm in. Yeah.

Jessica:            You're in. 20 years ago, it would have been a problem. You're fine now. And so I would encourage you to just be like, "I make assumptions that you like all of the things I like. Is it true? Do you actually like the booth seat? Do you actually like these things? For me, on a scale of one to five, five being the highest, it is a five." Just have a conversation about interests and preferences, and be clear with them that you're doing it because you realize that you don't. You're weird about it.

EJ:                   Yeah. I am.

Jessica:            You have a weird issue about it. Yeah.

EJ:                   For sure.

Jessica:            Owning that you're weird is really powerful because it's okay to be weird. It's okay to have weird shit. But here's where I want to come back to what I said, which is⁠—I'm going to push on you a little bit more because you don't want me to talk about you and your girlfriend, but I'm going to.

EJ:                   Yeah, I'm prepared.

Jessica:            Oh, you're prepared. Okay. Good. Okay. Good. Will you say her full name out loud?

EJ:                   Yeah. Do you want middle name, too, or⁠—

Jessica:            Give me the whole thing, girl.

EJ:                   Okay. Great. [redacted].

Jessica:            So the two of you fight?

EJ:                   We actually don't. No.

Jessica:            Yeah. I was going to say I'm not seeing any fighting.

EJ:                   Mm-mm. No, we don't fight.

Jessica:            But the bitterness happens.

EJ:                   It does.

Jessica:            Does she know?

EJ:                   She does, but I don't think to the extent that she probably should or that I should communicate it. And I think it's pretty much completely one-sided on my end.

Jessica:            Yeah. I would imagine⁠—I think you'd have a really hard time dating somebody who held on to things because⁠—

EJ:                   I definitely would.

Jessica:            ⁠—you're the one who's holding on to everything.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So you date more easygoing people.

EJ:                   I do. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. There's one big resentment that you have. What is it?

EJ:                   Sorry. If you can give me one second to try to⁠—

Jessica:            Do you guys live together?

EJ:                   We do.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's related to that.

EJ:                   I think that's where it is. Yeah. I think it has a lot to do with her taking up space in the home and noise level. That might be the one.

Jessica:            Yep. So the way that she takes up space in the home⁠—and are we talking about tidiness, or are we just talking about space, like just taking up space?

EJ:                   Tidiness, but that's more of a mild annoyance and not a resentment because I think that's just⁠—living with people, that's going to happen.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm.

EJ:                   But it's more of a figurative taking up space.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yep.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            She has no idea.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            She has zero ideas about this. She has no clue. She does know that you're annoyed frequently.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            But she doesn't know why. And you tell her⁠—tell me if I'm wrong⁠—that it's to do with work or it's to do with other things. You deflect it.

EJ:                   I definitely do. I have started⁠—or recently, we had one kind of bigger conversation where I told her, "I get annoyed with you a lot." But we didn't⁠—

Jessica:            Was she shocked?

EJ:                   ⁠—go super in depth. She was surprised.

Jessica:            Yeah. She was shocked. Mm-hmm.

EJ:                   Yeah. She didn't let on that her feelings were super hurt about it, but she was like, "I had no idea."

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. This is what's confusing. Some of why you're annoyed with her is because you just want to be alone, and you're not alone.

EJ:                   Yeah. That is definitely it, yeah, at least part of it.

Jessica:            Yeah. So she can't do anything right. There's no right way to take up space when you want to be alone.

EJ:                   Exactly. Yeah.

Jessica:            So my question is can you be alone?

EJ:                   I can. I don't know if I can to the extent that I would like to. And I think that's why it's hard for me to bring it up more, because I know there's nothing she can do about that. She lives there.

Jessica:            So here's something interesting. When I asked you about your childhood, you told me your parents didn't tell you to suck up your emotions, but you just decided to suck it up and deal with it and go into your bedroom⁠—

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠—because there wasn't exactly room for you.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So we have the identical situation, right?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            You've re-created your childhood, but only in the way that sucks, right?

EJ:                   Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Cool, cool, cool. So okay. Okay. So the only thing that is the same about your childhood and your current relationship is that you're there. That's the only thing those two things have in common, right?

EJ:                   Yeah. Mm-hmm. I agree.

Jessica:            Okay. Cool. Okay. Good. So I'm going to challenge you. I know you believe that what you said is true: there's nothing she can do about it; there's nothing you can do about it. But I don't believe that's true at all. I believe that you cannot get 100 percent of your needs met because nobody does. Life is compromise and tragedy.

EJ:                   Sure.

Jessica:            However⁠—is it just the two of you in the house, or is there roommates?

EJ:                   It's just the two of us.

Jessica:            Okay. And there's a bedroom and living room and kitchen?

EJ:                   Yeah. We actually have two bedrooms, and then a spare room, also, on top of that. So we have a good bit of a space.

Jessica:            So what you're telling me is you could retire to the extra room⁠, the second bedroom, the primary bedroom, the kitchen, or the living room, or you could even take a bubble bath or a long shower. And any of those things is actually legal and possible in your home at any time.

EJ:                   Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay.

EJ:                   Yeah. I'm starting to hear it.

