I couldn’t finish writing this — much less publish it — last year (around July 22, my birthday) when it was written, for many reasons. It remains unfinished. Autopublish picked it anyway; who am I to argue with its ranking system.
Hello. It’s been a long week of once again rethinking my entire approach to writing on the internet — this time all the while observing a nonstop rush of words pushing to be released. Ultimately, I couldn’t relieve the pressure, and I’m unsure whether my frustration around this was the cause or the effect. Probably both, seeing as it was my birthday on Tuesday, and things always seem to come to a halt at this time of year. Gate 56 is a stop codon, after all.
Since Saturday, I’ve been longing to finish this piece. Things got in the way: low energy due to my cycle, low energy due to my kid’s constant presence alongside my recently renewed determination to be truly present with him, low energy due to the melancholy that arises alongside the completion of another solar cycle, low energy due to the constantly accumulating weight of needing to tell.the.motherfucking.stories.fucking.pronto.
No wonder. Once again, it turns out that when I feel even slight pressure to do something — even when it feels like it is me, myself, who wants to do it — especially then — as is often the case when this pressure strangely enough lines up with what the transiting Sun is currently propagating — I cannot do it.
This hurts, like my own body is betraying me.
Mind, under the influence, is a child who didn’t get the ice cream cone his mother has been stating all along he wouldn’t be getting today. Mind, here, understands why it can’t have what it purports to want — and wants it even more. A body refusing to move for mind’s begging to conform? Yeah, that feels like a problem. Of course it leads to a person at war with herself.
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Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of birthdays. I’ve never loved gatherings as a general concept. One of the more embarrassing undefined ego things I observe in myself is that I disagree with the concept of celebrating myself for having been born — notably, though, extending the contempt only toward myself.
One of the reasons my birthday feels particularly un-fun for me and people around me — if not THE one reason — is that nearly every year on this exact day, the transiting Sun passes through my natal Chiron. My Solar Return (56.3 — Alienation, the result of trial and error in Stimulation) usually takes place the day before my birthday, so that, on the day of, the Sun has moved onto 56.4 — the place where Stimulation becomes transpersonal and opportunistic, where it needs closeness and the baring of one’s soul to another in confidence. This has historically been unavailable to me. My design is otherwise hilariously fourth-line-free and my bonding strategy has always seemed off-kilter, like it’s more about breaking bonds than making them in the first place. Ergo, I often default to accepting those who are available to me on my birthday (often immediate family) as the confidants I seem to need, but also don’t want them as confidants because, well, the aforementioned group dynamics make my throat close up, and if the pressure on the day is expression in confidence, then, well, lol. As a result, on this day, I’m forced to reckon with not getting what my mind staunchly maintains to need alongside the always-present hurt that comes with what makes me most alive — wandering in every sense — being tied up with this wound of both feeling chronically, forever unrecognized by those that supposedly matter most.
At the same time, it languishes in the self-accusations that follow, repeating ad nauseam, you’re such an ungrateful, self-absorbed, touchy little princess, you always make it about your silly little needs, you engineer this same predicament every single year by making sure your loved ones cannot help but let you down — and then you complain about feeling misunderstood.
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The day of did turn out to be a good ol’ bottle of Emotional Growth Juice previously buried under Emotional Inconvenience topsoil. Someone close to me — a confidant — irony knows no bounds — did end up remarking, when I carefully expressed how I would rather be alone on this day because the shit will happen no matter what I do; that, this way, at least, I won’t pull others into the mess: come on, that’s such a self-fulfilling prophecy. I said: I know, but that’s just how it is right now. I don’t like it, but it also just feels too much like throwing myself from the car onto the highway, at night. I would like to wait for the car to slow down a little first.
I’m not very experienced with the intricacies of knowing “the cause” — this Chiron-Sun conjunction — yet, having lived with the results of falling prey to the same mental loops every year without fail. Those neural pathways are hard to un-tread.
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Just last week, I was sitting on a cute nine half-finished drafts for this newsletter. That number fluctuates often, of course, but not by much. As of Monday, I’ve had more than twenty drafts. Eleven of them were begun over the last few days, and they don’t even represent everything I wanted to write down.
For me, drawing conclusions from stories and seeing the hidden meaning in every experience is not pathological, they are core to who I am. Yet these tendencies are among those my mind judges about me and itself most harshly.
Yes, sometimes things that happen don’t mean anything except that life sucks. Sometimes there’s no lesson, just a lesion — in these cases, if there is something to be learned, the act of looking for it will make it elude your grasp like wet algae.
Last revised April 30, 2026.