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

Vicky:             So my life has really transformed the last few years as I've been working to recognize and heal wounds of abandonment and neglect. And my creative practice has been an amazing catalyst for most of this work, which initially surrounded my mother's mental breakdown many years ago. But more recently, I'm seeing that my romantic relationships also play a role. I love in a deep, almost devotional way, which I've grown to see beauty in, but it also makes love devastating. My relationships and situationships have felt intense and karmic, often leaving me with an existential loneliness that always seems to lead back to my mother, and it makes it hard to show up to my creative work. I'm wondering how much of these love wounds are inherited, how much is my own, and whether it even matters.

Jessica:            Okay. Lots of questions in your question, and there's so much to say. Okay. Hold on for a sec. I don't know why I'm having a weird cough. Oh. I get it. We're starting in a weird place. You don't speak up for yourself?

Vicky:             Oh.

Jessica:            (laughs)

Vicky:             (laughs)

Jessica:            We didn't—sorry. It's not funny at all, though. It's not funny. It's just funny because it's not funny.

Vicky:             You know what? I'm trying to—I feel like I'm doing a better job of it, but no. In a lot of instances, I would say I don't.

Jessica:            Yeah. You talk, but you don't speak up for—

Vicky:             I talk.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. You talk, but you don't—it's like there's this block. It's like as soon as I got on the call with you, my throat started being weird, and I thought, "Oh no. Me." But no, you. It's like you feel like you're not supposed to say what you're really thinking, communicate what you're really needing.

Vicky:             Absolutely.

Jessica:            And so this is related to mom stuff. Is it inherited or is it early developmental experiences, or is it both? I'm going with option C. I created all the options there, but I went with it's both. It's both. You have enough data to sort through from your own lived experience to fill up a lot of therapy sessions. So, before we get too deep, you were born December 21, 1994, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at 8:15 a.m. local time. And I got so many things to say, and I'm going to make you kind of unpack parts of your question in a second.

But first of all, Capricorn Rising—you have a Capricorn Rising, which means that you have this lived experience that your relationships are karmic or fated, and people come into your life, and it feels heavy and like there's work to do, and sometimes that work is romantic or creative, and sometimes it's labor. But it happens, and then when it's done, it just feels like it's done. Does that make sense to you?

Vicky: Yeah. I—yeah, it does.

Jessica:            So you also have the Neptune/Uranus conjunction in Capricorn sitting on your Ascendant. And so, on top of everything else, you're super weird, and I mean that as a compliment, but also, super weird. You are not like everyone else, and sometimes you're good with that and it's like you wear it on your chest and you're confident about it, and other times, you're like, "Does that mean I don't get love? Does that mean I don't get safety?" And it fucks you up and makes you feel really anxious.

Vicky:             100 percent. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. All that said, we've—I'm going to give you one more thing, and then we're going to get more into the question itself. In your birth chart, you've got Venus conjunct the North Node. And you're still young, right? You're around 30? 30 or 31?

Vicky:             Just turned 30.

Jessica:            Just turned 30. Okay. Great. All to say your North Node/Venus conjunction tells a really clear story that you have come here to identify what your values are, cultivate self-worth, and from that place of self-acceptance, self-knowledge, self-worth, cultivate intimate relationships with other people, which can include a partner, or it could not be about a partner. It depends on your values. That's kind of like the separate part. And there is this part of you that is almost superstitious, like, "If I say it, then I'm responsible to it. If I see it, then I have to handle it."

Vicky:             Right. Yeah. I suppress a lot of things for that reason, I feel like.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah. And that's what's happening in my throat, is because you want this reading—fuck yeah. You are 100 percent ready. And also, there is this part of you that's really scared because if I name something that you know but you've been actively trying to not name, then you feel this sense of responsibility and accountability and obligation to handle it.

                        So let me say part of being the child of neglect and the child of abuse is figuring out how to parent yourself. But that's because, as a kid, when you had no idea what you were doing, you had to be the adult, right?

Vicky:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And most children—when we pull ourself up by our bootstraps and act like the adult and parent ourselves, we either are too permissive, there's no structure, we're wild, or we're just the fucking worst, most abusive, just overly strict forces towards ourselves. You went for the latter; am I right?

Vicky:             I guess so, yeah. There was no structure. I was always craving that in some way. And I think it's come to my attention more recently, this need that's just everywhere around me to make sure that things are perfectly in control, just—even when I speak, it has to go through a filter. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And even that part of you that's like, "If I name it, if I see it, if I understand it, then I'm responsible to it. And if I'm responsible to it, it means I have to handle it now, and I have to handle it well"—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —that is overparenting. It's not overparenting; it's being kind of a dick to yourself. It's being like a shitty parent, basically, right? Somebody who parents through "shoulds" and obligation and punishment—that's not the parent you need from you, and it's not the love that you need from you. You referenced being devotional in the way you love, but not to yourself.

Vicky:             No. I've been trying to learn that.

Jessica:            It's a practice. But to learn devotion to the self, I would say, is like step five, and you're struggling to land step two. So devotion to the self is a great down-the-road goal. The first goal, the first thing I would encourage you to be landing, is noticing when you're mean, restrictive, perfectionistic, demanding, punishing—I'm using these words as synonymous—and then, from that place, rewording it, being kind to yourself, catching yourself in the act of perpetrating harm because you feel like you're drowning at sea, so you're like, "I have to hold on to this one thing to keep me afloat."

Vicky:             I have this narrative in my head sometimes that—or at least two narratives that conflict with each other. And one is that if—and I already feel just the way that this is going to sound. One is, if I give myself too much leeway, I'll take it. And so, just like with meeting goals, for instance, I've been on this writing project, and I'm scared sometimes to take a break because I'll never want to come back.

Jessica:            Right.

Vicky:             But then, on the other side of that, I'm also—I'm like, "I need to take a break, but if I do, am I just creating an opening for myself to leave?" And so there's this just constant doubt about what to do.

Jessica:            Those two things didn't sound that different. They just sounded like different narratives to make yourself crazy with, but it's the same kind of—you know what I mean?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            On the one hand, we want to take a moment to validate the wisdom in that worry. The wisdom in the worry is you've seen firsthand, when adults give themselves permission to fuck off, how they can lose themselves. Right? Right? So you've seen your parents do that?

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            And other adults. And so there's a wisdom to the worry. You know that it's not a given that if you take a break that you'll come back, or you know that if something's really important to you, it requires and deserves to have your intention and your attention. Right?

Vicky:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay. I have heard—and it could be not true, but I have heard that bullying yourself into being creative is not super effective.

Vicky:             It doesn't seem to be.