Jessica:            You're starting to hear it. Good. It's great. It's great. It's great because here's the thing. If you were to⁠—let's say tomorrow you come home; she's just living her fucking gayest life.

EJ:                   Totally.

Jessica:            She's just having a nice day. And you're like, "Why must she exist so loudly?" That is when you go and you run a bath, or you go and you say, "Hey, I'm going to spend time alone. I'm practicing tending to this mood that I return to often." And then you go spend time alone, and guess what'll happen if you do this. You will either cycle in terrible bitterness/resentment⁠—obsess, obsess, obsess, obsess, obsess⁠—right? That's the most likely thing. Or you'll do that, and then you'll be like, "Aha. I knew this was going to happen. I'm going to breathe. I'm going to get into my body."

And then what will happen is you become more annoyed⁠—deeply, deeply annoyed. And then what will happen is you will access what you're actually feeling, which is sad, which is overwhelmed, which is vulnerable, which is sad, which is overwhelmed.

EJ:    Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's actually what you're feeling. And you don't like to primarily access that outside of calamity or privacy. Calamity you can share with people. You need privacy to access this chronic, deep condition of this existential spiritual malaise you have.

EJ:                   I really do. Yeah.

Jessica:            Good news⁠—and I don't want to blow your mind⁠—you have a big house.

EJ:                   I do. I mean, I'm so lucky. You know, it's all there.

Jessica:            Yeah. Lucky schmucky, whatever. Get in a room. You know what I'm saying? And so do you like baths?

EJ:                   I do, but I don't take them very often.

Jessica:            Do you have two bathrooms or one?

EJ:                   We have one bathroom.

Jessica:            Okay. So would taking baths be a habit you could start to invest in, or would it be a difficult thing or an annoying thing?

EJ:                   I could start investing in it. Yeah.

Jessica:            Because let me tell you why I'm going to baths, because your fucking Venus and Pluto is in Scorpio, so it's a water sign. You will have an easier time being in your emotions if you're physically in water. You will have an easier time practicing this habit of getting into your emotions if you're doing something that is completely out of the ordinary, like taking a bath.

EJ:                   Oh, okay. Yeah. I like that.

Jessica:            You know what I'm saying? You're creating a special time. And then you can get cool, like weird with it, and be like, "I use bubbles. I use herbs. I use crystals."

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. Totally.

Jessica:            You can get obsessive about bath stuff, and that's good for your brain.

EJ:                   Cool.

Jessica:            Yeah.

EJ:                   I do love a good ritual. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yes, you do. Yes, you do. And so this is a practice of feeling sadness and feeling tragedy because the truth is that at your core, you were raised with people who love you and who wanted you and who were essentially safe but who were completely in their flight-or-fight mechanisms as they were going through the greatest tragedies of their lives, or some of the greatest tragedies of their lives, while they also had the greatest love of their life, which was you.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. Aw. Yeah.

Jessica:            So, in you, these things are conflated. "If I'm happy, then I lose." This makes your girlfriend's persistently good mood very triggering.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Like, "What is wrong with her? Is she just fine?"

EJ:                   I'm like, "What?" Yeah.

Jessica:            "She's just living? The fuck?"

EJ:                   "Are you smiling?" I will literally sometimes be like, "Why are you looking at me like that?" And she's like, "I just like you. I'm just looking at you."

Jessica:            You're like, "That is a rude thing to do. It's offensive to me." It literally offends your system.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So these things are all intertwined, right? They're all intertwined. And to a certain extent, you have a depth to you that is⁠—it's not from your lived experience. It's not like you underwent a tragedy that you can point to to be like, "Yeah, that's why I have these feelings." It happened when you were one or two years old. You're not going to fucking remember it. It also didn't happen to you, essentially. It was your parents' loss. And so it doesn't work for your logical mind. Your logical mind wants it to be like somebody kicked you in the head when you were five, now you're scared of being kicked in the head, and that makes sense to you.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Virgo Rising. What are you going to do? But you have this in you, and it doesn't matter⁠—I mean, hopefully I've given you some context for where it comes from, but ultimately it doesn't even matter where it comes from. What matters is what you do with it, how you tend to yourself, how you care for yourself. And you would rather just not. You believe that now that you're a grown-up, you should be a self-cleaning oven, and you believed when you were ten years old that you were a big kid and you should be a self-cleaning oven.

EJ:                   Yeah. It's so funny because I think there's a gap between my being that way and seeing myself that way, if that makes sense, because⁠—

Jessica:            Say more.

EJ:                   ⁠—I think I see myself as being a little more willing to get vulnerable or to really dig in than I actually am.

Jessica:            So, when you say you see yourself as more vulnerable⁠—and also, I realize ovens may be a weird metaphor, but it's just like a thing I say.

EJ:                   No, I'm down with the metaphor. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So you see yourself as vulnerable.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Tell me, what does that mean? When you say that, what do you mean?

EJ:                   I think I'm willing to accept my emotional state. I think I'm willing to go deeper with it. I mean, when you said what you said about privacy, I think it is just in private only. So there is this whole unexplored, I guess, channel of vulnerability.

