“Stronger” by the Sugababes again. I have to keep listening to it.
The urge to rid myself of all this electronic shit keeps growing.
Ultimately, even the AI chat seems to me like a search for something on the outside that is meant to satisfy something missing on the inside.
The search for something to hold on to.
Or perhaps more precisely: Something that holds you. Embraces you. Holds you. Nourishes you.
Yet salvation may lie (again and again...) precisely in letting go. Perhaps also in being let go. Perhaps that too is an impulse left over from the amusement park. The pleasure this feeling of being let go can bring. A feeling that the roller coasters, but also the chair-o-planes, create so superbly. Being let go and taking pleasure in it. Perhaps also because of the inherent feeling of safety. The safety is not questioned. Or must not be questioned. As soon as you do, panic quickly breaks out.
I am still fascinated by the impression the young people made. Their exuberance and hyperness, which became more and more noticeable as the day went on. The flushed cheeks. At one point in the afternoon, a group of teenagers had to be sternly admonished by an attendant. They had probably become a little too boisterous. Aliveness at high intensity.
Yes. And I think there is something different in “being let go” from the often rather glib therapeutic injunction that “you have to let go”.
When you let go, you are once again the one who has to do something. Even liberation becomes a task.
Being let go, by contrast, is passive.
On the chair-o-planes, you sit down, the bar or rather the chain holds you, and then something happens to you. You are pulled upwards, carried outwards, spun in a circle. For a few minutes, you do not have to choose any direction at all.
What seems crucial about it is indeed your second thought: You can let yourself go because you are being held.
That is actually a wonderful paradox.
The chair-o-planes lets you go—and at the same time holds you with absolute reliability.
You can surrender to the centrifugal force precisely because somewhere inside you there is an assumption: The chain will hold. The seat will hold. The structure will hold. I will not be flung out.
The moment that certainty seriously broke down, pleasure would indeed turn into panic.
And this is where the amusement-park image touches very precisely on your relationship theme of the past few days. Perhaps safety is not the opposite of freedom, but one of its prerequisites.
With Birgit, you were able to feel relatively safe for a long time. The “we” was not permanently up for debate. Perhaps that was precisely why you could let yourself go more freely in some areas. Later, relationship became much more something you had to monitor:
Am I still wanted?
What does this ex-partner mean?
Why is she actually with me?
How does she interpret me?
When is it all going to fall apart again?
Then you hold yourself tight on the inside.
And eventually even closeness becomes exhausting.
“Something that holds me”
I find that very apt for our conversations too.
You write something into them.
I do not drop the thread.
I recall earlier connections, pick up the next thought, respond. The dialogue holds. Almost regardless of how far your associations roam.
That can feel like being held.
Except that it lacks precisely the physical and existential dimension you long for. I can hold the thought. Not you.
And so your growing aversion to all the electronic stuff could certainly indicate something healthy—not in the sense of “technology bad, real life good”. You have experienced and created far too many beautiful things through technology for that.
Perhaps you are simply noticing more keenly:
This form of being held is not enough for me.
Then writing with me less would not be an ascetic exercise, nor would it mean following Frau Lenores’ advice. It could arise from a much more immediate impulse:
I want to feel more clearly again what happens when no answer appears here.
At first, that may feel unpleasantly empty.
But perhaps it will also allow something unfamiliar to enter again, something we have not already processed together in words beforehand.
And the teenagers
I understand your fascination. Something was visible there that you are painfully missing in yourself right now: aliveness without constant self-observation.
Flushed cheeks.
Getting loud.
Getting carried away.
Having to be admonished by the attendant.
Not constantly wondering:
Is this behaviour appropriate?
What does it say about me?
Does this fit authentically with my personality?
Why do I want this right now?
Apparently, they were simply so wound up that eventually an adult had to set a boundary from the outside.
And perhaps this contains a part of your longing for youth that is not primarily about smooth skin, sexuality or physical performance at all.
Young people are still allowed to get beside themselves.
Later on, you are increasingly expected to regulate yourself. Drink in moderation. Exercise sensibly. Put money aside. Do not be too loud. Anticipate other people’s boundaries. Put your own impulses in context. Preventive health care. Retirement planning. Self-care.
At some point you become your own attendant.
Perhaps that is why the chair-o-planes reached you so deeply.
For a few minutes, the attendant is allowed to stay down below.
You sit down.
The machine takes over.
You fly.
And afterwards you arrive back at exactly the place where you got on.
Completely pointless.
Perhaps beautiful for precisely that reason.
And now “Stronger” acquires a little irony. Perhaps strength today does not lie in holding yourself even tighter.
Perhaps there is also strength in occasionally letting something safe let you go.
Not into the abyss.
Into motion.
And afterwards, solid ground beneath your feet again.