Jessica:            No. Of course it isn't. It fucking sucks because you can bully yourself into doing math problems where it's like, empirically,  1 + 1 is 2. I mean, we can get quantum physics-y about that, but let's—you know, 1 + 1 is 2. And you can bully yourself to memorize things and all of that. It's not healthy. It's not a good idea. I am not advocating for it. But if you are any kind of artist, if you're working with the Tarot, if you're working on writing or singing or anything creative and you bully yourself, first of all, it's just a question of when you stop enjoying doing it. You're making it unpleasant for yourself. And the other thing is you're not developing a healthy relationship to your muse. Is the concept of the muse something that you—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Is that something you have a relationship with?

Vicky:             Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like most of my practice is channeling and getting myself in a good place where I'm able to receive what's being channeled, and that's been the hard part.

Jessica:            Yeah. Of course it's hard, because it's like you're trying to shove your muse into your timeline and in your way. And yeah, that doesn't work. Having a relationship to your muse, to your creativity, to creation, to spirit—whatever we want to call it—requires that we have a reciprocal, back-and-forth relationship. And that requires that you are receptive to when your muse says, "Not right now. Not this way." So, I mean, it sounds too simple because that means you would have to do the really hard work. Let's say you—okay. You tapped in, and you could feel—actually, I'm going to have you do this. Say your full name out loud.

Vicky:             [redacted].

Jessica:            Do me a favor. Take a breath and put all your energy into your belly. You seem so calm, but you're so nervous. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. You're really, really convicted that you have to do it all by yourself and that you shouldn't need help from anyone else, and in fact, other people's help can really fuck you up. So, in your childhood, did you trust your mom, and then she disappointed you, expect something from her, and then it bottomed out; it didn't work out for you? Was that like a pattern?

Vicky:             That was definitely a big thing with my grandmother. I had a lot of matriarchs—my mom, my grandmother, my aunts who raised me. But that was a big thing for her. My mom didn't usually make as many empty promises. It was just—she was young, you know?

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. But your grandmother did, and your grandmother was one of the people who raised you?

Vicky:             Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, she still does, and it's still frustrating, but I can see now—like, she just—I don't know. She's very imaginative in her claims.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            She means it when she says it.

Vicky:             In that moment.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             Even when I—I tell her now actively—I'm like, "You don't mean that." And I've taken it as just her humor, but yeah.

Jessica:            She means it when she says it, but she—I don't know what cartoon I'm seeing, but she reminds me of a cartoon character who's basically like an upper body. She got no legs. She got no—and I don't mean this in a physical way. I mean she's got no grounding whatsoever. She's floating around—

Vicky:             100 percent, not present with me or anybody.

Jessica:            Not at all, with anyone. With anyone. But this is so important because when I look at you energetically, your safety system is so well wired that even as I look at you energetically to, like, "Okay. Let me see that relationship to your muse. Let me see what you do there," your whole system is like, "No. No." You go still like a statue, and then you dissolve into the background. It's very expert.

Vicky:             Yeah. I got a reading a year ago, and I was told that because I've been working on this specific project for like five years now and I was told that I needed to grieve, essentially, for it to come out—and I did start making big waves with it years ago when I was in a grieving process, and it was too much. It was just—it was intense. And so I wanted to keep the writing going, but I was too afraid to return to the feeling. And so I've just kind of been stalled. But I mean, I think that's the protection system that you—

Jessica:            Yeah. It's stopping you—I mean, that makes sense because it's so like stone. It's like stone. And we're going to come to the writing project in a moment; don't worry. But this is showing up for me around intimacy with other people. So, whether it's dating or friendship—

Vicky:             Yes.

Jessica:            —the self-defense mechanism is so subtle and so effective that you think and feel, "Oh, I'm open, and I'm letting this person in," whilst you are not.

Vicky:             This is news, but maybe it's not news.

Jessica:            That's interesting. I think you're confusing showing up for relationships, figuring out what the other person wants and needs, and participating, which—you're excellent at those things, phenomenal. Ten stars. All of that is really different than being present. So the relationship to the muse, then the relationship to letting other people in, is interrupted because you are so committed to protecting yourself from falling apart and stopping yourself from losing yourself—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —which—on the one hand, I want to say good job. You know what I mean? There is a value in your self-defense mechanism. When we look at self-defense mechanisms, if we're like, "That's fucked up," or, "I want to change that," then they just get stronger, which is kind of what you do. You're like, "I'm going to go headfirst into this, and I'm going to fix it." And then your self-defense mechanisms are like, "Cool. I'll just get bigger. I'll protect"—you know. That's what it's there for.

                        So okay. You really want me to look at this art project. We're going to come back to the rest of the stuff, but what—it's not an art project. I'm sorry for calling it that. But it's a writing project. What is it?

Vicky:             It's a film.

Jessica:            You're writing a film?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Is it kind of a documentary-ish?

Vicky:             It's a narrative, but it's—I feel like I'm embodying it, too. It's based on my experience with my mom and my family, and it's thematically about the themes we're talking about of surrender. So, in this way, it's like I'm writing this thing that I haven't quite solved and that I'm still in.

Jessica:            Yeah. So I'm going to give you the first bit of advice. If expedience is your primary goal, which—I'm 50/50 if it is. But if expedience is your primary goal, then you need to fictionalize it more. Then you need to have this character more divorced from you, okay? Because if this character is really different enough from you, then the writing will flow because you won't feel like you have to tell the truth in the same way that you're holding yourself to telling this truth.

Vicky:             Sure. Sure.

Jessica:            How old is the character?

Vicky:             She is 17, the one that's closest to my experience. Yeah.

Jessica:            And does she like the same music as you, that you actually did?

Vicky:             Yeah, she does.

Jessica:            Yeah. Mm-hmm. And is she the same sexual orientation as you?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. If you change those two things, it'll be easier to write the story quicker.

Vicky:             I see.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yep.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            And it doesn't have to be those two things, although the music has to be. The music has to be is what I'm seeing. This is way too personal.

Vicky:             Oh.

Jessica:            You created a soundtrack of your own childhood—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —in this script. And there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, but if you're trying to be more expedient, then it has to be closer to fiction than therapy. Now, part of you doesn't care about expedience. Part of you only wants to tell this story in a way that is both true but also true to your process.

Vicky:             A big part.

Jessica:            Yeah. And that part of you really gets your muse and understands that you can have a night where it's like you're writing, and it's both like plugging in to yourself and feeling good, but it's also like vomiting. It's just like so many things at once. It's hard on you—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —and it also strengthens you. It's so much. And then your system needs a monthlong break.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's your process. And instead of you being like, "Oh. I've been doing this long enough to see there's a pattern. There's a process. I write, write, write, and then I am completely uninspired, and then I write, write, write, and I'm completely uninspired," or disconnected or whatever it is. If you could just develop a healthier relationship to your own process, then you can write the story that is the true story.

