When I see this old picture of myself from a middle school yearbook, I think to myself “have you seen this girl?”
I haven’t seen her in fucking years. I think some of her is getting flipped back “on” now, because of solar arc Pluto (just through the lens of a 34 year old rather than a 13 year old)
**Trigger Warning – different kinds of abuse are mentioned in this article
**Here is a youtube video that I did about the same kind of thing.
I have wanted to do a blog post about this for a while, and each time I start it, I stop myself. Do I really want to expose ALL of what I’m about to expose? Probably not (and I might take this down as fast as I post it, lol). However, since I’m in the throes of Solar Arc Pluto conjunct my Ascendant currently, it feels like the “right” time to further work through a bunch of shit that happened to me 20 years ago when Transit Pluto was conjunct my Ascendant, and how there are echoes of this part of my life in the present day. This isn’t strictly an exercise for my own benefit, though – I’m hoping that other people will benefit from this post in some way, and in seeing the trends and themes that can come back around through an astrological lens. I really hope that this blog post encourages you to go through your own life cycles via transits and solar arcs. There is a lot to be learned from these.
**I actually do this kind of work for my clients, too – making sense of cycles that they go through via an astrological lens (and even making sense, from an astrological lens, of the things they’ve gone through and the things that they carry). If you should ever need any help with this, dear reader, I’m your girl ^_^ and you can have me do that for you here.
First, some technical terms before I start this exposition expedition:
Astrological Transits: The actual motion and placement of the planets in the sky at any given time. How transits impact each individual person depends on what the planets in transit are activating (or making contact with) in a person’s natal chart.
Solar Arcs: An astrological predictive technique which, essentially, moves each planet 1-degree a year ahead of where it falls in the natal chart. For instance, my natal Pluto is at 10-degrees 46 minutes Scorpio. Since I am almost 35 years old, and my Ascendant is at 15-degrees 59 minutes Sagittarius, Solar Arc Pluto has now moved about 35-degrees from it’s natal placement TO my natal Ascendant.
-Solar Arc Planets, especially when conjunctions to the natal angles happen, tend to point towards actual events taking place. Same thing can be said about the Solar Arc angles making contact with natal planets and angles.
**Side note: A lot of people who work with Solar Arcs only focus on 1 degree to 30-minutes of a Solar Arc planet contacting a natal planet (applying and separating). While I don’t disagree that the closer the Solar Arc planet (or angle) is to being in an exact aspect with the natal planet or angle the more impact the Solar Arc will have, I actually extend the orb out further – 2-degrees applying and separating. The reason for this is because you can usually see and feel the ripples of the Solar Arcs brewing before the Solar Arc planet or angle contacts a natal planet or angle within 30-minutes.
**Another side note: Solar Arcs really do fucking work. For example, when I started my astrology practice, I had the Solar Arc Midheaven damn near conjunct my natal Mars, and Mars is the planetary ruler of my North Node (and ever since I started my Astrology practice, I have always had this feeling that I am doing EXACTLY what I’m supposed to be doing with my life). Solar Arc Mars was also damn near exactly conjunct my natal Sun, too.
The chart below is of the transits to my natal chart in January 2002. We have to start with the past for this whole idea about cycles to make sense.
The year 2002 was a terrible year (there is very little that was positive that I can say about it). It started off with a bang – a friend’s father ended his life which was shitty (this particular friend who lost her dad meant the fucking world to me). This same friend of mine who meant the fucking world to me had a good friend that didn’t like me and my friend being friends. The friend of my friend, and her mother, decided to make it their life’s crusade to ruin me (I know that sounds dramatic as fuck, but that is how it felt). This mother took it upon herself to contact all of the parents of all of my friends, my teachers, even the school administration, to let them know I was “doing drugs” and “having sex.”
{Side note – I hadn’t had sex of any kind by that point in time, and I hadn’t yet tried any drugs.}
While none of that bullshit was true, it was deeply hurtful, confusing, and extremely embarrassing. I had teachers pull me out of class to ask me about “my drug usage” and about my non-existent sex life that they thought existed (some of my teachers meant well and were concerned, some of them decided to take the ‘shame and scold’ approach). Because of all of this, I lost most of my friends (most of my friends parent’s believed this woman’s lies about me and didn’t want their kids hanging out with me). A switch inside of me kind of flipped into what feels like the “off” position around the time transit Pluto crossed my Ascendant (probably because of Transit Pluto doing what it was doing to my natal chart, along with all the other shit that was going on with this transit). This switch never really flipped back into the “on” position.