Jessica:            Yeah. And I think, also⁠—I mean, you're incredibly deep. That's what this is about, actually. It's that you're really deep without having a private practice where you are alone with yourself, and you don't have to take care of other people's feelings, and you don't have to consider who is sitting where and who gets the tallest glass of water. You just get to be fucked up and messy and out of balance.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            The Venus/Pluto conjunction means that⁠—you know, Venus is this planet of diplomacy and balance, and Pluto is fucking deep, roiling change. So it's⁠—feeling out of balance in what is fair is like a chronic state for you. A lot of people with this placement⁠—there's a lot of different ways it can play out, but for you, because so many other things in your life has been really lovely and very supportive, you have this blessing where you have great friends, and you know that there's something weird going on in you because what they're doing is not that bad.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Even though you want [indiscernible 00:35:04] them to completion, you technically know it's not that bad.

EJ:                   Right. Yeah.

Jessica:            You're really lucky in that way. But what's hard for you is to say, "Okay, well, there is no reason. I just am intense. I don't have to judge it. I just have to make space for it so that I can figure out what I need around my own intensity.

EJ:                   Yeah. I definitely jump straight into judging it, I think, rather than considering⁠—

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. You want to do something about it. Yeah.

EJ:                   Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so what I'm saying is say to your GF, "Hey, you know how I told you I'm irritated? I'm going to work on myself. And the way I'm going to do it is by practicing going into a room alone so I can practice being alone with myself. Maybe I'll take baths. Maybe I'll sit in a room and just read or something. But if you see me do a squinch face"⁠—because I think you squinch your face when you get really agitated.

EJ:                   Yeah. For sure.

Jessica:            Okay. So, "If you see me doing that, if you see me getting all tight, if you could remember to be like, 'Hey, you can take a bath. You can go in another room. You don't have to hang out with me.'" She wants to hang out with you.

EJ:                   She does.

Jessica:            She has endless energy for chilling.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            She's great.

EJ:                   She really does. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. But you don't. You need a lot of privacy and a lot of alone time.

EJ:                   I have very limited energy for sure.

Jessica:            Yes, you do.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Yes, you do. You're not the chillest person.

EJ:                   No. No.

Jessica:            But you like people to think you're chill. It's very weird.

EJ:                   I do. It is very weird. It feels very weird within me.

Jessica:            Yes.

EJ:                   It feels tangled. Yeah.

Jessica:            It is. It is. Is your family Southern? Is that like a Southern thing?

EJ:                   Yeah. We are really Southern. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So you're supposed to be like a nice Southern girl.

EJ:                   Yeah. Pretty much.

Jessica:            You're supposed to make other people feel comfortable all the time.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            That's not for you. It's not for you.

EJ:                   Yeah. My grandmother especially was very much that way, and my mom, too.

Jessica:            Your mom and your grandmother. So deep, deep programming and conditioning and all the things.

EJ:                   Yes.

Jessica:            And so giving yourself permission to not be a good Southern girl is in your best interest. It's not just changing your habits, but it's breaking with inherited⁠—like an inherited issue of, "It is my obligation. If she wants to hang out, I have to hang out with her."

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            "It is my obligation to match her mood."

EJ:                   That is what it feels like. Yeah.

Jessica:            You're the only one who thinks that. I mean, that's not true. Lots of people have this damage. But in the relationship, it never occurred to your girlfriend⁠—from what I'm seeing about her psychically, it has never occurred to her to be obliged to do something, which is why⁠—

EJ:                   No, not at all. Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠—she just takes up space when she wants to, and she goes and hangs out alone when she wants to.

EJ:                   Yeah. Yeah. She does not mind a bit. She'll just do whatever she feels like doing.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. It's great.

EJ:                   It is.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's great. And what's so great about it is you can do that with her. You can take space from her, and she will not be harmed by it. She will not be harmed by it. And also, sometimes she might be like, "I'm a little butthurt," and you need to practice letting people have their feelings. So, when she's butthurt, you can be like, "Oh my God. You must love me so much that you want to hang out with me even when I'm grumpy."

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. I like the reframe.

Jessica:            You're welcome.

EJ:                   I think that is the hardest part for me, or I guess one of the hardest parts for me about expressing that is worrying that the other person will feel negatively about it.

Jessica:            And you know what? I want you to practice letting other people feel whatever the fuck they feel. You walk around feeling negatively 24 hours⁠—that's a lie.

EJ:                   Sure do.

Jessica:            Not 24 hours.

EJ:                   Maybe 23, 23 and a half. Yeah.

Jessica:            A good amount of hours.

EJ:                   Yeah. For sure.

Jessica:            What if somebody tried to stop you from feeling negative? That would be so very annoying. You don't want that.

EJ:                   It would. Mm-mm.

Jessica:            But one of the things that you do is you take care of yourself by managing other people's emotions because if the girlfriend or the bestie gets into a bad mood, then you have to fucking deal with that. So it's just easier to keep them happy. Do you see what I'm saying?

EJ:                   I do.