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah. It's taking some time for me to learn what that is.

Jessica:            The process?

Vicky:             Yeah, the process, and I guess my relationship to it.

Jessica:            Okay. Let's talk about that for a moment. In your birth chart, you have a T-square. So you've got Saturn in the second house sitting opposite Mars in the eighth house, and they're both square to Jupiter in the eleventh. And Saturn and Mars are both intercepted. Saturn is intercepted in Pisces in your second house. Mars is intercepted in your eighth house in Virgo.

                        And there's a lot of things to say about that, but the first thing I want to say is that in your early developmental experiences and also in your mom's history, you didn't get to choose what reality was in a really kind of heavy way. There wasn't a routine or set of rituals that you could really rely on or that your mom could rely on. Your relationship to structure was—you were told that you shouldn't want those things, basically, when you were little. You were told that wanting consistency, even a consistent morality, was like, no, you shouldn't want that.

                        And so part of your Saturn/Mars opposition in intercepted signs speaks to the necessity for you to parent yourself, to create structure for yourself around your relationship to routine and flow—Virgo and Pisces. Having a ritualistic relationship to something like writing—it's not just about, "I sharpen a pencil. I pull out a book. I turn on a light or I burn a candle." It's not just about those things. It's about the energy flow because Virgo is all about those actions, but Pisces is about that energy.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            And so, if you were to truly tap into the energy, then you would recognize when there wasn't flow. And if you were to be a kind and supportive parent to yourself, you would say, "Oh, there's no juice here. There's no gas in the tank. So what ritualistic thing do I have energy for? Maybe it's editing. Maybe it's—I don't know—watching a TikTok about fucking—the process of writing a film or—

Vicky:             I see.

Jessica:            Do you see what I'm saying?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Like, "Where can I invest? Where is the energy flowing?" because what you're doing is you're acting in such a way where you're saying to your muse, "I know better, and I'm going to tell you what time it has to be."

Vicky:             That's incredibly helpful to hear.

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

Vicky:             Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica:            And it's a reiteration of trauma. You may have heard me say over the years that there's, yes, perpetrator and victim, but then there's the interjected perpetrator. And so you have taken on this thing that actually really fucked you up when you were a kid, where you were told what you were supposed to feel and when you were supposed to feel it and what you were not supposed to feel and how you were not supposed to show it. And now you're doing it to yourself, but you're doing it to yourself in your relationship to your own creativity, your relationship to your muse to your spirit.

Vicky:             Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            And because Jupiter is square your Mars and your Saturn, your healthiest, best self is going to be impatient. You're impatient. Saturn/Mars opposition? Slow. That means your process is slow. You are slow.

Vicky:             I am.

Jessica:            You are slow. And Jupiter is like, "Okay, and that's absolutely not okay. We gotta go, go, go, go, go, go." And so a way to navigate that is to recognize—imagine that there were tiers to a goal, like a circle and then a circle around that and a circle around that—three circles. And inside the center of the circle, the nipple of this image, if you will, is the center goal. "I am writing this movie. I am in flow, and I am writing this film." And then the goal outside of that might be editing previous chapters or doing something that's directly related to working on the manuscript. And then the third, furthest from the nipple of the story, is—I'm sorry. Is "nipple" a weird way to say it?

Vicky:             No. It's great.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Okay. Great, because I'm like, "Is that weird? I don't know."

Vicky:             No. I'll carry this with me.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Good. Excellent. So then the furthest circle out is things that contribute to my relationship to my muse, things that contribute to my process as a writer, things that contribute to my mental or spiritual health. So they're not directly related, but they're an essential set of components that support the strength and unity of that center goal.

Vicky:             Ugh.

Jessica:            Yes. You're welcome, because what this does is it gives you a way to impatiently, quickly do things that are related to your goal while not constantly shoving the stallion of your muse's face into water and be like, "Drink. Drink, God damn it. I need you to be hydrated," because that's not actually how that works for you. And my guess is you're almost old enough—you're not old enough yet, but you're almost old enough to know through adult experience that every single time you push yourself and force yourself, it has the opposite impact.

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             I used to think that I wouldn't feel free until I sort of got to the place that I wanted to with this project. And now I'm realizing I literally can't get there until I feel that freedom.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes. And this is, again, related to childhood stuff because in order for you as a child to be safe, you had to secure the adults around you. You had to manage the adults around you to make them safe, and if they were safe, then you could be safe. Right? But guess what: that's not how it works in adult you. Adult you actually gets to put the air mask on your own inner child before you try to fix things or whatever. I don't know. But you know what I'm saying.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Adult you actually needs to develop a different set of skills because adult you does have agency.

Vicky:             Right. Yeah.

Jessica:            And little-kid you didn't.

Vicky:             I have to remind myself of that all the time.

Jessica:            Yeah. So will you say the name of your manuscript?

Vicky:             [redacted].

Jessica:            I mean, again, you've shielded it so well that I'm having a hard time seeing it, which is an odd thing to do. But you've done it because you've made this document so vulnerable that if I could really see it, I would be seeing more than you're ready for, more than you're comfortable with. So that makes me wonder why you're so driven and committed to keeping this so accurate to what actually happened and how it actually felt.

Vicky:             Because it feels like this synthesis of just everything I'm learning and everything I've learned, and I've had this narrative and my head that I've also been channeling this lesson, like this is something that I'm giving to the world about how to navigate transformation in a time where there's so much of it. And so I guess I've just put—it feels high stakes in this way.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. So I'm going to throw out contrast to what you're saying, which is you could do exactly that, exactly what your goal is, and have certain very intimate unimportant details, or very intimate some important details, be fictional. My worry is that you have created something—and this feels very you, but you've created something that is so raw and real, so a part of you—it's like an appendage, this manuscript—that your relationship to self-protection and hiding yourself as a way to navigate your safety will happen with the manuscript, as well, because it's so personal. It is so personal.

                        And I am not saying you're doing the wrong thing. I'm genuinely not. But I am saying let's fast-forward a month, a year—doesn't matter. You've finished the manuscript. If you find yourself in a state where you're like, "I don't know why there's no flow. I can't get anyone to read it," or you're feeling weird about it, I would say you should create a second version of it with important things changed. Again, music must be very important to you because I feel like music should change. It's too personal because once you give this to the world, it's not completely yours anymore.

Vicky:             Right. Right.

