the illusion lies within your denial of the truth
part 2 of my Saturn in 6H saga
If you haven’t already done so, go read part 1 of this Saturnian saga. It’ll make more sense. This part is a bit scattered (and long), and I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with it. I don’t know if I ever will be. Several things have been left out, making it feel all over the place to me. Addressing something that touches and impacts every part of my existence is not easy, especially when the thoughts, feelings, memories around it have always been disjointed. But if you’re here reading, know I appreciate the space that is being held for me to even share just a shred of my lore.
TW: Suicidal ideation, CSA, Self-harm mentioned
October 31st, 2024
“3 of swords + 8 of cups
Things are changing, and you need to be patient through how your world is being reset. The 3 of swords is painful. It is sad. But it lives in the mind and is only experienced there. There is or will be something that comes to light, something once thought to be an illusion or deceptive will make itself known in clarity and truth. Something is arriving in a big way to restore balance and heal whatever pain has been festering in the mind. This has a lot of power and influence behind it, but also love and alignment with my path. I don’t know exactly what this is, but I know it’s coming. This is all happening due to me walking away from inner turmoil and conflict around childhood wounds and lack of self-worth.”
I’m a relatively optimistic and hopeful person, but not at this point in my 6H Saturnian journey. Everything seemed like it was getting further and further away. Any sign of recovery for my body or my overall stability was lost in the void. I found myself again contemplating the sweet embrace of death, something that became a recurrent issue beginning during my pregnancy with my youngest child. My journal entries began to hide hints of proclamations to leave this earth, like I was attempting to convince myself that it would indeed be for the best.
I couldn't seem to pick myself back up, and every time I tried it was as if something came to knock me back down. I was stuck in a fetal position on the floor, doing my best to hold myself together long enough for it to all fade away into a distant memory. Nothing was going according to plan, at least not one I was fully conscious of yet. The end of 2024 saw me floating in an apathetic nothingness, hoping the current would take me where I was meant to be…and it did not disappoint. At most, I knew I was on the precipice of something terrifying yet profound. I knew change was afoot. There was a small part of me that was excited by the potential, and another that was mortified by what it may all mean. What I may need to confront on the path ahead.
Like usual, an opportunity presented itself out of thin air. Intentions aligned seamlessly to place me on a path to liberation from my funk, yet I still did not see clearly where I was going or why. As you may have noticed from the above journal entry, being a highly tapped in individual doesn't mean you will know the details of how your life will unfurl itself before you. The clarity of my feeling is impeccable, but foresight comes with limitations. Limitations that are strategically put in place by the divine so that I don’t fuck up my own life. Because I will fuck up my own life given the chance. I am human and thus full of beautiful imperfections that require me to at times take a backseat and be guided by a force that isn't limited to the same experience.
With that said, I went from wallowing in my own self-pity to being on a flight to Texas for a month to help care for my aunt and collaborate with a photographer and family friend. Something about this trip would be life changing, I could feel it in my bones, and I was feeling hopeful. It felt like maybe, it was the light at the end of a tunnel. But my expectations were off, and what transpired was much more shocking and liberating than what I was anticipating.
“I find myself standing at the edge of this new landscape, peering down into what I’ve been blocked from up until this point. I’m excited, because it means so many wonderful things. It means I’m finally ready. But I am also terrified because I don’t know what I will find there.”
“This is the cruelty that lives within me, that inflicts the worst kind of pain onto my own self. This is the origin of the voice that tells me that I’m a terrible person, that all I do is wrong, and that I don’t deserve all the wonderful things that life is constantly trying to give me. The voice that tells me that the bad things that happen to me are all my fault. The voice that convinces me that I am inherently evil. I am ready to face it, but I am afraid.”
- at the edge of a new landscape - Dec 10th, 2024
I want to make this next part short. Mostly because it’s still tender and I’m just trying to honor where I’m at, which is within a deep need to be physically held while I interact with my trauma. But it is important to understand in full the lessons and impact of Saturn moving through my 6H, so I will try to get straight to the point.
From a young age, I have always been keenly aware that I was sexually assaulted as a child. My body knew it deeply, but I had no shred of tangible proof other than my promiscuity that was in full swing at the tender age of 5. I grew up unsure of reality because of the trauma CSA created. I’m aware now that I probably suffer from some dissociative disorder, but back then I didn't know why I would have moments of returning to a body I hadn't occupied in a long time. Gazing down at my hands, shocked by my sudden awareness of them. No one thought twice about my long period of solely referring to myself in 3rd person, beyond the age where it was a part of developing speech. So, when you combine this kind of constant disconnect with the clarity of the body's memory, it creates the perfect recipe for questioning my sanity at every turn…at least for me.
