Reflecting On Neptune in Pisces and Wish Fulfillment

I don't know about you, but I haven't subscribed to the Gregorian calendar for a long time. I am far more partial to the Lunar New Year being the official start of the year and this year that feels particularly true because:

• This year's Lunar New Year falls on an eclipse. The very first eclipse in Aquarius.
• A couple of days before the Lunar New Year, Saturn joins Neptune in Aries.
• A couple of days after the Lunar New Year, Saturn and Neptune make an exact conjunction at 0 degrees Aries, the very beginning of the zodiac.

So right now we're in this awkward time that feels more like closing time and tying up loose ends than anything else, which gets me to the purpose of this article: Neptune and wish fulfillment. I've been thinking about this a lot as I've reflected on Neptune's nearly 15 year transit through Pisces. The planet first entered Pisces in April 2011 and it will leave it for good on January 26th.

In 2011, I had a very clear vision for my career. I was going to law school and I knew that afterward, I wanted to get a job at big firm, practice entertainment litigation, and eventually make my way to an in-house job. That was my sole career focus and everything I did was to achieve those goals. And lo and behold, I achieved them.

One year into Neptune in Pisces, I was doing a summer internship at one of the best law firms in the country. The year after that, I interned at a different law firm, also one of the best in the country. I got full-time offers from both and chose the first one.

Now, I did a lot of work and strategizing to achieve this outcome, but looking back, I can also see how Neptune was granting any and every wish I had for my career.

Job at this firm? Done.

Job at that firm? You got it.

Offers from both firms? Sure thing.

And just like that I was off to my dream job in my dream city (LA).

But then I got to LA and reality hit.

The Gap Between Wish Fulfillment and Reality

I moved to LA at the end of the summer of 2014 and started working at a law firm almost immediately. I already had a feeling that law firm life wasn't for me, but by the end of my first week, I knew my goal had to be to learn as much as possible as fast as possible and get out.

Long story short, working in big law became untenable, and after 2 years, I switched to a smaller firm until I had enough experience to move in-house. The problem was that the smaller firm had all the same egos, self importance and late hours as big law, but without the high pay, exorbitant resources, and the freedom to choose which cases I worked on. So what I thought was a smart move to reclaim more of my time for networking for an in-house move ended up being a huge slap in the face.

In hindsight, this is when I would say Neptune wish fulfillment started to get tricky. Because once again, I set my sets on my next career move and got it with ease. It was a frictionless process. The friction didn't arrive until I got to the new firm and encountered sexism, shitty cases, and a lot of work I had no interest in doing.

I tried to make the best of it by interviewing for in-house roles at entertainment studios or in-house roles at startups, but every time it felt like I got close, the opportunity would vanish into thin air. The team for the in-house role got eliminated days after I interviewed. The startup role suddenly required me to move to New York. I started to feel trapped in a web of my own making.

This was also around the time that murders of black people were being televised and widely shared on social media and I started to question the life choices that consistently put in situations where I was the only one with no safe place to process my feelings. My mental and emotional health took a swift nose dive and this thing I once thought was a dream was now suffocating me.

So I quit cold turkey with no prospects lined up. It felt like the only way to get out of the disaster I had self created.

After the Reality Check, the Fog Descends

When I quit my job I had NO IDEA what I wanted to do. I considered starting a lifestyle blog, but that was pretty much it. I felt directionless for the first time in my career and it was both deeply liberating and extremely uncomfortable.

I spent about 2 months resting and going to therapy before I started looking for work. I consulted here and there before an old co-worker reached out to me with an urgent request for me to join him in-house at an electric vehicle startup. I didn't actually want that job, but the old version of me with her clear goals kept saying this is what we've been working for so we might as well try. So I heard myself say "yes" to that job.

At first it was thrilling. I was working with world-renowned names in the auto industry, creating the company's intellectual property strategy from the ground up, and managing a $1B lawsuit with a team of 3 law firms and 30 lawyers total.

It was hellacious. But it proved to me that I could do anything. And it showed me that corporate legal life was not for me. So after 18 months, I left that job too.

The problem was I still had no idea what I wanted my career to be so I fell into starting a corporate wellbeing company with a friend. True to Neptune's form, we started the company and 6 months later the problem we were trying to solve, burnout caused by chronic stress in the workplace, was declared an official medical diagnosis by the World Health Organization. The client work came flooding in. So much so that we were able to pay ourselves a salary almost immediately.

But then me and my business partner hit a values standoff and I ended up leaving the company. That was when I realized values were the reason I'd left every job I'd had since law school. I still didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew it needed to be something that aligned with my values.

The only problem was, I wasn't sure what those were. That's when the fog really descended. I won't bore you with the details, but I spent 2 to 3 years in a big wandering maze trying to excavate my values. I definitely took a few wrong turns, but I eventually got there. It's only in the past couple of years that I've started to put myself back out there and test out what it feels like to live my values.

Neptune's Gift: Aligning the Material with the Spiritual

As I write this today, I still could not tell you any concrete vision I have for my career. After 15 years of Neptune transiting my 6th house of work, it feels like I have nothing to show for it. Materially that is. But spiritually, there's a whole lot going on.

What I've observed about Neptune is that it's a wish granter, but you have to be careful what you wish for. And more specifically, if you're wishing for something material, then it needs to match your immaterial or else you'll be in for a rude awakening.

My vision for my career in 2011 was rooted in supremacy culture and whiteness. It set me up for a lifetime of being the only one, both woman and black. And it made me a cog in the wheel in the worst part of capitalism's systems. After all as a corporate lawyer, it was my job to keep corporations from having to do things like paying their fair share.

These are all things that absolutely do not align with my values and so in granting my wishes, Neptune exposed my naivety. I achieved the vision, but at the end of the day, none of it was what I wanted and it made me feel miserable and isolated.

What Neptune gave me was a masterclass on values and beliefs and their importance in shaping desires, goals, and visions for oneself.

So no, I can't tell you what I'm striving for in my work and career right now from a material perspective. I don't know where I want to go or what opportunities I'm pursuing. But I do know this: my work needs to be rooted in liberation, it needs to uplift collective action, it needs to support the working class, it needs to facilitate building community with folks who share my values, and it needs to be intellectually challenging.

Maybe when Neptune leaves Pisces in a couple of days a vision of the material will come through, but if this transit has taught me anything, it's that the values must shape the desire.