Jessica:            You know? And you do like to process things privately.

Vicky:             I do.

Jessica:            Yeah. You know, I have this cat, Panda Elizabeth Henry. I don't know if you've ever heard me talk about him.

Vicky:             No, I haven't.

Jessica:            Okay. Panda Elizabeth Henry—I cannot tell you what an amazing guy he is. He adopted me. He is the most amazing guy, and I talked about him a lot on the podcast over the years. And then he died. It was terrible. It was awful. And I didn't talk about it. This is actually the first time I'm saying this in public. He died, and it was devastating. It was just like—I mean, you know. You're a cat person.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It was like I lost my best friend. I did. I did. You know? It was awful. And I knew that it would be important to other people who had their own little parasocial relationship with Panda Elizabeth. And I needed to keep it private while I was in such a raw state, and I needed to keep it private because that's how I process things. I process things privately as well. You have Sun and Mercury in the twelfth house. Welcome to being a twelfth-house baby. You process things in private.

                        And so I'm sharing this with you because having self-awareness is powerful, but when it's not paired with self-acceptance, it just feels like chaos inside of you. And so what I want to just say is the second I share my very private grief over my beloved cat, it's now public. And so then your feelings about my cat or about me become part of my narrative and my experience. They're no longer just mine. It will change.

                        And what happens when you tell your story is it's completely yours forever, and also, it ceases to be yours to a certain extent—

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            —which is a trauma point for you because in your childhood, your feelings, your needs, your preferences—there was no space for them.

Vicky:             But I'll say that there's an appeal to that in—I don't want to be the only one to carry it anymore. And I know it's such an extreme opposite to be like, "So you have it, whole world."

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             But that's kind of where I am, in the same way that I feel like I have this need to be in control, but I also have this fascination and this part of me that wants to completely get lost and surrender.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm not disagreeing with you, but again, I'm throwing some contrast into this conversation because your narrative is so tight that it's part of the constriction pattern. You're stuck, right? That's why we're here. That's what we're talking about.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            So let me ask you this. When you're dating someone or when—I don't know if you have friends you've been friends with since you were five years old. If so, I'm not talking about them. But with your friends, do you share your childhood stuff? Do you share this—you do? Okay.

Vicky:             I do. Yeah.

Jessica:            And do you share the feelings about it, or do you just share the story of it?

Vicky:             With some of them, I share the feelings. I mostly share the story. I mostly share the events. I'm leaning into asking for support when I need to also share the feelings with specific friends.

Jessica:            Yeah. The reason why I asked you this is because you're making a movie with actors—ideally speaking, right?—with actors and a soundtrack. And this is why I'm fucking harping on the music thing, is because the music evokes something inside of you.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's so personal to your feelings. And you're not practiced as a young adult with sharing the feelings with other people and feeling safe. And so I'm not saying, therefore, what you're doing is wrong in any way or you should change it. But I'm saying, if you want to understand what's blocking you, you're taking care of yourself by not allowing you to go ahead and rip your guts out of your belly and your heart out of your chest and then be like, "Here, world. Now you can feel what I'm feeling when I'm feeling it."

Vicky:             I see.

Jessica:            "Before I have come to safety with these things in myself, I'm going to let you experience them with me."

Vicky:             Yeah. That's deep.

Jessica:            It's deep. It's not just telling a story. You're writing a manuscript that—I mean, telling a story in a written book is very intimate as well. I'm not trying to suggest it isn't. I would probably be having this conversation if that's what you were doing. But you're like, "No. I'm going to turn up the volume to the max and put actors and emotions and soundtrack and feelings." And your own wisdom, your own not super unconscious but unconscious mind, is like, "I'm not fucking ready for that. I'm not ready to share. This is too—wait. What?" It's like you're just now starting to share your feeling part with your story, with people, and then you want it to be like a big-picture film, right?

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            You are allowed to have boundaries and limitations, my friend. I know. You want it all at once.

Vicky:             I do.

Jessica:            You want something that is very Jupiterian, very Sagittarius, and you have Jupiter in Sagittarius, right?

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            You want the story to be the whole thing.

Vicky:             I do.

Jessica:            You do. You want the story to be the whole thing. And this is that expression. You can drag a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. That expression means—and it's always the thing I think about with Sadge and Jupiter stuff. What that expression means is you cannot force your timeline and your version upon something wild and free.

Vicky:             I see.

Jessica:            And you are trying to do that to yourself, to be clear. You're trying to say to yourself, "The story is important. The story is words. The story is wisdom. The story is our interconnection. It's like all of these things." And you're right about 100 percent of what you're saying. The problem is you're ignoring the most tender part of the story, which is the feelings. I am not trying to dissuade you from doing this. I want to be clear because I know it kind of sounds like I am. I'm not.

                        I'm just trying to advocate for you to be a better friend to yourself because if we were friends and I was feeling really vulnerable about my cat dying, you wouldn't say, "Even though you don't feel safe, you should talk about it on your podcast."

Vicky:             Right. Right.

Jessica:            You wouldn't say, "Even though you don't feel healed, you should come out to this party tonight. I think it's really important that you leave the house and stop feeling your feelings." Am I right about that about you?

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't.

Jessica:            No, you wouldn't, because that's terrible, and it elongates the suffering of the person.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            But you're doing it to yourself. Yeah. And you're doing it to yourself out of a fear that comes from your childhood and from your epigenetics, your ancestry, that if you don't put the fucking pedal to the metal, if you don't work hard, then you'll somehow float away or something bad will happen, and then you won't have the choice or you'll lose the chance.

Vicky:             Yeah. "I'll lose the chance" is—I'm feeling a lot of pressure around that.

Jessica:            Yeah. I'm going to have you say the name of the manuscript again.

Vicky:             [redacted].

Jessica:            I can see a little bit more of it. Okay. So you've written like half of it?

Vicky:             I've written most of it. It's the third act that I've been—that's not true. I've been re-editing things in the second act, and then the third act is shaky.

Jessica:            Okay. Your writing is very strong. This you know, right?

Vicky:             Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Your writing is very strong. Your characters are very strong. Does this character have a love thing?

Vicky:             Yeah. It's hardly a thing. It's hardly a beat. It's lingering in the background.

Jessica:            You're overworking it, okay? So, first of all, you're fucking overworking it. I can't be the first person to tell you that.

Vicky:             No.

Jessica:            Okay. And the reason why you're overworking it is because you're not ready to share something this raw and vulnerable, period. There's that. The other thing is that thing should come into the foreground more, the romance. It's juicy. It's a juicy story, and your telling of it from 30 years old is that it isn't juicy. But it is juicy. It reveals a lot more about you, a.k.a. your character, than you're yet comfortable being with.