While I have no accessible memory of what initiated me into this internal hellscape, I know that my continued exploration of bodies didn’t happen out of curiosity, but memory and impulse. I knew when I was young, that what I was doing I shouldn't have known how to do. There should have been no familiarity with putting certain parts in certain places when I was hiding in the garage with the boy at my babysitter’s house. I don't really know how to explain it, but it was like watching something I couldn't stop. Something else had control of my body while I sat helpless behind a screen. I was a small child, and I was trapped in my own body while it did things and things were done to it. Disconnected yet fully aware. It’s a nightmare that doesn’t end because the only memories I have are the aftermath. The fire that fuels the internal dialogue that I am filled with poison, beyond imperfect, beyond restoration, beyond receiving what was stolen from me before I could fight to protect it.
“I was sacrificing my physical self for something I didn’t really want to do.”
- From you are what you believe
As I got older and began to work through the trauma and neglect I had faced in my life, I prayed to God that when the time was right, what happened to me would be revealed. A year or two later, I had a dream—well, more so the resurfacing of a memory. The vision was thankfully only what I was ready to bear. The truth of my age, the setting, and the perpetrator. My subconscious confirmed to me that the abuser in question was [redacted], a man I never felt comfortable around. That was all I was given, and it was enough to give me some kind of closure in the moment, but I still didn’t fully believe or trust in the truth of my body.
What I didn’t know is how much CSA impacted my ability to truly trust my intuition, which is the only reason I am bringing any of it to light. I didn’t understand the connection between my body and my instincts. Of course, denying and disconnecting from my body would lead to denying the language it was speaking to me. My intuition is strong, it's piercing, it's clear. It's never steered me in the wrong direction, but my doubt of it has. As I began to step deeper into the woman I am today—my intuitive ability growing and refining—I became more and more troubled by my intuition. It grew louder and more intense, and my denial grew with it. Even when something was proven with tangibility, I still questioned myself and downplayed it. Even though I knew I experienced CSA at the hands of a family member, I still allowed myself to fall under the illusion of denial. Denial of who I am, what I know, what I deserve, and the instinctual power of knowing that runs deep within me.
“Saturn spent it’s time in the first degrees of Pisces for a year as it retrograded back to the beginning of its transit, before it ever hit my Mercury in 2024. During this time, how I used my mind started to go through a shift. My intuition was still at a peak, but I began to feel indifferent to it. I began to doubt it and feel hindered by it. I began to get angry that I had this connection to the divine because at that time I felt like my life was shit and this “gift” wasn’t making anything better. I began to really give up on it all, and by the end of the year I had completely numbed out and turned on myself and my faith.”
“…through all of it, there was a tugging. A calling, pulling me towards the direction I was attempting to walk away from. However, I continued to ignore it. I was mad, about everything. The world was on fire, and everyone was just ignori…wait.”
- From you are what you believe
Thankfully, Saturn is not one for the BS and came through to tell me that my time was up at the moanin’ and groanin’ party. I have a job to do—as per me committing myself to work for God—and it was time for me to stop wasting my precious energy pretending like I’d lost my damn mind. It was time for me to remember who the fuck I am by reclaiming who I lost.
Before arriving in Texas—or maybe it was after I arrived—I had a dream of a younger version of me, and my [redacted] in his disgusting, cluttered home. There was another person in the dream, but they were apparently dead. Naked and dead, lying flat on their stomach. It was a man with blond hair, and we were burying him. He felt familiar, but I didn’t know him. His lifeless body was lowered into a hole in the floor in my [redacted] home. After we were done, I frantically went into another room full of old radios and televisions. I began to rush around, pressing buttons trying to find something that worked. Something modern that would bring me back to the present and far away from the exact place and person I never wanted to be around. By this point, this was a theme that was swirling around my life. I was searching for past transits around the age I suspect the initial event happened, trying everything anything I could to again find some shred of tangible evidence to calm the feeling of being absolutely insane—instead of just listening to and honoring my body pleas for recognition. It wouldn’t have mattered what I found, I would have still been in denial.
