Pluto square Pluto in the zeitgeist
So… who else is going through Pluto square Pluto?
Rest in peace, dear Michelle Trachtenberg. Oct. 11, 1985-Feb. 26, 2025. We don’t all make it through this one. <3
Justin Baldoni (born January 24, 1984), whose once well-intentioned collaboration with massive narcissists celebrities Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds has been poisoned by bad faith, betrayal, manipulation and outright lies. While I don’t pretend to know much about Baldoni as a person, my sense is that he’s a hardworking Hollywood hustler, a decent guy with a delicate ego and a tendency to jump on the train of popular social issues and kiss ass all over town, probably because he feels that it’s more effective than being a dick. Getting his passion project hijacked, being (I feel unfairly) labeled a sex pest and dropped by his agency, and having the whole world watching the emerging lawsuits with popcorn ready was probably not the way he intended to become super famous.
Another big name going through this transit is JD Vance (born August 2, 1984), whose appointment to vice president of the United States by Donald Trump seems to be the catalyzing event. I had literally never heard of him before that and I don’t have much of an impression of what he’s like as a person, save that he seems very emotionally guarded and politically calculating. But I suspect that he’s having a hard time being effectively supplanted by Elon Musk as Trump’s #1 sidekick. I would bet that he’s secretly upset that his carefully crafted public persona and considerable luck have all been rendered invisible by a flailing egomaniacal nepo baby. It’s a classic case of getting everything you want and being unhappier for it.
*A note before we get deeper into this: if you’re curious about the basics of this transit, please see my post from last year. Not everyone will experience transiting Pluto squaring their natal Pluto in their lifetime, because of the planet’s extremely elliptical orbit which sees it spending an unequal amount of time in each sign. For fellow early millennials, those who were born in the 80s, you will experience this transit as you reach the late 30s/early40s, and it will last for several years.
Unbearable reality
It’s hard to be truly honest about the experience of this harsh transit. For generations that don’t have their natal Pluto in Scorpio, or individuals who don’t have additional Scorpio / 8th house placements, the instinct to hide, mask, deny and deflect may not be so severe. But I’m realizing I hide behind a glamour of aesthetics, big words and defensive authority, and that it’s been a problem for multiple lifetimes. It deeply sucks, coming to terms with the emotional fragility hiding behind my front-of-house persona, because it feels against my nature. It’s a sensitivity that, to my idealized false self (an independent and confident Aries sun stereotype), seems excessive and debilitating. Sometimes it really is debilitating.
This transit has shaken everything badly: my confidence, my sense of self, my whole understanding of who I am to myself and who I seem to the world. Immobilizing anxiety, existential dread and internal upheaval have been coming in waves, on the heels of any minor upset. And that’s the thing: there have been no actual crises of real severity. No one’s died or been injured. I haven’t lost my means of income or been made homeless. My marriage hasn’t broken down. I haven’t been assaulted or attacked or publicly maligned. All these intense feelings are spawning out of regular, everyday life events—or, I should say, from the consequences of avoiding, neglecting and escaping from the daily maintenance of real life in the 3D world.
But the message is nonetheless getting through. Sometimes it’s so hilariously obvious how 8th house-y my karma is. Because of course, the reason I get emotionally triggered and avoidant around classic 8th house business like money and taxes is that they represent the looming, faceless authority that dominates this world and all of us who live here. It is a force that cannot be bargained with and that is fundamentally unjust (unless you’re a rare type who aligns morally with the actions of your government). It is emblematic of the dominant patriarch or exacting religious leader who demands and judges and punishes. This is the voice I hear when shame rears up and I lose faith in myself, which seems to happen at least once an hour. And I have to admit that I’ve been that judging voice intruding on the peace and freedom of others, in this life and in previous ones.
Self-reflection in the storm
It does make me feel like a giant baby, these disproportional emotional reactions, which is partly why it’s so difficult to be open about weakness. I prize my own competence so highly and I wear that mask for others so regularly that I end up shocked that it was me who fucked things up. But if I’m honest, I have a deep-seated lack of belief in my own intrinsic worth and I am profoundly ambivalent about being here, incarnated in a world dominated by authority figures I fear and mistrust, being slapped down by powers out of my control. I want to escape because being here means dealing with irritating minutiae, emotional turmoil and a culture that measures success by material trappings. It all gives me a feeling of wrongness and a sense of panic that this is a competition I can never win.