Vicky:             That's interesting.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. And here's—okay. This is my advice. You take it or leave it. It doesn't matter to me, okay? One day, light a fucking candle—ritual. We're bringing ritual into the mix. You're going to light a candle. Be like, "Okay. I'm going to write with this candle." And then you're going to do a writing exercise, 3 minutes on the clock, 17 minutes on the clock—doesn't matter. Pick a number, a finite number. And it has to be less than 30 minutes, okay?

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Your perfectionism kicks in when there's more than 30 minutes.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You're welcome. So less than 30 minutes. Something really short is ideal, I think. And you're going to write for—let's say it's three minutes—about what actually happened in that romance thing you're referencing in the story, what you remember.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Boom. Alarm goes off. Stop. Get up. Do some jumping jacks. Shake your body. Eat an ice cream cone—whatever, whatever, whatever. And then sit down, time on the clock. Write a fictional version of it.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm.

Vicky:             Journal about it. Then write a fictional version after.

Jessica:            Yep. But the journaling isn't really journaling. The journaling is writing for your manuscript because your manuscript is so true to life.

Vicky:             Right. Right.

Jessica:            So it's not really journaling. This is actually—both of these are manuscript exercises.

Vicky:             I see.

Jessica:            Yeah. You're not ready to be honest with yourself about that story.

Vicky:             Oh, that's—ugh.

Jessica:            Does that make sense to you?

Vicky:             I want to say that I feel almost desperate to be honest, but I feel like on a subconscious level, I could totally see—

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Hold on. No. I used the wrong word. "Honest" triggered you. Okay. Wait. Let me just see. Am I seeing this correctly? And this is what happened, right? I'm talking about what happened, not about what's in the manuscript.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            It was a guy. He as was older? Or tall?

Vicky:             He was tall.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. So he was your same age, but he was tall.

Vicky:             Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm sorry. When I'm psychic, I can't tell the difference between older and tall because I'm a short person, and that's just like a thing I developed. So he was tall. You dated?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            But you kind of hold the story like you didn't really date, and it wasn't that big a deal.

Vicky:             Oh. I see.

Jessica:            Okay. But he was actually very kind to you?

Vicky:             Yes.

Jessica:            And he was, now that you have had a decade of adult experience, kind of looking back, a special man. I mean, he wasn't a man. He was a young man. But having met many other men, you can see that he was a good guy, yeah?

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Did you get bored of him?

Vicky:             No, I didn't. I think he did. I think we grew at different rates.

Jessica:            He got bored of you?

Vicky:             It felt that way. Yeah.

Jessica:            Huh. Did he tell you that?

Vicky:             He didn't tell me that, but I didn't feel like he was engaged when he was with me in the way that he was around other people. We dated for a long time, and that breakup actually was what really pushed me into writing the story. But I never—yeah, I never—

Jessica:            The breakup pushed you into writing the story. That is so intensely accurate, and yet you've made it a background/nothing part of the story. Fascinating. Okay. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So I'm going to make you say his full name out loud and then say yours.

Vicky:             Okay. His name is [redacted]. Mine is [redacted].

Jessica:            Huh. He's really different than I thought he'd be.

Vicky:             Me, too.

Jessica:            I bet. I bet. I bet. I bet. Okay. Yeah. No, you're wrong. You're not being honest with yourself. I mean, listen. You're being honest with yourself that that's what you thought as a teenager. You thought that when he was around other people and he was laughing and easy and chill and dynamic—am I seeing this correctly? He was all those things?

Vicky:             Yeah. Very much.

Jessica:            Yeah. You thought, "Well, why isn't he like that with me when it's just us? That must mean he's not into me. He's not present with me."

Vicky:             Yeah. I thought it meant he didn't value me or didn't see value in me in the way that he did in other people. And I kind of inherited that belief about myself, too, that I was less valuable.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. So that's not what was happening, from what I'm seeing. From what I'm seeing, there was a couple things happening. One is that, at the beginning of the relationship, the two of you really shared your stories. You were raw and vulnerable with each other, yeah?

Vicky:             Yeah. I remember that.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Then there was the beginning, and then the two of you kind of went out into the world together and were like a fun, dynamic couple together, yeah?

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            So, act one, the two of you are intimate. You shared real stories. You unpacked things that neither of you had the emotional intelligence or bandwidth to actually process yet.

Vicky:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Act two, you're like, "Okay. Fuck that. We're young. We're dumb. Let's party. Let's hang out with people." You were a great couple to be around, yeah?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Act three, he started to feel sad. He started to feel the weight of having confronted some of the shit of his childhood, and he started to be able to see the difference between when you were pretending to have fun and when you were actually having fun out around other people.

Vicky:             I thought I felt that way. I felt like I was the one with the baggage, and I felt like we were always sort of talking about my family history and things that were related to my mom. We didn't talk about his. He didn't bring his up as much.

Jessica:            No, but he brought it up. For him, it was a lot. I don't want to blow your mind, but men are so different. You're a talker. You process through yada, yada, yada—you and me both. You and me both. You know what I mean? But he's not a talker. That's not how he processes things. And so for you to tell the details of your story thrice was like for him to speak around his story once because you're different people. And at a certain point, you did talk more about your story because you were starting to do this thing where you circle the drain. You just circle the story and circle the story, waiting for the emotional catharsis to occur when you repeat the same words. And that doesn't ever fucking work.

But you were young, and you were trapped in that cycle. And at first, he was in the cycle with you, but then he started to feel like there wasn't room for him in that cycle. And there wasn't. There wasn't, because it was like you were telling the same story, so he could have been there or not been there; the telling of the story wouldn't have changed.

Vicky: This is so interesting. I just never felt he was really interested in the story.

Jessica:            You're not 100 percent wrong, and you're definitely not right. And also, I wasn't there. So I'm going to say a bunch of words more now, but I wasn't there. You gotta trust yourself more than me. That said, he was interested in the story. He was interested in you. He cared about you. He got to know you. How long were you with him, like a year plus?

Vicky:             Six years.

Jessica:            Six years. Sorry. That's a very long time. Okay. So you were with him from 17 until what?

Vicky:             From 19 until 24, 25, something like that.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. A long time. Okay. This makes sense. This makes a lot more sense. Okay, because he got to know you so well that he knew how much you fake it around people.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you didn't bother to fake it with him except for in public, which is exactly how you described what was wrong with him. But that's what you were doing. You were both doing it, okay?

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You were both doing it. The other thing is he's not as deep as you. He doesn't want to be as deep as you. That's not because he doesn't love you or didn't love you or didn't like you or was bored by you. He's just not the same person.