Jessica:            And so you're not just doing it to make them happy because you like them or love them. You're doing it because you only know how to take care of yourself in external ways, so you're making sure that your environment isn't bad because if the environment's bad, that makes your insides worse.

EJ:                   Oh. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. But if you practice dealing with your insides and tolerating, "Oh, bestie's in a bad mood. She's allowed to be in a bad mood. Girlfriend really wants me to have dinner with her, and I really want to be alone eating popcorn"⁠—you know what I mean? You get to let people have their feelings without taking care of them, especially around mundane things, which is really where this issue is for you.

EJ:                   Yeah. It really is.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. It's not around the big shit. The big shit⁠—you're good at calamity. You're good at⁠, like—you gotta show up for a process? Yes. You're down. It's the little things. It's almost like in your early development, because it was crisis and calamity 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the first years of your life, it's what your default setting is. It's like what you know. And so you've chosen all these people to be close to you that are lovely, happy, well-adjusted people. What jerks.

EJ:                   I know.

Jessica:            And so then you're just like, "Oh shit. How do I handle this?"

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so this is where the bitterness starts to come in because there's all these tender, vulnerable emotions, and instead of allowing yourself to have them, you suck it up, suck it up, suck it up. And now, of course, you're resentful because you've just been sucking everything up for years on end.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            The good news is it's not that you're secretly a shitty guy.

EJ:                   That is good to hear.

Jessica:            It is. But I will say you do have Mars conjunct the Ascendant, and it is opposite Saturn, and it is square to Jupiter, which means you're very irritable and people are annoying.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            I mean, you annoy you.

EJ:                   I do.

Jessica:            But also, I annoy you, and they annoy you, and he annoys you, and she annoys you. Everybody is annoying.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            This is like a cultural thing a little bit. As a good Southern girl, you're not supposed to be annoyed.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Right?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And your whole thing about, like, "As a kid, I just went to my room, and I dealt with it. And in my relationship, there's no room for me to deal with it"⁠—so you're obviously telling yourself you're not allowed to be annoyed; it takes up too much space.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It takes up the wrong kind of space, whereas I want to say there is great freedom in allowing yourself to be an irritable bitch. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to brag, but I've leaned into it many years ago, and I find it quite satisfying. People know who I am. They know me when I'm coming, and they don't take it personally because I'm just my crotchety self. There is a freedom in self-acceptance. And that doesn't mean that I get to be mean to my friends or snap at my friends. My irritability is not an entitlement. It's just a little bit of my crotchety personality. I'm sure it comes through in the podcast. I don't know; maybe it doesn't. But I feel like it does.

EJ:                   It's admirable to me. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. I mean, I feel like it must come through because there is something about⁠—you have Mars conjunct the Ascendant. You're never going to be a Venus conjunct the Ascendant person. You're Mars conjunct the Ascendant. Somebody looks at you sideways, and your first thought is, "You want to fight? You want to go?"

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

Jessica:            And I want to hold that separate from the bitterness thing.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            This is actually a completely different topic than the bitterness thing. But because they both exist in you, you've probably conflated them.

EJ:                   I think I have. Yeah. And hearing you say that, I can hear that it's separate, but it feels tied up to me.

Jessica:            Of course. Yeah, because you don't ever express your will or your preference until Mars comes in and is like, "I gotta do it." And then it comes off sharp and rude and judgy.

EJ:                   Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big reason why I have a hard time. I feel like I have a hard time sensing where the boundary is with that or when it's appropriate to sort of reference and when it's not or how assertive to be or⁠—

Jessica:            So here's some hot tips. When you are seeing red, when you're like, "Fucking fuck, fuck, fuck"⁠—you know what I'm talking⁠—you know that mood, okay?

EJ:                   I do.

Jessica:            You've waited too long. Now it is⁠—no matter how annoyed you are, no matter how right you are, it's no longer about the thing alone. It's about the thing plus the fact that you've repressed it, plus the fact that you've been repressing things for as many years as you've been alive.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. So when you're seeing red, when you're just like, "Fuck," is not your best moment to verbalize. However, that would require that you either, A, never verbalize, or B, start to notice when you're annoyed before you want to murder someone's face off.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So, when you find someone annoying or something annoying⁠—do you have your phone on you all the time?

EJ:                   Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Okay. Pull up the notes in your phone, and write a note. Bullet point. You have Mercury in Capricorn. You bullet-point that note. What is annoying in this situation? Just write it down. Then ask yourself⁠—you can answer it in another bullet point⁠—"Is this something that I can gently adjust?" And if it is, then you do it. And your brain is going to say, "It's not a big deal. I can just suck it up. There's no room for me in the house. There's no room for me in the house." But there's room if you make it.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            The cool thing is you actually have good friends that actually⁠—if you started asking for things, a couple of them would be weird and not adjust to it well, but most of them would be fine.

EJ:                   Yeah. I don't anticipate any issues with that, honestly. It's all me.

Jessica:            It's a you thing. It's a you thing. Yeah. And so practicing noticing what you are feeling, writing it down and asking yourself, could you literally just take a bite of food off of your friend's plate who took too big of a portion? Could you just eat off their plate? Would that just do it? Because it might just do it.

