Welcome to my Astro Advice Column! If you subscribe to The Astro-Kats or Star Kids Club you are able to ask me questions about astrology for this advice column.


I am currently going through what feels like a Pluto hellscape to say the least and I desperately need help! I am a cancer rising/virgo sun/scorpio moon and I am currently dealing with multiple Pluto transits that are actively trying to destroy me more than I thought was even possible. To break it down, I have Pluto square both my moon in scorpio and chiron in scorpio in exact conjunction at 0 degrees, then on top of that Pluto is also in opposition to my ascendant in cancer at 28 degrees and to throw it in Pluto is also conjunct my Neptune in Capricorn at 27 degrees. There is so much going on I feel like I don't know if I can survive this, there has always been this sort of intensity in my life but nothing like this. I'm experiencing homelessness, have been in some crazy accidents, am undergoing extreme isolation, and dealing with an intense social situation that is laced in transphobia and classism and wrapped up in a very brokeback mountainesque sort of way and I have no idea where my life is turning. Luckily I have been graced with some placements that make me very resilient and nearly unstoppable (Mercury rx Virgo, Libra Venus, Scorpio Mars) but am still just exausted. I am honestly scared, this only feels like the beginning of this Pluto crisis as I know its going to just keep going back and forth over the next few years. I need your advice on how to work with these Pluto transits in any way possible, a survival guide of sorts to get me through this hell on Earth.

—scorpio moon in crisis


Scorpio Moon!

I’m so sorry.

Being homeless sucks. Being isolated sucks. Going through accidents suck! And surviving transphobia and classism also suck.

What I mean by the word “suck” is that there is harm being done to you. This hurts. You’re hurting right now. Both of these realities are important—the fact of you suffering and also the fact of this suffering being something that someone is inflicting upon you.

I’m glad that you know your own resiliency and your sense of being unstoppable. I’m also glad that those strengths allow you to feel your fear and exhaustion. You’re scared and you’re tired. You’re also resilient and unstoppable. Both of these things are true. Your resiliency doesn’t negate your fear.

I’m in two places reading through your question. Part of me is remembering my own Pluto opposition to my Moon and what that was like. Another part of me is just sitting with your ask—you’re asking me how to survive.

There are things that I know about survival. I know that sometimes you have to numb out and push yourself past your limits even when that hurts because you hope that it will get you to the other side. I know that sometimes you let yourself give something up too and that hurts in a different way. You’re essentially contending with the fact of your mortality when you’re in survival mode. There’s a whole host of literature about contending your mortality when it comes to what we tend to think of as normal processes of aging but there's little when it comes to just trying to survive in conditions of oppression, housing instability, and physical vulnerability.

These two things are not the same. Contending with mortality as part of aging is not the same as contending with it in conditions of oppression.

There are things that I know about survival and I know that there are things that you know about survival too. Your body knows them. Your body will try with all of its tools and reflexes and foolishness and wisdom to sustain the life in you. Can you feel that? I think you can.

And then you’re in pain. You’re hurt. What do you do when you’re hurt? You cry, you scream, you fall into a heap.

If you can’t do that right now, and I know that very often having to be in survival mode means that your body senses that it’s not time to be with your pain yet, I wonder if it can be time to make yourself a small pinky promise. Nothing too big. Just the promise that you will meet your pain at some point. In this promise is a hope and this hope can feel very naive to us when we are in survival mode. The hope is that there will come a day when we can let ourselves cry freely, that we will be at least safe enough to cry.

There are all sorts of things we both know about survival. Some of them will be the same. We run or freeze when we come across a predator. We have epiphanies about how to make things with what we have. We find the words we need to tell someone that we need help. You also know things about survival that I don’t. Your ancestors survived this world and what they know lives in you.

The other thing I can offer you is the suggestion of making that promise to yourself in pain. There’s something that happens, I think, when we promise ourselves that we can cry later even if we can’t right now. That something is the understanding that the things in our hearts are still real to us even when their reality is not acknowledged by the world around us. The pain you feel is not a part of your oppression. Oppression prefers to pretend that we are all numb creatures with no hearts. The pain that you feel in your heart is for you and is there to remind you that you are real.