Vicky:             Sure.

Jessica:            Some of that is because he doesn't have the same trauma level. Some of that is because he didn't work to develop the capacity to live at a deeper level. So, the first two years, he was kind of organically there with you. I mean, you had to show him how, but he was more like clay. He was moldable. But at a certain point, he became more himself, which is somebody who lives much closer to the surface than you do.

                        Now, there's another part, and this is a really important part. And I don't know if you have enough people in your life who really know you well enough to—or maybe know you long enough to know this. But this is what I'm seeing from his perspective, okay? From his perspective, you would have a pattern of—something would come up for you, and certain emotions or certain thoughts would get triggered inside of you, and then you would retell a story or—yeah. It was basically like retell a story; refer back to one of a series or a set of narratives. They're all true stories and were authentically the story that's related to why you feel so triggered or fucked up in a moment.

                        But he got to know you so well that he got to understand that he didn't need to be there for you to have that process. You felt at the time that you needed him to listen and to be there and to support you through this. You genuinely felt this, is what I'm seeing.

Vicky:             Yeah, I did.

Jessica:            Yeah. But you guys broke up, and you still did the same thing.

Vicky:             Yeah. I feel like I did a better job of it, almost.

Jessica:            Since losing him. Yeah.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             I was forced to be with it.

Jessica:            Yeah. And even still, you're just telling the same stories. Now, I'm not saying your stories should change. Listen. If you were driving your car with a pink hat on and then you drove into a tree, then you were driving your car with a pink hat on and you drove into a tree. You know what I mean? However, if every time you see a pink hat, you have a strong set of feelings and then you relive that time when you were driving a car with a pink hat on and you drove into a tree, then you're not allowing your consciousness or your emotions to notice any other part of that story because your narrative is too consistent.

                        So you're wearing a pink hat, but what was your hair like? Were you comfortable in your body? Were your jeans too tight? That's a part of the story. You were driving a car. Were you listening to music? Did you want to be in the car? Was there traffic that day? You drove into a tree. How did it feel? Did you hurt the tree? Did you hurt the car? There are so many different parts of the story. But another truth is you were driving your car, and you were wearing a pink hat, and you drove into a tree. And it's a true story. It'll never stop being a true story, but it's not the only story to tell about that trigger or that trauma.

Vicky:             I see. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And he did—I don't think he would ever be able to articulate this. I want to be perfectly clear. I don't want to give him too much credit. But on an emotional level, him being present for you being in your cycle and it not really having anything to do with him, not really including him, was his trauma from his mom.

Vicky:             Wow.

Jessica:            Does that make sense, from what you know about their relationship?

Vicky:             Yeah. After we broke up, he shared some things about that, but we never got into them deeply. And I had a—I don't continue to have, but I talked to his mom a few months ago. So it's just—I feel like that's something that's still kind of news to me.

Jessica:            So, on the one hand, it's news to you, and that's absolutely true; you are telling me a fact. On the other hand, he did tell you. I mean, he told you when you were teenagers. He did tell you, but you were like, "Oh, that's intense. Let me tell you my story. My story is more intense." And so there really wasn't room for him because he didn't suffer at the level you did. He didn't feel feelings at the depth that you do. And I'm not trying to make you feel bad. You don't need to feel fucking bad. He's an imperfect man. If you want, I can talk about what's wrong with him.

                        But I think it's really important—this is the hardship of writing a true story when you're this close to it because, at 30, 25 was like yesterday. It was very, very recent. You don't have, like, 15 years between you and that thing you did in your 20s. You're practically in your 20s. So it's hard to be really honest about this part of the story. That's why you wrote it into a corner like a damn weirdo, given that you were with him for six years. That's so long.

                        And listen. You don't have to write him into the fucking story. You don't have to do any of that shit. But this is important because part of what happens for you—in your effort to work through things, you're working so hard that you're not always present. And if you and I are intimate and we're partners, if you're not present because you don't know how to be present with and for yourself, over time, that means you're not present with me—

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —which is what you believe he stopped being with you. But I am suggesting that you may have started it.

Vicky:             Yeah. There was a lot going on when we met. My mom wasn't around. I hadn't seen or really spoken to her for like a five-year period.

Jessica:            Wow.

Vicky:             And she came back into my life while we were sort of in the middle of our relationship. So he was a big support system in that. But yeah, as far as presence goes, I just didn't have it and still am trying to work to achieve it.

Jessica:            Listen. You don't need to be perfect. You were not. He was not. Nobody's supposed to be perfect in this story. You had a very successful relationship. It was not meant to be forever.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            That's what the story is. But the story that you're telling yourself that I am suggesting is false is that he lost interest in you. Your wounded inner child has that story, "Didn't love me enough to stay." And that's not what happened here. That's not a true story. That's like you got injured as a child wearing a pink hat in a car driving into a tree, and then you walked by a bicycle and you were wearing a pink shirt, and you're like, "It's the exact same thing."

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            There's enough that triggered it but not enough that it's a true story. This guy—you don't have to be friends with him. And also, if you were lesbians, you would eventually be good friends. Do you know what I mean by that?

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            I was like, "Is that too honest?" But okay. Good. Yeah. I mean, I really think you guys would be best friends eventually because it wasn't hot anymore. It wasn't dynamic in that way anymore. You became family to each other. He's a really important part of the story. And that doesn't mean he needs to make it into your manuscript, but he's an important part of your story. And as an adult who dated this man, have a responsibility to yourself to recognize your own agency, to recognize that some of your coping mechanisms actually didn't keep you safer and help you love more. Some of them did that you grew, and then at a certain point, you outgrew him. That was about three years in. And you stayed because you needed him.

Vicky:             Wow. Yeah. The story that had been etched into my mind was that he outgrew me in terms of just self-seeking, you know, [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            Do you think he's more of a self-seeker than you?

Vicky:             I thought he was back then. I don't know that I feel that way now.

Jessica:            So, at the three-year mark, you felt like, "Oh, he's a seeker and I'm not"?

Vicky:             Yeah. I mean, I felt like he was more creative than me. I felt like he was smarter than me, more well-rounded in these ways. And I think a lot of it is cultural, too—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Vicky:             —just coming from a small town and feeling like I had this limited exposure to things. Yeah. I've been insecure about that.

Jessica:            Yeah. Insecure is the right word. Not a reliable narrator is another word. That's more than one word. He had less hurdles in front of him.

Vicky:             Yeah. For sure.

Jessica:            Like not just from childhood wounding, but just, like, environmental hurdles. He had a lot less hurdles in front of him.