EJ:                   It might just do it. Yeah.

Jessica:            It might just do it. Or might you say, "Hey, no pressure, but do you want to switch seats? Would you be down?" Practicing asking for what you need⁠—trust me. If you do this, you'll have a shame spiral later.

EJ:                   Yeah. I can⁠—yeah.

Jessica:            You can feel it coming. Yeah. Just even the idea.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            But it's a practice because you would only⁠—the reason why you're doing this stuff is because of survival mechanisms. So, when you challenge your survival mechanisms, you feel like you're dying. It's just like that's a thing. Okay? And if you wait until Mars comes online, then you're angry. Then you're agitated. Then you're like, "I can't help but say it. I'm going to say it rude." Then you're acting like a dude. You're acting like a dude. You're just like, "It's not about my emotions. It's about this thing."

EJ:                   That's so funny. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

EJ:                   Uh-huh.

Jessica:            Sorry. No disrespect to dudes. No disrespect to dudes of the world. But also, it made sense when I said it.

EJ:                   It did. It did. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. And it makes sense you're being a dude because it's Mars.

EJ:                   Right.

Jessica:            Mars is our inner dude. Everyone has an inner dude. Your inner dude is a know-it-all because it's in Virgo and Saturn is opposite. So you have a very strong inner dude who will overtake, and then when you do that, now you're in your head. Now you're annoyed and in your head, and you're justifying everything. You're justifying everything. And when you're justifying everything, you're no longer in the vulnerability. Now the scab has gotten thicker over the vulnerability.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So what happens is, in the big picture, your resentments and your insecurities get worse every time you do that.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So, to recap, you will consistently be irritated because people are irritating and not because something's wrong with you.

EJ:                   Yeah. Okay.

Jessica:            It's okay to be irritated. Agitation, irritability, anger are human emotions, and they are not bad or good. They're just emotions. They're not fun for you, but for as long as you judge them and you decide they're bad, then you will continue to have maladapted coping mechanisms, a.k.a. repressing them. And then you will act out in shitty ways justifying the judgment.

So we start with acceptance, right? Start with acceptance. You have a Mars/Ascendant conjunction. You weren't meant to be a wallflower. Your story was not written that you would never experience, "That was annoying." You can get annoyed by just about anything.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And that is not a bad thing. I mean, again, I don't think that's a bad thing.

EJ:                   I don't, either, at my core. You know?

Jessica:            Of course not, because you know everything's annoying. Some people don't know that. They just have different Mars than us. So all to say, if you can accept, "Oh, I have Mars on the Ascendant. I'm a person who gets annoyed. That doesn't mean I'm resentful. That means I'm annoyed. So, if I find outlets for my annoyance, if I find outlets for the fact that I get these sharp flashes, when they start to pass"⁠—I get anxiety, like flashes of anxiety that overtake me.

And so what I used to do is be like, "Anxiety⁠—what is it? Why is it? What is it? Why is it?" And I would just go deep and try to figure it out. And now what I do when it happens is I try to⁠—when I notice it, I take a deep breath, and I actually release my breath. And then my partner is always like, "What the fuck? What's happening?" And I'm like, "Anxiety flash." It's just an anxiety flash. It's just a flash because if I don't attach to it, it doesn't actually stick around very long most of the time, 80 percent of the time.

And if you could practice being like, "Oh, that's just a hot flash. I'm seeing fucking red"⁠—you know what I mean? If you could practice just be like, "This is just a hot flash," then you don't have to figure out why, and you don't have to figure out what to do about it.

EJ:    Yeah.

Jessica:      You can let it run through your body and leave.

EJ:    I like that. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. But this really only works if you're also working on the core resentment stuff that we've been talking about, which includes being more honest and forthcoming about your preferences and your needs in the little things. Now, you tell me, have we addressed your question? Is there anything else that's in there that I haven't spoken to yet?

EJ:                   So I think there is a very core and fixed belief within me that even though I've heard everything you said and I'm going to work to internalize it in practice, that it still is not okay to voice these preferences. And I feel like, a lot of the time, I feel like I have a million more preferences or opinions than anybody else. And that's hard for me to [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Well, that's real. Okay. So there's a couple things. You have a Mars conjunction, a Virgo Ascendant. You do have more preferences than a lot of people. You are constantly like, "Good, better, best," "Terrible, worse, awful."

EJ:                   Yes.

Jessica:            You have very strong opinions about everything, even things that are completely inconsequential.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            You are just an opinionated person.

EJ:                   Yeah, for sure.

Jessica:            And I'm hearing you say that you think that's a bad thing.

EJ:                   Yeah. It feels like it is to me.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm, except for when we think about your career, eh? When we think about your career, if you weren't so opinionated, you'd be pretty bad at your career.

EJ:                   Yeah. I actually came into this career really recently. This is a super recent change. It's something I've been working towards for a few years but I've only started doing professionally super recently. And I do work under somebody. I'm not the one making the ultimate calls or⁠—

Jessica:            For now.

