I’ve spent the past three entries talking about work, which I know is only titillating or interesting if you’re another workaholic like me. The work isn’t done; I’m currently in Los Angeles until Tuesday night, helping with the edit. I am still not totally sure of what time zone I am in and I am exhausted- but at least I am in the same place for more than three days. No, I am not going to write about work this time. I have bigger, more looming problems right now.
You see, today Pluto turns retrograde. Pluto by itself is the planet of transformation and the subconscious, and it shatters everything it touches in general. But when it turns retrograde, the knife twists even deeper. It hurts like a bitch at first, but ultimately makes you a stronger, better person. Right? (Right?)
So what’s wrong with that? Well, if you’re me, transiting Pluto falls in your 7th House of relationships, and is smack on your natal Neptune. YEAH IT IS. Pluto’s been transiting my 7th House since I was in high school; it goes without saying that my adult relationships since then have been fraught with conflict, to put it mildly. This Pluto placement (natally or by transit) does two things: 1) it makes relationships transform you profoundly and 2) it makes you give your partners a lot of power over you, a lot more than they usually deserve. Being a Pisces with natal Neptune and Jupiter in the 7th House, you can well imagine that my sensitive little heart doesn’t take well to being trampled on by transiting Pluto over and over again- especially when I really believe that I learned something valuable from the last time. And the retrograde turn of Pluto isn’t going to make it any easier. If anything, it’ll hurt way worse, because it’ll be that much more internalized.
Last winter after a particularly strange break-up with a particularly strange man, I wrote an e-mail to Shirley Soffer, my beloved teacher, entitled “Lucy Has Too Much Pluto,” in which I lamented my transiting Pluto in the 7th House, and how it’s put a hideous dark twist on all my relationships so that they are never happy or romantic, and how Pluto won’t officially be out of my 7th House until 2013, when I’m 29, so it’s possible I would just never find anyone that was right for me because the Rapture was supposed to happen in 2012 and we’d have all been annihilated. In her reply, Shirley told me that I am not a puppet being pulled by Pluto’s symbolic strings, and that I need to own Pluto’s power for myself and learn to create my own strength and happiness instead of just letting my partners control me. This is certainly most true while Pluto goes retrograde; with the energy turned inward, grasping my own power can come a lot more easily.
Which believe me- I do need, especially if I like someone. Especially lately, having recently been dumped like yesterday’s trash by someone I am still absolutely crazy about. Venus retrograde, currently in effect for the next two weeks, already had me spending a lot of time agonizing over what I could have done differently and, in Aries in my 11th House, prompted me to (after a lot of solitary crying and zombie-movie-watching) direct more of my other-directed energy towards friends, since I am so extremely not ready to even be thinking about being with anyone else that’s not him. But that all looks like cake and ice cream as compared to transiting Pluto retrograde conjunct natal Neptune in the 7th, which is like the universe yelling, “YOU STUPID IDIOT WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.” (Of course, it’s kind of hoarse from yelling that for about a year now, but I digress.)
In a way I’m lucky that I’m still so busy, because it’ll allow me to step away from the Pluto a little bit. (Which is so subconscious anyway that dwelling on it only gives you an ulcer.) But as soon as I’m not so busy, I know I’m going to have to spend some time thinking of how to change my approach. Because if I don’t, I’ll end up in the same boat as always, feeling like I’ve just realized some horrible mythic truth about the inherent evil of mankind as soon as somebody wrongs me or leaves me. In an attempt not to buy into the Pluto transit, I’m going to look ahead towards the good in it, like the fact that I am pretty intense and that as much as I would love to have a serious and loving relationship, I totally don’t need another person to shatter my optimism. I can do that myself, for serious.
I do, however, need someone to tell me what time it is, because it totally feels like 4 in the morning right now even though I know it’s really not.
