A Tale of Exploitation:

I suppose it’s easy for the Rationalists to dismiss. According to the theory of confirmation bias, the moment that I ‘choose’ to believe that I had a bad childhood I will focus in on all the negative times and ignore all of the positives. But that is itself a pre-

Judiced rationalization. For instance, it PRESUMES that there even WERE good times, or that I need to be reminded of them should my mindset grow too negative, or that the good times all ways and invariably balance out the bad, and that this happens for EVERY one, but that either we all go through the same things but at different times, or those of us who wind up in a rutt – a lesser station in life – do so by some ‘fault’ of their own:

Either ‘imbalanced chemistry’ or the even murkier modern myth of ‘personal choice’. The TRUTH is that my mind does not need to be reminded to perform this set of exercises. With Libra in my House of Self, it’s done this my entire life. And that is no foregone conclusion; this is not the first time that I’ve noticed that I’ve all ways striven to ‘balance’ my inner world as my whole interpersonal world fell apart around me. Nor is it the first time that I’ve noticed that my life is one that I’ve been living backwards: that my childhood was a sort of project I’d intended to ‘complete’ within my adulthood, and that now that I’m older I am trying to learn how to be a kid. Plenty of times I’ve rationalized that my childhood was not so bad, even saying once after I’d finished reading Waiting for Godot:

‘My life has been a happy one. Yes:

There was some oppression. But I have survived. And now I’m good.’

I still remember where I was when those exact words crossed my mind. And only now I realise I plagiarized them from a Marxist lecture.

But part of it’s true: I was oppressed.

The fact that my own thoughts were taken from a lecture further proves my point:

My entire life, I’d had no life.

There is some thing about the Truth that has a way of upsetting our attempts to level rationally with our peers. It’s not politically correct, nor is it ‘fair and balanced’ as we (or SOME of us) would like to be. A revelation is accompanied by an extremely BIASED emotion. But because it is begotten by the Truth, this feeling is a truthful one, and so one must conclude then that the Truth is Biased. This is no foregone conclusion, even if the reasoning for Truth sounds circular to tin ears.

One cannot ethically dismiss the possibility of such a Truth, and it alone musters the Deep Emotions up against the (dated) monarchy of Reason.

All ways my attempts to see the bright side offered only fleeting, insecure, and superficial relief. The Truth now is that each memory of joy that I can conjure in my desperation is swiftly over-shadowed by a memory whose pain consumes its pleasure. One would expect (and really hope) that every grim recollection would, by the same token, have a silver lining.

But that is not so; I would have to contrive it, as I all ways did to cope.

It’s not as though all human life is doomed to failure.

Plenty people my age do not seem to think so, and I’m getting to the point that I no longer laugh at them for their naïveté, nor even envy them for their blissful abandon. I simply, calmly, but without that Libran pretense, rather with the heartfelt equanimity of a Zen master, come to accept the fact that my peers, for the most part, had some thing I never did: a childhood. Even those who had a miserable childhood still can say that they were CHILDREN. They were kids. But I could not afford that privilege.

My whole life, up until the last few years, I’ve had to be the Grown-up. And that is a fact that no swindling pretense can extricate from my Heart.

When I first realized this there was an intervention. I broke down. My ex’s Mother had manipulated my own into taking me to the Mental Hospital (a sort of cozy, passive-aggressive version of an Asylum, as befit their family’s character) that the former worked at. When Father tried to set my old Casio keyboard ‘straight’, for it was crooked (to his mind) upon its stand, I flipped out. I meant no harm to a soul. It was purely aesthetical.

I simply began to re-

Arrange the layout of my whole bedroom. The bed became diagonal. My keyboard too.

My parents did not bother once to ask me what was wrong. They never had; it was all ways a ploy my Mother used to learn how bad my grades were, even when I was in Middle School and got no worse than B’s, and on occasion.

So I went to the Hospital gladly.

It was like being in my ex’s house again, and she had been the closest thing I’d ever known then to an alma mater.*

*‘Nurturing mother’.

I was surprised to learn it, nonetheless, and for much the same reason, that my ex’s mother had ‘successfully’ won my own mother’s favour.

They were just so diametrically opposed: Ally’s mom and my own were archetypal opposites, and Ally and I had agreed.

Yet Ally would no longer speak to me, so I never could figure it out.

I think that I understand it now, though: Ally’s mom and mine had common goals. The former did not care about me, but that I keep away from her daughter. The latter did not care about me either, but just that I do not tarnish the family’s reputation.

So a compromise was reached.