EJ:                   ⁠—making final design⁠—yeah, for now. That is [crosstalk]⁠—

Jessica:            You know you're going to be self-employed

EJ:                   I got goals. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. You're going to be self-employed, for sure.

EJ:                   I am so glad to hear you say that. Yeah.

Jessica:            And you're going to do good at it. Yeah. You're going to do great at it. You're welcome.

EJ:                   Great. That's the dream.

Jessica:            I'm just trying to point you towards all of these things that you're saying are bad in this way personally are some of your high-functioning skills, right?

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            So I want to say, okay, yeah, it's good to know that some of your preferences⁠—you can let them fucking go. You can practice letting them go. Right now, you're letting go of all of them.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And that's not sustainable, hence resentments, bitterness, right?

EJ:                   Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Whereas if you were to say to yourself, "Okay. I know which seat to sit in, which glass I want to drink out of, which pizza we should share"⁠—I'm obsessing on pizza right now. I had really good pizza the other day. I'm sorry. Right now, you're expressing zero of your preferences.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So maybe you can practice expressing one.

EJ:                   Okay. Yeah. Baby steps.

Jessica:            Maybe you could practice expressing five out of ten. Maybe you could practice⁠—because through this practice, you'll start to be able to identify what of these preferences are actually important to me, because right now, because you're repressing all of them, they're all equally chaotic and important to you, right?

EJ:                   Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So that's one part. The other part is⁠—listen. You say there was lots of room for you in your childhood, but you also say there wasn't room for you in your childhood.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            I believe both of those statements. I believe that there was room for you because you were so self-sufficient.

EJ:                   Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            And you know it. You're working off of that same logic. Six-year-old you realized how much validation you got for being self-sufficient and mature, and you're riding that fucking train all the way into your 30s.

EJ:                   That's so interesting. Yeah.

Jessica:            Being mature has its privileges when you're six.

EJ:                   For sure.

Jessica:            And so you're still trying to be like the person who doesn't need anything because you got it. So, if you practice⁠—see, here's the thing. Coping mechanisms, like true survival mechanisms that we develop when we're little⁠—when you start to dismantle them or when you bump up against them, that part of us is the age we were when we developed the coping mechanism. I'm seeing six years old⁠—could have been five, but it looks like six years old. Does that sound right to you?

EJ:                   Yeah. That sounds right to me. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Yeah. So there is a six-year-old part of you that, every time a preference comes up, is panicked like a six-year-old⁠.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠Emotional like a six-year-old

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Inconsolable like a six-year-old, only wanting to be loved and approved of like a six-year-old⁠—

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠—which is why all of your great logic doesn't work on a six-year-old.

EJ:                   Right. Okay.

Jessica:            And so the only way through this is through this. And what that means is practicing recognizing that you do have emotions that are disproportionate to the situation. And that doesn't mean you shove them down deeper. It just means, "Oh, I need to be curious about this. Okay. I'm feeling many kinds of ways about the fact that I'm not sitting in the seat I wanted to sit in, and I know it's disproportionate. But I'm going to honor that there's a little six-year-old part of me that feels like I never get what I want because the only way I get loved is by being mature and the good girl who never asks for anything." And you're hurting yourself that.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And that's really what's up. It's not about all the petty things. It's about what they represent to this part of you that has never gotten to grow up with the rest of you.

EJ:                   Yeah. Aw. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            And so, when you spend time in one of the many rooms of your palatial mansion⁠—it's not a palatial mansion. I know it's not, but I think it's funny.

EJ:                   It is funny.

Jessica:            When you're spending time in one of the rooms of your mansion, what you can do is spend time with that little inner six-year-old part. You can journal. You can listen to music that six-year-old you listened to. You know what I mean? You can tap into that and care for that because then you will feel sad and bad and like the world is falling apart and all the things you felt when you were six. And that's what you deserve to feel because what you're doing is you keep on paving over nature. You're putting cement over a park. You know what I mean?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And grass keeps on trying to come up, and you're like, "Grass is bad. Why am I so bad?" But the grass is actually the beautiful part. And maybe we actually are going to pull up the grass eventually, and we're going to plant wildflowers or something else. But first we gotta get rid of the cement

EJ:                   Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            You know what I'm saying?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And so listen. I know I'm atypical in saying embrace your rage and your irritability. You're going to go into your life, and everyone around you is going to appreciate that you're not outwardly irritable, right? So I don't want to pretend like, "It's great to be irritable; everything's fine"⁠—or having tons of preferences. But I do want to say you have a good sense of humor. I can see it in your birth chart. You know how to laugh at things, right?

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so having a willingness to be more honest doesn't mean you lose your sense of humor. You can be like, "I have a Virgo Rising's list of preferences."

EJ:                   Yeah. Scroll. Yeah.

Jessica:            "I will share three of them with you right now." And you can tease yourself about it, but be more honest than you're being.

EJ:                   Okay. Yeah. I like that.

Jessica:            See what I'm saying?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Right now, you're doing zero or 100.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so you're like, "I can't imagine doing 100, so I'm going to keep on doing zero." And I say try out three; see how it goes. You know what I mean? What about 20? I don't know. And just practice from there⁠—

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            ⁠—because this is a life practice for you. This is not something that is one and done, because⁠—

EJ:                   No. Yeah.

