Jupiter and the Luck You Didn’t Want

(but apparently you needed)

When I saw Jupiter would be transiting my 7th house in Gemini, I thought it would make my relationship sing.

It did not.

As Jupiter hit my Descendant, my relationship went poof. The person I thought was going to move in with me disappeared instead. Why that happened on his end is a long and dramatic story, but suffice it to say, nothing has since materialized in the relationship department. Since last summer, he’s been on his own journey, and I’ve been on mine.

But I kept thinking, What is Jupiter doing? Is he asleep at the wheel? What kind of luck and good fortune is this!?

As Mercury moves into Gemini, it has finally dawned on me this morning what Jupiter was teaching me. It has to do with the relationship between my 7th house and my 1st house, where Neptune conjuncts my Ascendant.

Most of my life, I have felt that I don’t even want to be an individual.

I know that may sound crazy to some, but Neptune wants to merge. It also wants to not exist. The urge to lose myself in a relationship—to give up my life, to sacrifice my “me-ness” for “us-ness”—felt immensely compelling and meaningful. I have accomplished immense feats of endurance and compassion in the pursuit of that dissolution.

But in the end, it wasn’t my individuality that dissolved, it was the structure of the relationship. All the meaning I wanted it to give me shimmered like a dream and disappeared. That is what Neptune teaches, and it’s a harsh lesson: the magic isn’t out there in some romantic dream, love. The magic is inside you.

But Jupiter—it was teaching me that there was something better than getting lost in someone else’s life. It was teaching me that Who I Am Matters. It was fanning away the Neptune fog and replacing it with a conviction to create from a place in me that is all mine—my own vision, my own desires, my own ambition, my own Dharma.

When Mr. Ghost went poof (again), at first I waited.

I agonized. I tried to get him to come back. I felt listless, confused, exhausted, dysregulated. I went through so much agony with his back-and-forth, hot-and-cold, in-and-out confusion. And I’ve been here before, so many times.

But I finally just got tired of it.

I refocused. I decided to just do my own thing. Reluctantly, resentfully. But I still did it.

I wrenched my attention away from my “situationship”, and devoted myself to my own projects. I stopped putting my life on hold, and started building the things that matter to me: AstroLiberation and my community Self-Liberation Society.

It’s taken me a year to realize that this was Jupiter’s gift all along.

It was the gift of realizing that my own thing actually means a lot to me, and in a grounded, real, I-can-actually-do-this kind of way, not in the gauzy, dreamy, delusional Neptune kind of way that relationships have always shown up for me.

Jupiter was telling me:

As long as you can only do relationships in a Neptunian way, they will not work, and your individual creative life will not work either. I don’t want you to live like this. I want you to know that you can sing, and when you find the song that is just yours to sing, and sing it loud, then your life will be on track again, and you will not feel lost in the wilderness anymore. You will have anchored yourself in your own becoming, and that’s what I’ve always wanted for you.

Jupiter is my chart ruler, and overall, we’ve always had a good relationship.

My Jupiter is a bit of an overzealous cheerleader in detriment in Virgo, but it is super earnest. Its the kind of Jupiter that carries a fiery faith in its abilities and wants you to believe in yours too. It tries to sell you on your own potential, which is sometimes exactly what you need, and other times can feel a bit patronizing, evangelistic, or tactless. (I’m sure my Sag rising doesn’t help. 😆)

Neptune in Sag in the 1st and Jupiter in Virgo in the 10th are square in my chart, setting up a tension between the desire to dissolve into a fiercely meaningful sacrificial non-existence and the need to actually achieve something meaningful and tangible in the world.

So far in my life, I’ve always chosen to follow Neptune’s call when it appeared, despite the cost.

The cost felt immaterial, because Neptune makes sacrifice feel blissful. You drown and you’re happy to drown.

You can see why Neptune is associated with madness. What a mad thing to do, to throw your life away for the chance to subsume your needs and motivations to the idea of a romance that barely exists IRL. Wow that is a sad sentence, but that is, in fact, what I’ve often chosen.

Jupiter this year was showing me the alternative: Being You Is Great, Actually.

Jupiter in Gemini enticed me in a different way than Neptune. It reminded me of my own curiosities, and the paths I have wanted to travel but haven’t let myself commit to because I was reserving space for Mr. Ghost.

While some part of me was still fixated on my hazy unworkable dream, another part started just wandering in the direction of the things that hold my attention when Neptune isn’t able to.

Saturn transiting Pisces in my 4th rounded out the mutable cross situation that has been working on me for the past year. I stayed home and worked. I worked on all my ambitions that had lain fallow from neglect.

Once I got into a groove, I poured myself into them. My overall direction still felt fuzzy and vague, but my delight in what I was creating was undeniable.¹

So while one part of me was grieving and confused, another part of me was happy to be working in a domain where I had complete creative control. My work is not subject to the whims or deluges of Neptune, thank goodness.

Some part of me that had never been fully developed strengthened this year.

And that was transiting Saturn at work, opposite my natal Saturn in the 10th. I couldn’t feel the strength of my own ambition until I did the work to develop it.

Saturn only rewards you at the end; in the middle, you’re just lifting heavy things for seemingly no reason, because it feels important. Something in you wants to be able to do it, even if you don’t know why and you constantly struggle with self-doubt. It’s the act of struggling and continuing anyway that makes us into the person we wanted to become.

The entire growth journey is something you have to take on faith. You have to commit to the person you know you will become if you act in alignment with a vision you can’t yet embody. You have to think, I don’t know how, but if I keep walking in a good direction, I will get somewhere good, so I’m going to keep going.

It is acting on the faith that our lives have order and meaning, even if we can’t always see it. And that is exactly what Jupiter wants us to remember.

So what did I learn? That being my own person doing my own thing is actually fabulously better feeling and more meaningful than jumping off the boat to drown in the pursuit of a beautiful but unreal dream.

So, thank you Jupiter, for helping me see through the fog I didn’t realize I was in. You were there all along, a glowing star guiding me home. ⭐️

P.S. A few more astro notes - my Solar Return this year has a mutable T-square in 1st/10th/7th as well, with Venus in the 1st opposite Neptune in the 7th, square Jupiter and Mars int the 10th. Saturn is also in the 7th retrorade with the Descendant in Pisces. So I think this was My Big Lesson for the year.

1. One thing I wish more people understood about Virgo is that there is a delight in putting things right. I appreciate the proper ordering of things. The right thing in the right place is pleasing, and the process of getting there makes me happy.