Lucy Looking Upward

Today, if enough weren’t going on, Jupiter turned retrograde. This means that all three planets in The Clusterfuck of Doom (a nickname I will be using so that I won’t have to keep re-typing “Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron on my natal Venus-MC-Pallas Athena”) are now retrograde. I’ve been reading up to figure out *what this means*, and if I were smart, I would stop calling it The Clusterfuck of Doom and turn it into The Best Excuse to Check Out and Become Addicted to Painkillers Ever. By itself, Jupiter acts as a weird kind of thickening agent, where anything it touches becomes magnified and doubled and tripled. With its proximity to Neptune and Chiron, and all three being retrograde, it takes all the ways you’ve been trying to heal and gives you either a huge breakthrough or just a much-needed break. I’ve also heard Jupiter retrogrades described as a way to check in with your core beliefs and rediscover the inner optimism you have that is yours. With all that I have been through recently, I am hoping that all three things could very well be true. I am also going to use Jupiter retrograde as an excuse to write about three different things at once at the same time, which are actually all part of the same thing. (Jupiter isn’t organized. That’s Saturn.)

Quite fortunately, I have not had another panic attack since the one I described in my last post. I think identifying and articulating my anxiety, even as messily as I did, was pretty crucial in preventing another one. However, the anxiety is not gone. Even as I go about my business, and even as I’m getting better at kind of letting it slide, it’s still in the back of my mind like a dull thud that I am hopelessly in love with someone who does not love me back. I am just as aware as everyone else how incredibly, irrationally stupid this is. I rag on Jennifer Aniston all the time because even three years and like two serious relationships later, every damn interview she gives is all about how she regrets losing Brad Pitt. (And because she’s otherwise a total waste of space, but I digress.) And yet here I am, almost four months after the break-up, with tears welling up in my eyes every time I read The Philosopher’s Facebook statuses about how much fun he’s having (subtext: without me), waking up in the middle of the night feeling weird astral shocks wondering where he is (subtext: who is he with?), and telling myself at least once a day that maybe sometime soon he will come around and want to make peace with me (subtext: take me back).

On the one hand, there appears to be no end in sight, and it’s miserable. I’m physically ill over another person. How goddamn pathetic is that? On the other hand, in a sick way, I’ve almost come to experience this feeling as a sort of protection, like a buffer from getting badly hurt again by anyone else. In a crazy-sounding (but very Jupiterian) way, it’s almost like the way I would imagine a nun feels knowing she’s “married” to God, although I’m sure some would argue that it sounds kind of like Stockholm syndrome. But I’ve come around to realize that this is probably the way The Clusterfuck of Doom is manifesting in order to make the detachment bearable.

Case in point: I’ve been on three dates this week, each with a different person. (I didn’t sleep with anyone else, I hasten to add, for the lurking parochial types.) None of these people are particularly “new” in my life. Two of the three actually read my blog (in fact, probably thought to ask me out again because of my blog), and as such are very aware that I am hopelessly, fruitlessly in love with someone else. And yet, that fact didn’t seem to make either of them any less interested in me. And you know why I think that is? Because I think The Clusterfuck of Doom has forced me to finally, FINALLY come into my Venus in Aquarius conjunct Pallas Athena in the way that the cookbooks describe it.

I am now emotionally unavailable. Dudes LOVE emotionally unavailable. OF COURSE.

I could, and in fact at an upcoming date I will, go on at length about why most men nowadays seem to prefer long-term relationships with emotionally unavailable women, while opting to reserve emotionally giving, affectionate women like me for between-break-up flings and cheating on their girlfriends. (In fact, I will do it this Sunday, when Venus and Mars are exactly conjunct in Taurus, in my natal 12th House- apropos much?) But right now, all that needs be said is that I’m starting to see just how the retrograde motion of the entire Clusterfuck of Doom could actually work to my advantage, instead of making me drink more. Because I am carrying the burden of an unattainable, unresolvable love, I am approaching everything and everyone with a kind of measured restraint and detachment- which in turn makes me somewhat unattainable, and therefore more desirable. Before, I thought that a good enough manifestation of Venus in Aquarius was going to Sarah Lawrence College and making sure I had my own space to learn about fucked-up things like serial killers and the gendering of consumerism and dressing like a cross between Strawberry Shortcake and an 18-century German philosopher. Not good enough, it seems. To have successful relationships, it would appear that I have to at least create the illusion of total indifference to potential partners, if not actually be a total frigid bitch.

This is not an easy thing to reconcile with a Moon-conjunct-Ascendant and a Pluto final dispositor. I feel things extremely passionately, in a way that is sometimes nigh on impossible to hide or repress- and believe me, the last thing I want to do is emotionally stunt myself so that I can be on the same level as everyone else. Not to mention that my Moon trines my Venus in Aquarius- OF COURSE I’m going to be emotionally forthcoming with my partners. But the more I think about it, the more I think this is Jupiter’s “retrograde challenge” for me. Can Lucy, who probably actually should have come of age in the antebellum south, successfully be more of a Russ Meyer girl? (I was going to write “ice queen,” but I don’t think that really works when you have unignorably large breasts.)

Look at that- I was all ready to trash Jupiter, and he just may have been the divine intervention I needed to get some perspective on this whole mess. I like how I started out saying I feel like a nun, and now I’m going to aspire to be a Russ Meyer girl. You see the connection, right? Anita Ekberg, duh.

Believe me, I am just as creeped out by how my mind works as you are.