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


hi ace! i am an aquarius rising with a sun and venus in capricorn in my 12th. my chart ruler is in aries. i have trouble reciprocating companionship in ways that feel... authentic? nourishing? in my life, i have always mirrored/matched energy with others to feel accepted. i always feel guilty in my friendships, and have been small-t traumatized in my teenage years by falling outs where i didn't behave in a friendship in the way i might have communicated/promised verbally (during this mirroring). saturn through my first house and my 12h profection have challenged me to mirror less, and to be more precise in my commitments. i think i've become quite cold and lonely in the process of becoming more discerning of how affectionate i am. i am often afraid of disappointing others because i know what kind of care they might need, how i might give it to them. i feel like i've let so many people down just to learn the simple lesson that i can't be everything to anybody. i am learning that the saturnian no and discernment is valuable, i am learning that flexible and creative boundaries can help me feel more connected while still being honest in my capacity to reciprocate. i love your piece "loving venus in capricorn," and i suppose my question is: i'm wondering if you have advice (practical or theoretical) on ~living~ venus in capricorn? how to tap into venusian values in a way that is honest to me? how to feel warmer? how to feel whole and protected through the subtraction? and additionally, perhaps... a thought on how to be "myself" when so much of my personality and connections were rooted in my desire to shapeshift for others? thank you so much, and i appreciate you and your work more than i can describe 🫶

—future goated friend


Oh, future goated friend. I wanted to thank you for your question. You mention in it that you experience fear of disappointing other people when you reach out to them. I wanted to point out that, by writing me here, you are reaching out to someone. I wanted to acknowledge that this hasn’t been something that comes easily for you. Thank you for doing it. It’s moving on my side of things to witness.

I relate to a lot of what you are saying here. I am also a Saturnian like you. I don’t have all the answers for you but, when I read over your question many times, I was struck by your mention of the word guilt. I hope that you don’t mind if I indulge in my own curiosity over that word for a bit.

You mention discovering that there is a persistent feeling of guilt that shows up, trying to do something for you, when you make friends. Guilt is a very interesting emotion for Saturnians, in my opinion, because guilt has to do with authority. Guilt as an emotion seems to have gone through a lot of change in the last century. It used to be thought of as moral—we feel guilt when we don’t live up to God’s expectations. Now, we think of it as parental—we feel guilt when we don’t live up to our parents’s expectations.

When we discover guilt in ourselves, I think that it is a sign. It’s a sign that we are dealing with a small and tender part of ourselves—one that needs both validation and care. Guilt is a childlike emotion. It’s an emotion that looks for authority in someone else or something else.

I’m thinking about this and about how you are learning creative and flexible boundaries and about how you can be yourself in your relationships. I’m thinking about how boundaries are the things that allow you to be yourself in relationships—we are limited people who can’t do everything for everyone. Sometimes, we even fuck up. We don’t show up and we are misunderstood when we do. All of these things keep us human and we are human. We are not heroes or villains but just regular old human beings.

Sometimes, childlike parts expect us to be heroes and, when we don’t live up to those expectations, they expect us to become villains. Sometimes, childlike parts overestimate our own abilities. They overestimate the impact that we have on other people, exaggerating harms that we have committed or fallouts for normal mistakes. They might do this because it is easier to organize the world through shades of black and white rather than gray for the naive but also because childlike parts need both attention and social validation. This is part of the drama of guilt. Guilt needs a hero and a villain. When you strip it of these monstrous figures, sometimes you find a childlike thing that needs validation. That childlike thing that needs validation can be harder to hold than the figures that move across guilt’s stage.

I’m saying all of this to say—I wonder if people are really as impacted by the potential ways that you might disappoint them as the guilty part of you expects them to be. I wonder this because disappointing other people is something that regular people just tend to do as we live our lives with and around each other. Disappointing other people is something that heroes are not allowed to do. I wonder if the guilty part of you could be overestimating the level of impact that you have on the people around you.

This is what boundaries are for, in many ways. Sometimes we think of boundaries as our rules for how we allow or do not allow other people to come into our own lives. Boundaries can also be very humbling. Boundaries can be an acknowledgment of what we are unable to do to other people. People have boundaries while heroes don’t because there are things that people cannot do for other people.

So, I don’t have any practical advice for you. I think that you’ll be okay. It is alright to experience incongruence between the love you desire and the love that you can handle, experiencing coldness and loneliness as a result. This will not last forever since you are growing in your capacity to accept that you, too, might harbor a desire to be loved. This will also not likely be the only time that loneliness might afflict you in life. It’s something that happens to the best of us. I guess my only advice would be to see if the guilty piece of you knows that you are a regular person and not a hero, that your impact on the world around you is human sized and not mythic, and that you are not at risk of becoming a monster simply because of your imperfections. I wonder how guilt might feel taken care of by you when you show it that you are willing to be loved for yourself and not for who you can be for others. I have a feeling that it might be very impressed by you whenever you show it who you really are.