It was around the time that this switch in me flipped into the “off” position (this switch flipping off was probably out of some kind of self-preservation) that I started dating my first “serious” boyfriend. The relationship started off fine (the first 8 months or so that we dated were awesome). It was once we entered high school that he drastically changed into some kind of fucking demon. The abuse and bullshit started out as mentally and emotionally mind fucking me three ways from Sunday. A few examples of this were him making me think he was going to break up with me for one of my “friends,” and playing the hot and cold game where some days he would act like I didn’t exist and treat me like absolute shit, and other days I seemed to do no wrong and hung the fucking moon. It wasn’t until November 2, 2002 that the actual physical abuse started (this was right around the time Transit Pluto crossed my Ascendant for the last time). We were at the movies (in a sparsely crowded theater) sitting behind the last row of seats. He wanted me to play with his dick or some stupid shit, and I didn’t want to do that in public. He didn’t like my response, so he decided to choke me. I don’t know how long it went on for….30 seconds? A minute? I remember it caught me completely by surprise and it felt like an eternity while it was happening.
And you know how I fucking responded to this shit? I fucking stayed around. I had already been beaten down SO MUCH throughout that year in various different ways that any concept of self-worth had been completely extinguished. So, I stayed….and it was all downhill from there. The sexual abuse started in 2003, and further downhill it all went. “When I tell you to open your legs, you open them.” Gross. I’ll spare you further details, but you get the point. By the spring of 2003, my self-worth was so low that when he pulled a knife on me and held it to my throat, I told him to “just fucking pull it.” I remember it took him by surprise that I reacted this way (he had done similar awful shit before, and I had been scared of it and reacted in a scared way). This time, since I guess I didn’t give him the reaction he wanted or was looking for, he put the knife down. This became my way of fighting back.
**I’d like to think about it as my way of fighting back, anyway. In reality, I may have actually been okay with being taken out of the game at that period in my life. That’s the most depressing part to come to terms with.
This shit went on, on and off, until early February of 2004. Interestingly enough, this is around the time that transit Pluto was pretty much done being tightly conjunct my Ascendant. It was also around the time that I found out that on top of all the other shit he had done to me, he decided to fuck around with another girl (and this was actually the straw that broke the camel’s back).
**From a retrospective lens, there was also a whole bunch of karmic shit going on with transits to my skipped steps (Venus/Uranus and Chiron) when transit Pluto started crossing my Ascendant (which makes me think there was something I wanted and needed to learn from these life experiences….as difficult as it might be for me to swallow that notion). There were also other transits going on throughout this period of time, too, that stand out (but I will spare you from looking at a whole slew of charts).
I will show you one more chart, though: The chart of my Solar Arcs to my natal chart for July 2022 (below):
You might be wondering how any of this ties into the present day (and why I would go off on some kind of something or another about all of that shit)? Because there are some key themes that have come into play 20 years later, that have come “back around” in the last couple of years as Solar Arc Pluto has inched closer to my Ascendant (and you have to know the context of those themes from 20 years ago to know why they matter fuck all now).
Some of these echoes are:
1. There was recently a suicide in my extended family in June 2022. Weirdly enough, the same area where this person took their life is located where a bunch of the physical and sexual abuse occurred 20 years prior. This area now has a whole new layer of trauma surrounding it.
The land around there needs to be salted or some shit.
**There was also another suicide shortly after Solar Arc Pluto started its conjunction with my natal Ascendant (this was my friend Matthew who took his life in 2020). Also, weirdly enough, when do you think I met Matthew? When transit Pluto was conjunct my natal Ascendant 20 fucking years ago (in May of 2002).
2. There were certainly issues with a different overbearing mother early when Solar Arc Pluto started to conjunct my Ascendant, but I don’t really want to give that difficult human being any more attention here. Point is, the overbearing mother theme came around again.
3. Relationship shit shows that made me question who the fuck I am (different kind of shit show than 20 years ago…but still, a shit show). The divorce between myself and my ex-husband has been the biggest personal life change to occur during this Solar Arc. Out of respect for our son, I won’t go into details other than to say the person I thought I was married to was NOT who I thought he was at all. I found this out in the first part of 2020 as Solar Arc Pluto started applying with my natal Ascendant within 2-degrees.
**This took a long time for me to fully process and come to terms with (which has happened over the past couple of years). And Goddamn, it was painful.
4. The feelings of exile and isolation have come back around. This is kind of weird for me because I’m not really someone who needs to have someone up my ass or me up their ass in real life in any kind of relational capacity (I’m pretty “low maintenance” that way). I will say this, though – most everyone that I am close with (outside of family) doesn’t live anywhere near where I am, and sometimes you actually want to be IN someone’s presence. You don’t even HAVE to fucking do anything with them (we could fucking sit in silence for all I care….it’s just being in the physical presence of people that you know really love you and care for you and you love and care for them – that’s what matters). This was something that I lacked throughout Transit Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, and it’s been thrown in my fucking face by the universe that this is lacking now, too.
5. Me having to ask myself the question “when is enough, enough?”