Where was I? I was playing with tiny coloured index cards within my bedroom, trying to discover the mysteries of Chi. Having become frustrated with women, I’d decided to join a cult. It would take me some time to get out of it. The leader’s books, still published post-humously even decades after his death (I think decades, definitely years) continue to peer at me each time I pass the New Age section of the local Barnes and Noble.

This is not neurotic projection, but poetic personification. Even the O’s in his damned name look like blank, staring eyes.

I could continue to elaborate, but I forego that burden.

My point has been made, I am exhausted, and we are past the point that any body sensible would dismiss my exhaustion.

Yes: to speak of ‘sensibility’ seems all so to be hyper-rational.

But it is thankfully only to speak from experience. I only retain my rationalist habits be-

Cause, until recently, I did not know yet from EXPERIENCE how sensible people can be. Lo and behold! It is a virtue that tends to be in direct proportion to Kindness, and often it is in inverse proportion to condescension, at least where the object of con-

Descension would be me.

Does this make me biased in favour of my fans? Hardly.

It simply indicates that, as an empath, I can tell which critics are emotionally unstable and which ones are stable. And the stable ones I hesitate to call ‘critics’.

I do not care how astrology works.

I did not write this as an ‘essay’ to be published. That I’d even think of it that way, and that the audience intended would be scientific positivists,

Only underscores the tyranny I lived under throughout my formative years, as far as my creativity had been concerned.

It is sufficient to say, with childlike abandon: that it DOES work. I have Known of its practitioners to be beneficent and healing people,

Even if I had to come to terms with their Humanity and take back a few shadows in my Self to get to that point.

I have Cancer in my Tenth House. This is not a growth of cells.

It is an astrological symbol referred to as ‘the Crab’. And it is every bit as tragic as the medical Cancer. The trick in both cases is to spot it early.

My whole life has been reversed. By this I do not mean a recent change. I mean that since the day and hour of my birth I’ve had to deal with adult pressures that only an adult can be expected to handle. That boundary – betwixt the adult and the child – was violated. And I feel like Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage whose name means literally ‘Old Boy’, who was Rumoured to have been 600 years old when he was born into his most historical re-

Incarnation. And like Merlin,

I age backwards. I paid MY dues early. I intend to party the rest of the way. This is not the first time I have said this. My only regret is that I did not adhere to this ethos with more valour and rigour. I won’t lie: Having fun

(for me, at least) is HARD.

Only a twelfth of the population will have lived through what I’ve lived through. Just as the theory of evolution suggests that things like Dogs, Cats, and Humans are the work of millions of years of natural mistakes, so it is that thousands of years of studying individual case histories have produced our present and incorrigible body of Astrological fact. Anecdotal evidence is hard to dismiss when every body has a story, it gets harder to dismiss when every story’s different, and it becomes impossible to dismiss when the Stories follow trends. Nor is it that all of the stories offered by Astrology apply to everyone.

This naïve reduction is an absurd inflation, for were that so then no one would judge of any one, and no one would help any one. The rationalist will contend that these are but two different ways of coping,

And that so long as there’s a choice there is no reason to eliminate either completely; one can simply CHOOSE to ‘deal with’ one’s own life and others either by condemnation or commiseration. Yet such a choice would be tragically arbitrary to make, like voting in a bad election. It eliminates the third party: Empathy.

By avenue and grace of the Empathic Gift, one can Feel one’s way into an other’s pain. Granted that one remembers one’s own identity in the process, one will be stricken by just how ALIEN the suffering of others is to one’s own. We do NOT all go through the same trials. And some of us DO suffer more than others, or at least we suffer less as the result of our own foibles. To take any more blame upon ourselves would be to snap under the weight and strain of others’ foibles.

And that’s a mistake so tragic that it would be cruel to make those others (in this case, my parents) face the shame of it, when I am no longer AROUND to blame them, but the Truth persists as advocate for me.

Those of us who have lived with a Tenth House Placement in Cancer have spent our whole lives at Sea gazing out for a lighthouse in the night-time myst, the night being a premature adulthood in a life whose morning and day we had only barely glimpsed.

When I find that light, in the form of a beautiful, motherly astrologer telling me it’s OKAY, and that she UNDERSTANDS, we’ve found our birth-right, and that lighthouse carries all the light of Truth and all the warmth of Love. If YOU would disagree, Know that you disagree from a position of privilege.

I am only thankful that I found this sanctuary no later than I did. And that some of the repairs that all ways were in order have all ready been underway.

This was not the first Sign to appear.

DM.A.A.