So why all these difficult emotions that go so far beyond what is normal and reasonable given my situation? Illumination in this area comes through my 12th house, where Pluto has been kicking up dust for more than a decade, and is now still within range of squaring my natal 8th house Pluto. To refresh, the 12th house represents all that is hidden or walled off from regular existence: dreams, the subconscious, psychology and spirituality, places of confinement and recuperation, secret enemies, past lives and their repressed pain and regret.
If you read some of my previous posts, you’ll recall that I know I ended my life by suicide at least once (and perhaps multiple times) in past incarnations. I think about this a lot because, despite my cushy situation in a first world country without any real problems, I often feel like all this is just too much. I’m committed to sticking it out here but sometimes the desire to leave is just so strong. I wonder why that is, when there are so many people who go through hell on earth, things I could never imagine myself surviving, and emerge with their lives and sanity intact. Do I suffer from a striking lack of resilience? A weak connection with reality and other people? Terminal deficiency of self-love? Unconquerable shame? Inability to imagine a better future?
Perhaps it’s all of the above. There is a fundamental insecurity at my core that I’ve been struggling to name but “alienation” probably fits best. It’s knowing that I don’t belong here, that I’m an outsider even in the country, culture and family I was born into. It’s a persistent feeling that I’m not really part of the world I’m forced to live in. And the effort it takes to survive, to maintain an existence, is so labourious and empty of intrinsic value that it’s not even worth it. Like, I know I’m here for the sorting out of my own shit, for the learning of lessons that I decided I needed to learn, but sometimes it feels more like punishment than a reward for spiritual progress.
In past lives I solved this alienation problem by joining powerful institutions, like the church. I entered a monastery or became a priest, rooting myself into religious ideology to the detriment of my true nature, which did considerable damage. The man I was—a spiritually inclined, self-loathing, closeted gay—started out as a sweet boy but ran away from himself at every turn and became a hypocritical, oppressive tool, righteous on the outside, dying on the inside. Rather than face the challenge of his first Saturn return, he took his own life.
Uncovering past life patterns to find what’s underneath
Unfortunately, suicide was not the escape he thought it would be. That’s what Pluto teaches: there is no escape, only transformation. So it’s no wonder I was compelled to begin this esoteric work around my first Saturn return, which found me examining every single spiritual belief I held and ultimately formally divorcing myself from Christianity. It caused permanent rifts with my family and ended friendships. It changed me from someone who struggled to justify and conform to a pre-established faith into someone who was willing to abandon every belief, no matter how sacred, in pursuit of what was real and true. It was (still is) a messy process of asking and seeking and finding and discerning and changing and becoming disillusioned and returning to the search anew.
It took almost ten years after my Saturn return to come to a place where I could get to know that particular past life personality. Pluto had to get balls deep in my 12th house before I began to realize that my patterns were not created solely from my current life experiences, that I was rehashing the same issues I had tried to escape from through suicide, just in a different story through a different lens. I suspect that’s why I have this strong connection to that other life: the priest and I are linked because I must resolve what he could not.
Throughout this strange exploration, the underlying question has been whispering louder and louder. Who or what am I, apart from personalities that come and go? “I” am not the priest who killed himself nor am I the artist who writes about it; “I” am something else that is having these experiences, processing these emotions, being refined in the crucible of pain. “I” am something that does not die but passes through life and death like doorways, uses bodies and personalities like vehicles, and belongs to nothing except itself.
I get little glimpses of “It” or “real I” now and again during meditation, particularly in times of intense emotional distress. I could call it higher self but that’s a little misleading—there is no “self” there as we commonly understand. It is not a bigger, better, more complete “personality”. In fact, it’s more like the neutralization of personality, a rolling wave of breath/life that contains no effort, no judgement, no want, no ambition, no charge. Just a gentle in-out of pure existence without any impulse to make or do or think or be. Experiencing it always comes as a massive relief and I wish I could stay there forever.
So what now?
At this point I really just want to scream okay I fucking get it already, can we please not? But the further away Pluto gets from triggering the square, the closer it gets to my ascendant at 8° of Aquarius. And it’s not in Pluto’s nature to be gentle or empathetic. There will be more torture, more turmoil, more change. What choice do I have but to take it? There is no escape, there is no ending. Dead or alive, transformation is coming and I’d better get used to it.