Most of my trip was pretty uneventful on the outside, but internally I was going through it. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, was triggering me. I was in a fragile state with my health, and life was just piling on top of it. At one point I just spent a day grieving. I felt like I was dying, and in a sense I was. A whole part of me and my identity was being burned away for good. I numbed out, often just repeating “I'm neither here nor there” when my sister caught me in a daze. I was not home. I checked out. And when I wasn't checked out, I was ravenous. I was finding release through entertaining my need for intensity and constraint in my sex life. All I wanted was freedom from the pain, but the only way I have been able to do that was through self-harm. To feel pain was to feel the aliveness in my body. It connected me back to a vessel I regularly vacationed from. I don’t physically self-harm anymore, but the ache for something that will place me on the edge of life never fades. It never ceases and becomes particularly loud when I’m faced with feeling the fullness of my body’s history. Unfortunately, my tolerance is high (yay dissociation) and the only thing intense enough feels like it needs to be close to death.
Exhibit A (written before I even made it to Texas…the yearn only got worse😂):
And then came what I really traveled to Texas for.
One evening a conversation grew between my sister, my aunt, and I. I asked a question–one that felt like it needed to be asked for whatever reason–that lead to a retelling of a family story I had heard many times before but had clearly missed a vital part of. The vital part was that my great [redacted] was a fucking pedophile (but no, we can’t call him that because that’s just an accusation…we don’t really know). Needless to say, this entire conversation triggered the shit out of me. The realization but mostly the denial of who this man really was.
I stepped out of the conversation and went back to the guest room to be in peace. I was exhausted by people in my family being in denial about reality (see how that works? The threads that connect us are always informing the self of what we aren’t addressing within, on an individual and collective level). Not too long after that, my aunt is sitting in front of me telling me that she didn’t mean to upset me. Me, oblivious to what she was referring to, told her it was okay and that “it was piece of information that I didn’t know but needed to know”. And then she said, “I know my [redacted] is an asshole”. Dead stare, straight into my eyeballs. I never noticed how beautiful her eyes were, even though they were filled with tears. I also never told her about the truth of my body. She knew what I knew, and there was no denying it from that point onwards. I faded into black. My eyes got watery, but tears didn't really want to come out. Again, nobody was home. And I stayed that way for a month. In the void between there and now, burning, shedding, unbecoming.
“You begin to back-track and wonder where the obvious signs were. You have to fight your mind because for ages you’ve been gaslighting yourself out of acknowledging your daily pain and exhaustion. I had been so hard on myself for YEARS…”
-From you are what you believe
But in that space, I also found light, and clarity. There was no more denial. There was no more confusion. Everything immediately snapped into place. The boulder blocking my path dissolved into dust. My world stopped violently shaking every 2 seconds. I had a new point of reference whenever my fear and doubt tried to creep back in, “Victoria, remember how you knew something happened to you without having any memory or evidence? Remember how you were never wrong about what your intuition was begging you to acknowledge? Remember the wisdom of your body?”. Nothing and no one can make me doubt myself ever again.
Like I stated before, there are several parts I am leaving out of this story. There are many layers to this experience in its fullness. I can’t do that here, and I can’t do it yet. But one day I will, when I’ve had someone hold me long enough to do the work required to invite all the lost and scared parts of me back home. I can’t do it by myself, I know this now. I need to be loved tenderly first, and it’s the only thing I’m inviting into my life right now.
Saturn’s journey through my 6H and conjunct my Mercury exposed me to all the hidden things—whether they were hidden from me or I hid them from myself—that would continue to stay with me for the rest of my life. It showed me where I’ve overlooked and sacrificed my needs to give endlessly to others. It showed me how far I will go to ignore the truth of my body if the pain is too much, and the consequences of doing so.
Whether it is a physical problem I cannot resolve in this lifetime (like a genetic disorder), or trauma that needs to be acknowledged through a patient and compassionate love, this transit has exposed me to what I can no longer hide from just because I’ve only experienced it alone and in the dark. It has forced me to see my pain in the light, honor it, and make much more room for it on my priority list by developing and upholding the necessary boundaries—for myself and others.
I still struggle, but I’m getting better at listening to my body when it needs rest and when it needs connection. I’m getting better at giving myself the opportunity to be close to someone, to be held, to receive what I need to leave what I can leave of the past behind.
Saturn deals with what prevails throughout time and Pisces is what transcends time and space. There are things that can be restored and renewed, and things that cannot. Things that will continue to pass from generation to generation, through one lifetime to the next. Things that can be released, and others that can only be worked around and managed. But regardless, there is always the opportunity to alchemize through loss and grief. To turn something painful and everlasting into medicine, even if it’s only for healing my own heart. I get to be in service to me, and I get to welcome others to be a part of that too. I get to have that in my life, even when it’s feels foreign and hard to accept fully.
“There is no erasing of this, but you were never less than because of it…you were only made to feel that way by those who did not have the capacity to take you as is, and build for you a palace where you could be the empress of your imperfections.” - Saturn in Pisces