The first hard Pluto transit I experienced was when I immigrated to the United States. Pluto crossed my Sagittarius midheaven when I was just about the turn six years old. Around the same time, Saturn conjoined my natal Sun in Aries.

People talk about immigration in terms of hope, in terms anticipation, and in terms of economic opportunity. The worst emotion that people allow ourselves to associate with immigration is nostalgia. People don’t talk about how immigration is a trauma, even when nothing goes wrong and even when you don’t get detained or when you’re coming on a visa and your new home is just an airplane ride away.

You lose yourself when you go through a Pluto transit. I lost my Chinese self and, for years, I was no one. I stopped speaking completely for the first year, developing the selective mutism that is common to immigrant children. I hated my mom for bringing us here and I hated how much happier she seemed when I never made her so happy in my life. She had become a born again Christian and I hated her new God. I imagined that God was made of shit and that statues of him would crumble.

Before we moved, my dad would bait me by telling me that my mom had become a completely new person. He told me that she had blonde hair now, that she only spoke English, and that she wouldn’t recognize me anymore.

I didn’t have any way of communicating except two slips of paper that said “I have to go to the bathroom” which I was told to give to the teacher whenever necessary. I was worried that I would only be able to go to the bathroom twice. I didn’t need to worry—whenever I looked at the teacher, she would send me to the bathroom with another kid to escort me.

Pluto transits affect you forever. Twenty years later, I asked my cousin what she thought I would be like if I had stayed in China and grew up with her. She made fun of me for asking such a useless question and said that it could only be better or worse and that it was impossible for it to be the same.

You could, in some sense, say that about any life decision. However, Pluto decisions are the one you notice. You think that they’re a big deal and so they become a big deal, just like geopolitical borders.

In actuality, the plane ride from China to the United States is just 13 hours. It the politics that make the decision to go feel so heavy.

When I was twenty three, Pluto opposed my Moon in Cancer.

The first Pluto transit was still a part of me. While I had been an outrageous kid in China, I became muted in America. I never started speaking again except when absolutely necessary and days would go by when my throat closed up because I hadn’t said anything for so long. Immigration made my parents paranoid about the outside world and they made our home a fortress that I could never leave. They made me a container that was never allowed to close and they put every anxiety they had inside of me.

I was in the middle of making stupid decisions when Pluto opposed my Moon. I wanted badly to prove my worth to the people around me and I let everyone use me. I wanted to enmesh myself with someone who married me because they needed a green card. I worked a lot. I paid off their debt. I yelled at them because they hated me. I was on speed everyday. I sold $50,000 phones to China’s new billionaires and made mad commission. I fucked around and felt angry when men twice my age refused to treat me as a friend and saw me as prey.

Mostly, I was married to someone who despised me and made sure that I knew it everyday and, even though my self worth fell to zero, I kept thinking that this was my only chance to love.

Pluto was my decision to leave. I found out my partner was stealing from me so I divorced them and moved out. For a year, I drank everyday but I stopped using almost everything else. My lowest point was when I pissed myself and didn’t care. I lived in a windowless room that smelled horrible.

Pluto taught me that you can leave and become another person. You can leave your homeland and, when you do, you leave yourself. You can leave a relationship and, when you do, you earn yourself back again.

After Pluto opposed my Moon, I stopped being quiet. I wouldn’t say that I found my voice because I don’t feel like I have a voice—just a multitude of voices that I can assimilate into at will—but I stopped with the drugs, the whoring, and the self loathing. I still worked a lot but I started doing educational work. Working with kids made me feel like I had a future.

Pluto squared my Sun last year and I decided to stop playing games with myself.

When I was a kid, before I moved to the United States, I found that I could always get compliments by drawing. I was good at drawing. All my life, that never changed. I knew that I was good at drawing and that, no matter what happened, I’d always be an artist.

Art made me approach life through a lens. I could do anything and it wouldn’t hurt me because I could just turn it into an art project. You could be a failure at life but it doesn’t matter if you turn it into art. It became a short cut to self esteem, especially in a New York art scene where the work doesn’t matter and everyone is fronting. In New York, art is about “community” which is just another way of saying an elitist group that relies on gatekeeping to keep out the riff raff. In New York, everyone rubs shoulders with big real estate monguls and you don’t talk about the social climbing aspects of the art world because you’re all in on the con together. In New York, there are only like eight big art buyers and the one who basically created the LES scene still openly preys on young women.

Pluto squared my Aries Sun and I stopped receiving validation from the art scene. I broke up with the art world.

I fed myself in other ways, in all the things that I had missed over the years: science fiction, K-pop fandom, anime, soap operas, sociology, astrology, essays that don’t pose as critical theory, quantum physics, journalism, and jokes that aren't wry but actually make you laugh out loud.

If art makes you into a jaded person, then I chose to become curious again. All it took was for me to stop identifying as an artist.

So, Pluto is about break ups. At five, I broke up with my homeland. At twenty three, I broke up with my self loathing. At twenty six, I broke up with playing games.

I won’t get another major Pluto event until Pluto crosses my ascendent in Aquarius. But I’m not afraid of Pluto anymore. It honestly is just a break up and, if you get of what you need to let go of through it, you can keep your power. You start identifying your power in a new way. The thing is, Pluto doesn’t like sacred things and, when you stop seeing things as sacred, you are able to understand what sort of hold they have on you. If nothing is sacred, then you become holy.

So, in a Pluto transit, always remember to:

1. Let go of what you need to let go of, even if that thing is something that once kept you sane, even if it was something that once kept you together—something that made you bloom. If you keep it sacred, then it will become as dead as a museum piece. In Babylon, they sometimes killed people by tying a dead body to their body so that the living person decomposed slowly with the dead one. That’s you during a Pluto transit. Even if the body tied to you is something that you love, you have to shed it in order to live.

2. Remember that you can leave but that the consequences of doing so are permanent. Remember that the consequences of staying are also permanent. Life is a permanent condition and there are no temporary decisions.

3. If it’s worth it, you’ll survive. If you don’t, you won’t regret it.

4. Not having enough time for anything is a symptom of efficiency. Pluto transits are when you are at your most efficient, even when you feel like you are accomplishing nothing. Nothing will change the amount of change you are currently going through—not even your own will. You cannot decide how much you change and change is not a project that you can finish. Get some sleep.

5. You won’t be the person you thought you would be. That self is lost to a parallel universe.