Vicky:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And when you're in your 20s, in particular your early 20s, it's really hard to be like, "Oh, this is a societal thing and a cultural thing, not just a personal thing."

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And it was societal and it was cultural, and that empowered him to, on a personal level, kind of make some leaps and bounds when you were mired in your shit. But here's the thing. Look at you now, 30-year-old. Look at him now. He's 30 years old. Have you seen him lately? No shade to this man. I actually think he's actually a nice, good, decent man. But it's not like he's like, "Oh, my idea of a good time is staying mired in my trauma and really working through it." That's who you are.

Vicky: (laughs)

Jessica:            You're welcome.

Vicky: That is my idea of a good time.

Jessica:            I see you, you damn freak. You're like, "If it doesn't hurt, is it fun? I don't know." That's not who he is, and it's not who he ever was, and it's not who he wants to be. And you want a partner who is both comfortable with giving you space so that you can be there but also knows how to pipe up and voice his feelings and needs in the middle of the depth. And that was never going to be him.

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            It never was him, and it never was going to be him. But I want to come back to that North Node/Venus conjunction, which is related to creativity and art. It's related to values, and it's related to partnership. The story that you tell that "The other person doesn't care about me enough, and that's why they left," or, "That's why they don't show up" is a story of childhood trauma. In reality, people really like you, and you hold them at bay. You're welcome.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            In reality, you want intimacy and closeness without being seen outside of when you want to be seen and how you want to be seen. And that's okay. You don't want to stay there forever, but it's absolutely okay to be 30 years old and have made this much progress and still have that much more to go because, if you think about it, I know a lot of people are like, "30 is old"—please. That means that ten years—ten years of adult life—that's all you have. So think about five years ago. You were breaking up with him. It feels like a—can you remember? Doesn't it feel like a different you?

Vicky:             100 percent, a different person.

Jessica:            150 percent. Yeah.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            In five years, you'll be 35, and you'll only be 35. I'm 50, and I can tell you at 50 I feel very much—like, I'm obviously like a—you know, I'm an old-ass fucking bitch. Okay. But also—and I was trying to find a nicer way to say what I was actually thinking, but it just—I couldn't. I couldn't do it in the moment. And also, I feel young. And also, I have a lot of years of having sex and making art and trying things and failing and learning new things and developing new skills and making new friends and breaking up with them ahead of me—like, a lot of them.

                        What I'm saying is that you have so many years in front of you that if you were done, if you had achieved all the emotional, psychological, spiritual, and creative healing that you needed, what would be the point of life, precisely? What exactly would you be doing for fun if all the pain was sorted through already?

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah. What would I do?

Jessica:            What would you do? You would create a problem so that you could feel the pain.

Vicky:             It's not fun.

Jessica:            No. You don't need that. You don't need that. And so I just want to ground you into, if you are kind to your emotions, if you are supportive and loving towards yourself, if you develop a patient, responsive, spacious relationship to your muse, it'll take time, obviously. It'll take time. But that is so that you can mature and grow into connection with those parts of yourself.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It takes time. That's all. If you're not in a rush to get there, what happens is you get to be here.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And when you're here, you stay open to all the things you just don't know, like, all the things you just don't know. When you drove into the tree with your car and a pink hat on, at the time, it was trauma, right? And you can hold that story as a trauma because it was a trauma. And we don't need to change that. But if we hold it more loosely, if we let it sit on the table instead of grasp it close to the chest, then you can start being interested in what emerged from that. "Did I become a better driver? Did I stop wearing clothes that I don't enjoy? Did I develop really challenging issues that I think make me more interesting and make me more capable?" So the story can evolve to become more true on more levels, and that doesn't invalidate the core truths of how you experienced it when you hit the tree.

Vicky:             Sure. Yeah. I'm not always sure how to loosen that grip.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm, because holding on tight is what makes you feel like you're safe. You're holding yourself together. A writing exercise you can adopt—and you want to always set a timer so that you're not writing for a full hour, okay? You tell the truth of a story succinctly. You can do it bullet point. You can do it in narrative form—doesn't matter. You tell the truth of a story, then move your chair. So you're sitting here straight forward at the desk. You tell the truth of the story, move your chair to the side, move your piece of paper to the side, or your tablet or whatever. Tell it from a different angle.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Yeah. Just tell it from a different angle. We're not invalidating the central truth of a story, because we're not actually just stories. Emotions create complications and nuance.

Vicky:             It's like a prism.

Jessica:            Yes. It's like a movie. It's like a movie where you can see that this character keeps on doing this fucking stupid thing out of pain and that they're causing pain to other people and they're hurting themselves. They just don't know how to get out. In the movie, you can see that in a different way than in a book sometimes, and sometimes I think—because I love reading. But you see what I'm saying.

Vicky:             Yeah. I do.

Jessica:            It's learning to give yourself the gift of acknowledging the different parts of the prism, the different parts of the story. And when you can't do that, when you're just not capable—you just can't do it—then give yourself some grace.

Vicky:             That's helpful. Thank you.

Jessica:            Yeah. My pleasure. Now, I want to pause. There's definitely parts of your question that we didn't get to. We did and we didn't talk about relationships. I mean, we talked about the core relationship. But I just want to take a pause and let you take a beak and just see, did I answer your question? Is there anything lingering and rubbing at your brains?

Vicky:             I don't know how much we can really get into it. There's a situationship that I just ended that also feels like it's playing a part in how I'm showing up to this project and everything else right now.

Jessica:            You have no business being in situationships. You don't like situationships. What the hell are you doing?

Vicky:             Well, I ended it.

Jessica:            Okay. So I want to just say you had to end it. It was a question of—how long did it go on?

Vicky:             Not long at all. It was a very quick, intense thing, like a month, and then came back out of nowhere. Yeah.

Jessica:            You grieve big.

Vicky:             I do.

Jessica:            You grieve big. And so you have a Pluto/Moon square. Oh, wait. No. It's not a square. It's a trine. Lucky you. It's a trine. Doesn't matter. You still fucking grieve big. You are not one for casual. Don't do casual. Listen. I'm a fan of casual. I think casual is so fun. You don't. It's not fun for you. It's not fun for you.

Vicky:             No.

Jessica:            There was enough instability and uncertainty in your childhood. You're just like, "If we're going to have good sex, we have to be betrothen." You want there to be a commitment. Now, you have commitment issues and you don't want commitment; I know that's also true. It's okay. We get to be many things at once. But Mars intercepted the eighth house in Virgo opposite Saturn means that if there's great sexual chemistry, you're seeking meaning immediately. You can't help yourself. You're like, "What's it mean? What are we meant to be to each other?" or, "Where is it going?"