Jessica:            ⁠—your origin story is always going to be your origin story. Your depth is always going to be your depth. And that's okay. That's not a bad thing. Obviously, people really fucking like you, and not just because you lie about pizza. People like you for lots of reasons. And so the work for you is to give yourself permission to recognize that that part of you that's like, "Everything is unfair," is six years old.

EJ:                   Yeah. That's really helpful to frame it that way.

Jessica:            Yeah. And do you have a therapist?

EJ:                   I do. Yeah. I love my therapist.

Jessica:            Bring this to your therapist.

EJ:                   Cool.

Jessica:            Your therapist is going to love this conversation.

EJ:                   She is going to love this conversation. Cool.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. Good, good, good. Yeah. The thing about astrology that I think is so⁠—just nothing else does it⁠—is that it's like there's a fucking map of this stuff. What therapist could automatically know that there was a death in both of your parents' families⁠—

EJ:                   Right.

Jessica:            ⁠—at an early age and that this would create a thing that would lead to a thing? How do you come up with that?

EJ:                   Right. Yeah.

Jessica:            Really, astrology gives a really fascinating and instructive frame when it's used right. And so your therapist⁠—there's no way she could have picked up on this. You're also⁠—when we first sat down, as I mentioned, you had all these walls. I was like, "I can't see shit." I couldn't see shit on you. I was just⁠—

EJ:                   My apologies.

Jessica:            No, no, no. No. That's good. It's good because I wanted you to show up as you are. And you show up, when you mean to be open, very well protected and walled. And that's good that I got to experience that because then I instantly understood where you're starting from. Your starting place is hiding behind a wall, peeking around it.

EJ:                   Yeah. That's definitely what it feels like.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. That's what it looks like energetically. It's really, really, really what it looks like. And it's good for you to know that that wall doesn't go away when you step in front of it. You always can return behind the wall. You're not trading the coping mechanism for nothing. You want to think about a dial. You know what I mean? Like old-school dial.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            So you can titrate so that you can turn it down or turn it up. And sometimes you turn that shit all the way up, and sometimes you put it in the middle. You know what I mean?

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            It's just about⁠—and this could be something else. When you're feeling activated, if the visual of a dial works for you, visualize, on a dial, do you actually need to be at an eight? Could you dial it down to three?

EJ:                   Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            What would that look like in this situation? And again, you just want to practice using lots of different things to see what actually works for you.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            And for you, you want to in general have three go-to coping mechanisms. One doesn't work for you because you get weird and bored and judgy of it.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            It has to be a cycle of three. It can't be more than three because then you get too in your head, and you don't do anything. Three.

EJ:                   Okay. Yeah. That rings true.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Good, good, good. And then my very last thing I'm going to say is do you guys have an animal in the house?

EJ:                   We do. I have a cat.

Jessica:            Your cat. Okay. I can see her. What's her name?

EJ:                   Her name is Olive.

Jessica:            So is she an indoor/outdoor cat?

EJ:                   She's only indoor, but she goes on the porch. We have a screened-in porch, and she likes to go out there.

Jessica:            Okay. So did she use to be an outdoor cat?

EJ:                   I don't think so, but I didn't have her as a kitten.

Jessica:            It's just the porch.

EJ:                   Yeah. It's just the porch.

Jessica:            It's just the porch. So she's telling me⁠—she's really funny. She's a lot like you. She's a lot like you.

EJ:                   Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            She is very, very⁠—when you do it wrong, she wants you to know.

EJ:                   She does.

Jessica:            She's like you actually are, not like you act. She's like you actually are. So she wants you to know that she would like more time on the porch.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            She would like a water bowl on the porch.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            She has a couple little bat-'em-around toys?

EJ:                   She sures does. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. She would like more of them.

EJ:                   That's so funny. Yeah.

Jessica:            She has her favorites⁠—

EJ:                   She does.

Jessica:            ⁠—but she wants you to get a lot of different kinds because sometimes she gets bored, and she changes her mind.

EJ:                   She does. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I see that.

Jessica:            She's very happy in your home and in your house.

EJ:                   Oh, good.

Jessica:            There is a room she's not allowed in?

EJ:                   No.

Jessica:            Is the door always closed in a room?

EJ:                   Yeah. The bathroom. The bathroom.

Jessica:            Okay. She doesn't like that. She would like you to stop.

EJ:                   I know she doesn't. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay. She's good with her food. She's good with her water.

EJ:                   Oh, great.

Jessica:            Do you ever get her⁠—this is so disgusting and terrible, but you know they sell frozen mice that cats sometimes eat?

EJ:                   Ew. No, I don't, but if she wants that, I'm [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Okay. She's got the heart of a hunter. Do you know what I'm saying?

EJ:                   Yeah. She does. Okay. I can do that.

Jessica:            Or maybe a raw⁠—you might want to try a raw diet out for her or something like that.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            I would just say that she's just like, "What could you give me that is interesting?"