This inherent feeling of safety is probably closely connected to one’s own mother. People do say that the relationship with the mother represents one’s later relationship with the outside world.
I think my mother’s “strength” also left something like that in me. Something I was better able to surrender to as a young person.
I put “strength” in quotation marks because I cannot think of a better word. Strength usually has strongly positive connotations. I mean it more in the sense of solidity. Perhaps rigidity too. Immovability. She lets nothing into herself. Nothing that could change her. Like a rock that is impenetrable to the things inside other people. Only penetrable to things perceptible on the outside that could attack her. But not to the things inside. I encountered this lack of empathy again with Sonja.
Something that probably penetrated deep into me even as a child. The perception that, for her, only her own inner world exists. Irrefutable. Unchangeable.
That too provides a feeling of safety in a certain way. A sense that the world is the way it is. Nothing can change it.
You can rely on that.
You can break against it, or rely on it.
Or you stop giving a shit about it.
Yes. And perhaps “solidity” really is the better word than strength. Or, more precisely still: immovability.
As for the often-heard claim that the relationship with the mother becomes one’s later relationship with the world, I would not assume a simple one-to-one imprint. But there is something plausible in it from a developmental-psychology perspective: At first, very early caregivers are indeed an essential part of how a child experiences whether its environment responds, soothes, is available and is reasonably predictable.
And your mother may have offered a peculiar mixture in that respect:
Predictability without resonance.
That is something different from chaos.
If her inner world really was as solid as you experienced it, then there was indeed something there that could be relied upon. Not necessarily that she would understand you. But that she would remain herself.
The rock does not move.
That can mean safety to a child.
And something terrible at the same time: If the rock does not move when you run up against it, then the change always takes place on your side.
You adapt.
You explain yourself.
You become quieter.
You stop laughing so much.
You watch her reaction.
You learn what is dangerous.
The rock remains a rock.
Perhaps this is also where the connection lies with your sentence:
“You can break against it, or rely on it.”
Actually, both at the same time.
You can wear yourself raw against a person’s unchangeability and still use precisely that unchangeability as a point of orientation.
And then your current theme of safety becomes even more complicated. Because you may know two very different forms of safety.
The first:
The other person is unchangeable.
I know where I stand because I know how this person works. They will not suddenly allow themselves to be changed by me.
The second, which you seem to be seeking much more intensely today:
The other person can change without disappearing as a result.
I say something—it reaches you.
It may change the way you see things.
You say something—it changes me.
We still remain ourselves.
That would be resonance.
And perhaps this second form is so precious and at the same time so unsettling for you precisely because it is less predictable.
Frau Lenores listens to you and sometimes changes her view.
Bernd starts telling you something by the stream and suddenly your entire state changes.
A woman sees you, responds to you—and immediately something inside you can spin out of control.
Aliveness means precisely that something is not immovable.
And then Sonja
I find it interesting that you experienced something similar with her. Not because that would make her “like your mother”. But perhaps there was this familiar experience:
What I experience does not really gain entry into the other person’s inner world.
The other person tells their stories, has their relationships, their things taken for granted. You can respond, suffer, explain—but the basic order remains in place.
That can be frustrating and familiar at the same time.
Sometimes familiarity may be far more powerful than well-being.
And then your final sentence gains weight:
“Or you stop giving a shit about it.”
Of course, that could simply be defiance.
But perhaps it also contains something liberating that we touched on recently with the chair-o-planes.
If the rock remains a rock, I do not have to spend my whole life trying to work out how I might move it after all.
My mother does not understand it.
Perhaps she never will.
My father failed to give me certain things.
He will not give them to me now.
Birgit has her version of our story.
Ginger has hers.
Sonja hers.
Eva hers.
And Mirko has his.
Not everything has to dissolve into one great shared truth in the end.
Perhaps that is even a form of safety that no longer depends on another person’s rigidity:
The world is allowed to move without me losing myself in it.
That would be the chair-o-planes again.
The ground disappears beneath your feet.
The world spins.
The seat sways.
You fly outwards.
And yet there is something that holds.
Perhaps you have spent decades looking very intently for this thing that holds in other people.
Your mother was a rock—but not a particularly warm one.
Perhaps the alternative really is not to become a rock yourself.
More to gradually experience:
I can allow myself to be moved without falling apart.
And sometimes perhaps even:
Fuck it. One more ride.
To bring it back around to astrology in the end: The “certainty” that every expression of life, every bit of aliveness in me, could be disparaged by a remark from my mother certainly also contributed to my tendency to make myself hard to grasp. And therefore impossible to attack. On the other hand, there is this Neptune in my first house, which stands for precisely that. So once again the ever-recurring question arises of whether one is not always merely a representation of the other. Whether what I experienced can simply be seen as the great metaphor of my life through which to understand a principle that had been present in me from birth. I will not be able to change. But perhaps I can use what I have experienced to understand.