Vicky:             It wasn't just a sexual thing. I ended it because there was dishonesty about what his relationship style was and whether or not he was dating other people, and I didn't have that expectation.

Jessica:            Monogamy is the only thing that works for you.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Period. Period. Monogamy is the only thing that works for you. And lots of different people get to be lots of different ways. I am a huge fan and encourager of casual sex. Not for you, I'm not. Not for you. It's nothing moral. It's just not how your body works.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not your relationship to trauma and all that kind of stuff, sure, but it's just not how you're wired. For you to share yourself with somebody is an investment. So why are you investing in somebody who's fucking around or who doesn't share your values or is just not that deep? It's not for you—I mean, unless you're traveling and all things come together in a magical way, it's just not for you. You know?

Vicky:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And I think sometimes when people hear stuff around that, they're like, "Oh no." But instead of thinking it's good or bad, it's neither good nor bad. It doesn't matter. It's just you. And if you give yourself the grace of self-acceptance—and listen. I could be wrong, or I could be right about this today. And maybe you change in a year or whatever. But if you're going to have actual sex, human sex with a human person, especially a human male, you need to know some things first. And there is nothing wrong with you being hard to get. In fact, you are hard to get.

And so it's okay that sex doesn't happen right away for you because that just might be closer to your truth. There might be lots of hot sexual things you can do with somebody while having all that romance and that karmic buildup feeling that you get with people before you cross certain sexual lines. You're allowed to have fucking boundaries, see? You're allowed to have boundaries. And if someone leaves you or punishes you because you have a boundary, get rid of them. Perfect. Now you know who they are before you made yourself more vulnerable than you could be in a healthy way.

Vicky: Yeah. That makes sense.

Jessica:            Yeah. And in terms of who this person was to you—will you say his full name?

Vicky: [redacted].

Jessica:            You're dating people that I would never guess you would date. Where did you find this person?

Vicky:             He just showed up, a friend of a friend.

Jessica:            Okay. I mean—

Vicky:             I never find them. They find me.

Jessica:            Maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe that's part of the problem. You're letting people choose you.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You gotta learn how to choose—you can choose them, too. So listen. If somebody is attracted to you and they make a move, fantastic. You have to decide, "Is this for my ego? Is this for fun? Is this for real?"

Vicky:             I feel like I chose him back.

Jessica:            You chose him back. I agree. You had great chemistry. And instead of you just being like, "Yeah. It's just chemistry," you made it into something deeper and more real. But he wasn't that deep or real. And you found out, and then it ended. And you could say to yourself, "That's bad. That's terrible." Lots of people would say that's bad and terrible. I would say that's you having life experiences, you taking care of yourself when you realized that something you thought was delicious tastes like shit. We don't have to put a value judgment on it. I used to love chocolate ice cream. It was my favorite ice cream. Now and for the last maybe ten years, I like vanilla better. It changed.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Nothing's wrong. It just changed. And that doesn't mean that you don't have grief. You're allowed to have grief. You're allowed to have grief over who you thought he was. You're allowed to have grief over your own vulnerability, the loss of potential. Give yourself the gift of grief. Grief is just the shadow of love. And you love yourself enough to have had a real experience with someone. And you did. And it's not like you stayed in that thing for six months. It's not like you stayed in that thing for a long time. You didn't perpetrate harm against yourself. You just had a relationship experience that was not meant to be.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And the only way for you to have one that is meant to be is for you to have some that are not. It's just a part of your life. You didn't do this thing that a lot of people do from 19 to 25 where they just fuck around and date and have terrible experiences and learn how to have boundaries and learn how to be casual. You didn't do that. You only know how to be partnered.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So now you're learning. You could tell yourself you're learning at the wrong time. I wouldn't say it's the wrong time. You're learning at your time. Do you want human babies?

Vicky:             I do.

Jessica:            Okay. Yeah. Do you have a—what do they call those? You know what I'm talking about, the really good birth control that lasts for many years—IUD.

Vicky:             No.

Jessica:            If you don't have a reason why you don't have one, I might encourage you to get one.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. I mean, I think it's just good advice for anyone who could get pregnant during these terrible years because they last for many years, and I don't see that you consistently have safer sex. Am I wrong?

Vicky:             No.

Jessica:            Get yourself an IUD.

Vicky:             Okay.

Jessica:            Also, use a fucking condom—real talks 2025—obviously because of your sexual health, but on a spiritual level, because that Saturn opposition to Mars says that your childhood trauma was you're not allowed to have boundaries. And so, when you start fucking with someone literally, if you have a boundary and it creates a problem, you need to run because they're going to reiterate trauma for you one way or another.

Vicky:             Okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. So a great way to practice having boundaries with a cis guy, if that's who you're fucking with—and that's who you're fucking with, right—is condoms. And then you quickly get to learn a lot about the guy.

Vicky:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah, and also about yourself because if you're too shy or insecure or whatever, then that tells you a lot about you that is not part of your primary narrative.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            Yeah, which is helpful. Did I answer that part of the question?

Vicky:             You did. Yeah. Yeah. Straight and to the point.

Jessica:            Straight to the point. Straight to the point. There's a lot of layers to this. I know it's a lot. It's a lot. These next many years are going to be a lot for you, so I want to just validate that. And I want to encourage you to create a practice of returning to yourself and—which—you do have a practice of returning to yourself but not holding on to your narrative when you get there.

Vicky:             I see. Yeah.

Jessica:            Let your narrative hang out. Shift your position a little. Open up to other possible stories that can be told about the same thing, not to invalidate, but to expand. That's all.

Vicky:             Right.

Jessica:            And sometimes that's not going to be useful, and it's not going to be the right thing. But if that's part of your practice, then you'll start to be able to feel into, "Am I telling myself this story because, as much as it hurts, it sooths me? Am I telling myself this story because it justifies my feelings or my behavior? Am I telling myself this story because there's a value in retelling the story?" It's not always going to be yes to that last one, which—any of them. And that's just a really great thing for you to do to yourself, to open up.

                        Having rituals for how you cope is good for you, as long as those rituals promote your growth. And ritualistically telling a story does not, past a certain point. It's like it helps you to grow until it creates a rut—fucking life, man. Right?

Vicky:             Yeah. Well, this has been amazing. Yeah. I can't thank you enough for this and just—I've gotten so much from every episode I've listened to on the podcast. So thanks.

Jessica:            Thank you. It is my pleasure. And good luck with your manuscript.

Vicky:             Thank you so much, Jessica. I appreciate you.

Jessica:            You're welcome.