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If in your adolescence, no one important to you celebrated and enjoyed your innate desires long enough for them to feel real, good and accessible to you, then it likely feels close to impossible to unearth what makes you feel truly alive. Your deeper desires may be laced with terrible feelings of rejection and often, a sense of shame for wanting at all. Desire is often remembered in the body as a fracture in relationship, as deviation from the course of loving attention, as a fall from grace, as not worth the losses it threatened to take.
The truth is, erotic desire is ruled by Pluto and this primal force is threatening to the status quo of any family. Embodied desire is powerful beyond measure. The riches of the unconscious are endless. They lead you to a field of flowers rooted in hell. These are not the flowers of narcissus. Hades need not be interrupted from their work in the nightmares of the ones asleep when awake. These flowers are the eternal roses of Persephone’s spring.
True desire is often met with Saturnian restriction for the sake of protecting the child, the teen, the young adult from a parents’ own fears. What happens is so common I’d argue that it’s a modern developmental stage—loss of meaning and connection to self, years of labyrinthine wandering, and the fear that the way back has been washed away by the weather of time.
If this describes you, when asked what makes you feel most alive, you likely feel a slight shade of existential dread in place of your most erotic desire. Being witnessed created our first identity. If you tried telling or showing people close to you what you found most exciting and were met with a blank face, a placating smile or worse, then you may have eventually lost perspective of yourself. The initial discomfort of not being understood doesn’t immediately snuff out our authentic selves. Aside from big traumas, it’s the subtle yet consistent barrage of micro-rejections from multiple important people over time that usually shapes us. If your natural excitement isn’t appreciated, the odds of you accessing it diminish.
When being close to the core of ourselves causes a profound feeling of being misunderstood, cast aside or villainized, we stop being ourselves in seemingly small ways. It hurts too much to stay so we leave ourselves behind, piece by piece. We can feel betrayed by our own personalities for leading us down paths others do not see. I remember angrily writing in my diary as a kid, ‘what’s the point of being different when everyone else is the same???’ I didn’t know I was a Pluto Rising Scorpio with a dominant intuitive function but I found others like me, secretly desiring to be accepted for their perceptiveness, in novels. Not in characters but in the 3rd person narrators who, to me, were magical intuitive forces capable of the same level of intuition as me. I saw their audacity to take up hundreds of pages with their perspective and I never forgot that in that expansiveness was the promise that one day, I could do, and feel, the same.
The cost of staying close to what we most desire, especially in our younger years, is sometimes too high for the developmental stage we’re in. Emotional shut down from a parent or a subtle change of subject when we bring our deepest wants to the surface can condition us into being more of what others find appropriate. This happens before we even realize we’re sealing our fate and it includes what we most desire to be, how we desire to spend our time and simply, what we feel enlivened by.
Lucky for us, fate is ruled by Pluto and nothing gets this part of our charts more inflamed and headed on a stubborn journey toward our crimson crown than when small and big rejections lead to profound self-ostracization.
If we became one or two people removed from ourselves, as our identity continued to form, we may have coveted our shadowed values and deeper desires in private, at the end of a long day or in a daydream. We didn’t imagine we’d lose track of our private selves. But, without the experience of being related to and being enjoyed, much of identity can be lost. This is the case for modern womanhood. Girls grow up conditioned to abandon their vital selves in favor of false harmonious dispositions and often expect their soulmates to awaken their old flames and, to keep it burning. This search says, I couldn’t stay and I’m not sure where I went but if you found me, maybe I could stay this time.
This is why so many women are susceptible to love-bombing and ignoring intuition when meeting the various Bluebeards of our lives. We want to be close to our fire again except these desperate impulses lead us to arsonists—the ones who set fires and run so quickly as to look like they are victims of their own desecration. While it’s not initially a woman’s fault for losing herself, it is her responsibility to find her flame and protect it from being put out.
To live the erotic life is to be close to what’s most alive in you. Your life is not a waiting room for a partner. Should they find you snuffed, the fire between you will only light you up for so long before they expect you to be erotic on your own. Erotic people are attracted to other erotic people, not those who mine them for fire.
Your desires that are shunned, held in privacy and eventually left behind don’t leave you as you have left them. Your desires are in love with you. They’re the lover that knows you’re the one, the only one. They have always known. And you’re the avoidant they will convince no matter the cost. Because you avoid them and search for yourself in other people, that is where your desires visit you, in those who are also avoidant. Every time you’re attracted to that emotionally unavailable medium-ugly man who has the audacity to center himself in his life, you’re meeting your desire to be released from the shackles of your own shame, to meet the audacious parts of you ready to orbit their own sun.
You’re meeting your desire to not require a match.