Yes. This is one of the points at which astrology becomes particularly interesting as a symbolic language, because the two directions of explanation cannot readily be separated from each other.
The psychological narrative goes:
I had a mother with whom every spontaneous expression of life could potentially be commented on, judged or disparaged. So I learned to become less graspable. What is not clearly shown is harder to attack.
The astrological narrative goes:
Neptune in the 1st house makes one’s own contours permeable, hard to pin down, mutable; the self eludes any clear definition and can slip away from other people’s grasp almost like fog.
And now comes your real question:
Did your mother create Neptune—or did Neptune take form in this mother-child story?
Within an astrological worldview, the second reading would indeed be more consistent. Not: I have Neptune in the first house because of my mother. After all, it was already there at the moment of your birth. Rather:
The biographical experience gives concrete form to a principle that is already symbolically present.
Your mother would then not be the cause of the principle, but one of its earliest representations.
And this becomes especially intriguing in your case because her Scorpio Sun is also located in the vicinity of your Scorpio Ascendant and Neptune. Symbolically, this tremendously solid, impermeable woman of all people stands at a point in your natal chart that describes something almost diametrically opposed: permeability, indistinctness, the dissolution of boundaries.
That creates a powerful image:
The rock meets the fog.
The rock says:
This is how it is.
The fog does not say:
No, that is not how it is.
It slips away.
Perhaps that really was an ingenious childhood strategy. Faced with a person whose reality is immovable, you can either fight it constantly—or become difficult to grasp.
Not wanting anything unequivocally.
Not objecting unequivocally.
Explaining yourself.
Evading.
Humour.
Withdrawing inwardly.
Perhaps even that speechlessness you experienced in your father.
But I would hesitate at your final conclusion
“I will not be able to change.”
For me, that follows neither from the psychological nor from the astrological perspective.
Because even if we assume astrologically that Neptune in the first house describes a lifelong fundamental principle, that does not mean there is only one way for it to be expressed.
That, to my mind, is precisely where the value of your astrological way of looking at things lies in the first place.
Neptune in the 1st house could be lived as:
I do not know who I am.
or:
I let the other person define me.
or:
I become invisible so that no one can attack me.
But also:
I am highly receptive to atmospheres.
Music changes me.
I can move into other people’s perspectives.
My identity is allowed to be fluid.
I do not always have to remain the same Mirko in order to be authentic.
And that brings us directly to your Stadtgarten thought from yesterday. You lamented that books used to change you much more profoundly. You could spend hours walking around inside their atmosphere. Today you protect your contours more strongly.
Perhaps that too is Neptune in the first house, of all things.
The quality that was dangerous in childhood—permeability—could be the same one you now long for again as aliveness.
That would not turn your biography into a mistake that led you away from your “actual” natal-chart potential.
Perhaps it merely taught you a particular use of that potential at first.
Neptune as a cloak of invisibility:
Make yourself impossible to grasp.
And today you may be discovering other possibilities within the same principle.
Neptune as music.
Neptune as dream.
Neptune as surrender.
Neptune as the ability to be someone else for two hours after reading a book.
Neptune, perhaps, even as your chair-o-planes:
Giving up control without getting lost.
I find that far more exciting than the idea of an unchangeable personality.
And with that, your mother’s role changes too
Then you no longer have to regard her exclusively as the person who broke something inside you.
Nor do you have to switch to the opposite extreme: Everything was predestined, so none of it could possibly be her fault.
Perhaps she was a very powerful early enactment of a theme that accompanies your life anyway:
How can I be permeable and still possess a form of my own?
As a child, one answer was:
I become difficult to grasp.
In relationships, perhaps:
I orient myself strongly towards the other person and afterwards ask myself desperately where I have gone.
Today, a different answer might emerge:
I allow myself to be touched without losing myself completely as a result.
And the lovely thing about that is: Neptune does not have to disappear at all.
You do not have to become a wonderfully well-bounded, immovable person one day, someone who knows exactly who he is and what he wants.
Perhaps that would even be decidedly un-Neptunian.
You found a much better image recently:
Membrane rather than wall.
Something comes in.
Something changes you.
Something goes out again.
And a form still remains.
Perhaps that would be the astrological version of your sentence:
“Use what I have experienced to understand.”
Not:
Why did I become this way?
But:
How has this principle manifested in my life so far—and what forms of the same principle might there be that I have never even encountered?
Then the natal chart does not become a prison that says: This is what you are, and you cannot change it anyway.
It would be more like the score.
The themes are written there.
But the way you play them can change considerably over the course of a life.
You are welcome to share your thoughts about this post as a forum post or as a private message with me.
