A lot of the assumptions around Scorpio are awkward ones—they have to do with sexual availability, the femme fatale, and with revenge myths. I imagine that most, if not all, Scorpios don’t resonate with the classic Scorpio stereotypes. I mean, imagine being a little kid Scorpio, seven or so years old, and looking up information about your Sun sign. Scary and bewildering!

Scorpios are supposed to be secretive. They’re supposed to be manipulative, whatever that means because everyone has a different definition of manipulation. They’re supposed to be sexual.

A lot of what people miss about Scorpios is that their edginess and their severity often hides a tender heartedness that doesn’t seem to go away no matter what disappointments they live through. A Scorpio knows about their own soft heart—they’re knowledgeable like that. A lot of what people don’t know about Scorpio is that their dodginess around their own emotions is not only a defense mechanism but a choice.

Scorpios care about emotional consent. They care about being asked whether they want to share instead of just being expected to do so. They care about whether things leave a conversation. They hold onto your sacredness and expect you to hold onto theirs.

A lot of the stereotypes that we have around Scorpio has to do with this strange projection of sexual power that casts a fetish object as being more powerful than the projector of that image. This relationship to sexuality is actually about a fear of desire. It’s what a lot of men do to women, imagining them as shiny and perfectly polished succubi that use sex to punish men. A lot of Scorpio stereotypes are just about misogyny. But Scorpio is not defined by misogyny. Scorpio is not someone else’s fetish object.

Scorpio is the fall of the Moon. Where the Moon falls, it deals with uncertainty and insecurity. What Scorpio is about is a willing rejection of what everyone thinks that a person needs. This is why some Scorpios are hedonists while others are minimalists. A Scorpio is always willing to go all the way—they are the person who will refuse a check out of morals or decide to make less money for a freer way to live. Frank Ocean bought himself out of his contract with Def Jam, which is something that almost no one does in the music industry, to regain his artistic freedom. Scorpios seek freedom through self denial, you see. They use their hunger to understand themselves. Scorpios play with their hunger as if it were just a tool.

And, yes, Scorpios can be cruel towards themselves because they wish to manipulate their own desire so thoroughly. A lot of the assumptions around Scorpio casts them as people who are cruel to other people. This isn’t so. A Scorpio isn’t trying to challenge or test you, to test your loyalty to them. They’re in a constant process of testing themselves.

You see, Scorpio is about refusal more than anything else—not availability, sexual or otherwise. Learning how to be a Scorpio is about learning what you have the ability to refuse and, if you don’t, how you might earn your refusal.

Scorpios are not manipulative and nor are they vengeful. I’ve never seen a Scorpio take revenge on someone. Scorpios have big feelings but the sign itself, ruled by Mars and beguiling the Moon, is about the struggle of expression. This is why it’s so harmful to call Scorpio a manipulative sign—there are people who think of any emotional display as manipulation. For people who are learning and trying to earn the right to cry, having to police themselves for signs of manipulation hurts more than helps.

If you’re not a stereotypical Scorpio, you’re not a walking definition of what someone else thinks of as sexual appeal. You’re not a walking tornado of revenge and suspicion. You only seek to honor hunger, to honor desire, and to honor the integrity of you. You get pretty good at refusing when you’re a Scorpio—at refusing what people want from you and also at refusing what people want to see you do.