You said something that you thought was funny, but now you look at your friend’s face and realize that their laugh looks a little forced. You aren’t sure whether you crossed a line anywhere and carefully ransack your memories looking for a mistake in judgment. You wonder if you’re a bad person pretending to be good. Such is a day in the eyes of Moon in Pisces,
Moon in Pisces needs outside validation, because it is often difficult for Moon in Pisces to tell what is real and what is false. It is hard for this sign to identify and define their sense of realness and their sense of falseness with sure inner authority.
Starry eyed Moon in Pisces is a wanderer and wonderer. It believes in magical moments and having the wideness of breath to never settle for the mundane if magic isn’t a part of the story.
Moon in Pisces gives away the authority to define reality to other people. It looks for the coolest people because it projects its own glamorousness onto those whose sense of style and grace seem to carry it well. It can ally itself with what it sees as the cool crowd to protect itself and let that crowd decide Moon in Pisces’s every whim.
It’s okay to need outside validation. If our fears and heartbreaks were not recognized by the people in our lives, we would be forever stunted by them. We wouldn’t be able to talk to them or about them. We would gaslight ourselves and fear ourselves. We can talk a lot about how we can be strong and not need other people’s recognition, but what if we’re in love with someone and no one in our family sees it as love? What if we go through a violation of ourselves and everyone tells us it was our fault?
It’s easy for Pisces Moon to cut corners, to throw all of it’s emotion into complexes that society recognizes or even fetishizes. Our society is obsessed with romantic sexual love and all of Pisces Moon’s fears and wants can become funneled through a singular experience with a romantic partner, because there’s a sweet pain everyone knows a pop song or two about. Pisces Moon pain can get funneled through social justice language, because that’s the way they know how to demand validation.
It’s also easy, though always ridden with heartbreak, for Moon in Pisces to look for institutions that don’t have their best interests at heart, or know how to understand or listen, in order to feel validation. Because Pisces Moon wants desperately to be understood, they can adopt a veneer of being perpetually misunderstood to create safety. They can pass through until things reach a tipping point, which is when they cut all ties and run away to a place where no one knows them.
The thing about Moon in Pisces is that it just doesn’t know. It doesn’t know for certain whether what it feels is right or wrong, whether their spiraling or whether their emotions are just well designed hallucinations by the hormones their body released after they forgot to take care of their sleep schedule last week.
And I’m not knocking down romantic love or social justice. I’m saying that these should not and are not easy ways to solve problems. I’m saying that when we project our not knowing onto ideological frameworks that normalize certain behaviors, we’re not allowing ourselves, our love affairs, or our politics to grow.
I’m not going to say that Pisces Moon plays the victim. The victim is a radicalized (white) and gendered (female) trope. I’m saying that Pisces Moon doesn’t have to collapse every one of their night terrors, social anxieties, and commute produced rages onto the flat category of victimhood for these multi-dimensional emotions to be valid.
Reparenting Moon in Pisces takes a complex juggling negotiation or deciding who you want validation from, how to ask for it, and what to do when you don’t get it. When Pisces Moon feels that their own pain is not recognized, they can get overly passé about other people’s pain. They can adopt a jaded veneer of being over it, and having suffered more than thou.
You can choose to be thick skinned sometimes, if that protects you. You can still be tender after all that.
Most of all, learn your language. Communicate to be listened to. Get specific about who you are and what you are feeling because no one is feeling things in the exact same way.
Where do you get your validation from, Moon in Pisces? Are you satisfied with how you get it? What do you do when you don’t get the validation you need?
What happens if someone disagrees with you? Do you feel the need to convince them of your ideas once and for all or do you completely shut down because you start to doubt yourself? Can you see where your ideas may be socially aligned to other people and actively seek understanding instead of expecting misunderstanding at every turn?
Moon in Pisces can easily codeswitch, becoming different people to different crowds. It wants other people to feel comfortable in their presence. It doesn’t want to challenge things accidentally, because it’s looking for a sense of reality in belonging.
And there’s nothing wrong with this. However, reparenting Moon in Pisces is about taking ownership of the way social context creates your reality sense. You can be picky about who you let describe that emotional reality with you. You can pick people who have a dialogue with you and not people who put their own shit onto you. You can love the way that you are impressionable and take ownership of that impressionability, know that it makes poetry in the world and a drifter out of you, and chase the impressions that love you back.
Assessing and understanding your emotions is the hard work. In order to reparent your inner Pisces Moon child, you have to take on the role of being the parent who sits down and asks questions and affirms for hours, because your Pisces Moon child has heavily nuanced feelings which take different shades at different hours of the day.
You have to make sure that your rumination is affirmative, because it can be easier to cut those corners, flatten yourself, and believe that your feelings are too messy and inconsequential to take up space. This is hard work. You’ll probably need a friend to help you.
Try this: The next time something throws you off emotionally, the next time you aren’t really sure whether you should be feeling bad or are feeling bad, stop. Sit down with a journal and write down every sensation you are feeling. Look over these sensations and ask yourself why you may be feeling this way, what this feeling may be a reaction to. Look over this list and pick apart any tropes, of romantic sexual love or motherhood or sisterhood. Pick them apart by asking yourself what are the specific sensations this emotion is producing in you and your life. Do this so that your feelings are not given to you by memories of a childhood movie with a white, male writer but are living in your very experience. Tell yourself that you have reasons to feel the way you do and you have ways of reacting to the things you feel.