EJ:                   Cool.

Jessica:            She's just like, "What kind of food could you give me?" She's eaten a mouse before?

EJ:                   She's⁠—probably, yeah. Not to my knowledge, but probably as a young one.

Jessica:            She's showing me that she likes a mouse, but she's⁠—

EJ:                   That's so funny.

Jessica:            ⁠—not sure she wants mice around her.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            So that's why I thought of a frozen one.

EJ:                   Yeah. She is a little skittish, so she probably wouldn't want mice around her.

Jessica:            She's moody.

EJ:                   She is.

Jessica:            Sometimes she wants to hunt. Sometimes she doesn't. But she's always just like, "This is my house, and you are the people who work under my employ."

EJ:                   I call it Olive's house.

Jessica:            Yeah.

EJ:                   I've always said it's her apartment or her house wherever she's lived with me.

Jessica:            It is. So she acts—

EJ:                   That's so funny that she's come through.

Jessica:            She acts like you feel.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            She is as charming as you could be if you were just a little more honest and forthcoming.

EJ:                   She is very charming.

Jessica:            Oh, I know.

EJ:                   That's so cute.

Jessica:            And she's a great model of being bossy but still really receptive and loving and nice.

EJ:                   Yeah. Oh, I love that.

Jessica:            Good. Good.

EJ:                   Okay. I can learn from her.

Jessica:            You can absolutely learn from her. You can twin with her.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            Does she go up on someone's shoulders sometimes?

EJ:                   She used to when she was younger. She does like to sit right up here on the chest or close. She sits on the couch right behind our shoulders.

Jessica:            Okay, because she's showing me that that's a really happy place for her.

EJ:                   Aw. Okay.

Jessica:            She has long nails, so you don't like her on your shoulders. Yeah.

EJ:                   I'd trim them, but it's a whole thing, so⁠—

Jessica:            It's a whole thing. She doesn't like it.

EJ:                   Yeah. She hates it.

Jessica:            Does she not have a scratching post?

EJ:                   She does. She has several places where she can scratch, allowed and not allowed. You know.

Jessica:            She understands that you're upset with her nails. She understands why, and she thinks why is because you have weak skin, which is very charming of her.

EJ:                   [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Yeah. She's not wrong. She's not wrong. We're weak. We're weak as humans.

EJ:                   So cute. Okay.

Jessica:            But she wants you to know that it's like a privilege for you when she's on your shoulders. Do you know what I'm saying?

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            Yeah.

EJ:                   Yeah. It is.

Jessica:            She is not a girl with low self-esteem. She knows who she is.

EJ:                   That's wonderful.

Jessica:            She's a very happy, well-adjusted cat.

EJ:                   Oh, that's so cute. Okay.

Jessica:            But she just wanted to come through. She literally⁠—I saw a cat prance, and I was like, "Interesting."

EJ:                   She does prance. Yeah.

Jessica:            She's a prancer. She's a prancer.

EJ:                   She's a prancer. She's a little baby.

Jessica:            Yeah. She is. She's kind of almost like a show pony prancer when she wants to be.

EJ:                   Totally.

Jessica:            And then she's like a wildcat when she wants to be.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So she just wants you to know.

EJ:                   Okay.

Jessica:            She just wants you to know those things.

EJ:                   That is so funny.

Jessica:            She would like more of everything, essentially.

EJ:                   Oh, lovely. I'd be happy to give her more. I can't open that bathroom door, but⁠—she has a bad track record with going in there.

Jessica:            She's very like, "Just so you know, that room should be accessible to me."

EJ:                   I know. Yeah. I'm fully aware. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. Okay. Good. I'm just so glad that you're like, "Yes, I know."

EJ:                   We may be able to work on that, but yeah.

Jessica:            I mean, you don't have to give her everything she wants. But she wants everything.

EJ:                   Great. Aw.

Jessica:            And it's charming.

EJ:                   It is. Oh, I love her so much.

Jessica:            And she's not mad that she doesn't get everything she wants.

EJ:                   Yeah. No, she's not.

Jessica:            She's just a person.

EJ:                   Yeah. She tends to have a very⁠—at least to me, her moods feel light most of the time, even though they're moody. Yeah.

Jessica:            So this is because she's always totally forthcoming about what she wants when she wants it, and she's not holding back. So this is a perfect fucking metaphor.

EJ:                   That is perfect.

Jessica:            Look at you with a perfect cat for you.

EJ:                   Mm-hmm. That's my girl.

Jessica:            That's your girl. That's your girl.

EJ:                   All right. Awesome. That's so sweet. I'm so glad she came through.

Jessica:            Me, too. What a great way to end the reading. That's very nice.

EJ:                   Yeah.

Jessica:            I love it. Well, I'm so glad we did this reading.

EJ:                   Me, too. Thank you so much.

Jessica:            Oh my God. It is my pleasure. And I hope you find ways of embracing all the things, all the emotions.

EJ:                   All of the things. I'm sure I will. I really appreciate the help and your sharing your expertise and your time. It's very meaningful to me, so thank you so much.

Jessica:            It is my pleasure.