The Astrology of my Social Media Cyber Bubbles

The other day I received an email from tumblr wishing my tumblr blog a Happy first Birthday. It was a quirky surprise and I posted the card to mark a milestone in my blogging life.

“Damaged & Dangerous turned 1 today! We hope it was a great year, and we look forward to sharing many more!”

My tumblr is a Leo. I knew I’d started it sometime in August 2012, but I’d forgotten when. It explains a lot about it. I love to decorate it with beautiful images created by talented artists and photographers. I tend to post more often when I am feeling emotionally charged, and choose images which capture whatever emotion is dominating me. I also post quotes, and those too are chosen for their ability to say what perhaps I am unable to say. Yet I do say a lot too. My tumblr also has Mercury in Leo. When I write, I gush blood and guts, and needless to say there is an element of emotional drama in my writing.

It is a rather dramatic blog. The name itself screams drama – Damaged and Dangerous. I got it from a quote:

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.” ― Josephine Hart

The quote comes from a book called Damage, and… Ha! The profile picture which I now use on all my social media is called Damage… I did not do that consciously. Sheesh! Looking at things from this angle is freaking me out a little, in a thrilling way. I think. Not sure.

Originally I used this image as my profile picture (perhaps my tumblr has Scorpio rising?):

Circus Divas – Diva Poisson Eve by Carlos Ostos Sabugal

Then I briefly used this image for my tumblr profile pic:

…after I started using my own face to represent me on the internet.

I had originally thought that I would keep what I looked like private, and use images which expressed an idea of what I wanted to do through the medium I was using to express myself. However after I read this article – 30 Types of Twitter Profile Pics by Scott Williams – I opted to be more me and less hidden and shy. Doing that helped me to bring more of myself out into the open, which has been very insightful and enjoyable. So far.

I used my own face first on Twitter. I went through a few different avis, battling between being fully myself and hiding behind variations of myself, not so much masks but as filters to create a bit of buffering between me and others.

I finally settled on the Damage image. It is not only unfiltered, but I intensified the contrast to bring out my freckles, inspired by those UV adverts which are designed to terrify us into avoiding the Sun because we are all vampires we just don’t all know it.

The image has many elements about it which I love, and still love, which is quite unusual for me as I am addicted to change, but this portrait encapsulates me in a way I have never achieved before. Everything about it… is very me.

I have Virgo rising, so I am shy. But the hand over my face serves several purposes other than to express my shyness. It also expresses the fact that I groan a lot at some of the things I say and do. And I have rather intense eyes, I can’t see them as I use them to see through, but others often react to their gaze as though I could shoot lasers from them… so I hid them to not scare off the casual observer.

The smile is subtle, but it is one of my favourite smiles. It is the one which I use most often with myself. A wryly cheeky smile, laughing quietly at myself, and at the universe which seems to enjoy playing tricks on me.

Anyway, this is the image I use on all my social media bubbles. It is my brand, my logo, my representative of the world of me. Not sure if I chose wisely, but I like it… which usually means I chose unwisely. Using that smile right now!

I had originally used different profile pictures on each creation, because I thought it would help to remind me what I wanted to express through that particular outlet, but then I read a social media advice article which claimed that it was a good idea to be consistent across all platforms, at least where the profile pic was concerned. It’s your internet face, people use it to gauge who you are, to find you in a crowd, and it is best if people recognise you visually should they decide they want to get to know you better.

Constantly changing your image confuses and frustrates people, forcing them to keep clearing their mental image cache of who you were and replacing it with who you are now. They may find your changes fun at first, but after a while they may get fed up and decide not to look for you anymore as they don’t recognise you anymore. When people give you their attention, they are offering you a gift. They do not owe it to you. You’re not the centre of their universe, they are, and their attention span has other things and people it wants to focus on.

I am changeable enough in RL with who I am to know that people will only put up with so many ‘I’m different now’ and ‘I’ve changed my mind’, before they can’t take anymore because they need some consistency, and being consistently inconsistent does not count.

Blogging has really helped me to be more consistent, and incorporate my ever-changing, evolving self into it. It’s been very healing and rewarding. On the internet and in the outernet.

The birthday greeting for my tumblr made me feel… elated. I had survived an entire year of doing one thing consistently. What I actually mean is that I survived my own tendency to destroy my own creations. Oh, my natal Pluto! And Uranus!

And Mercury! I could also point a finger at Lilith… All of the Liliths! They are clustered in my 10th house, except for the asteroid which is in my 5th house. Basically… I do stuff until I decide to stop doing it, then I go off and do other stuff.

I am a wild and crazy creature who is incredibly difficult to tame, not just by others but by myself as well. And I’ve been trying for years and yonks. I can pretend that I’ve been tamed… it never lasts. I have however become more adept at working with the destructive energies within me, understanding their cyclical needs, and how to channel them more constructively. Using that smile again, a bit wider this time.

I always smile and chuckle at myself when I make statements about myself which I know will probably be tested for veracity and accuracy as soon as they are made. Still… can’t hold things in for fear of being challenged, just do it and then deal with the consequences… hopefully they’ll be good ones.

Anyway my tumblr’s first birthday made me curious about the astrology of my WordPress, so I searched to find its date of birth.

You’d think that someone who had quite a bit of Virgo in their chart, and rising, would be more meticulous, and that someone who loves astrology like I do would have cast charts for my blogs before I created them. I have quite a bit of Pisces/Neptune influence in my chart too, and so I forget things, to do them and to think them, and I get confused a lot. Even though I have a very good memory, it is also a vague one. I live on the seesaw of the Virgo/Pisces axis.

Speaking of Pisces… my WordPress has a stellium in Pisces. Neptune, Venus, Chiron, Sun, Mercury and Mars. Phew! No wonder it’s An Upturned Soul!

My deviantart is a Capricorn, which is perfect because I created it when I felt the first stirrings of transiting Pluto about to cross the cusp of my 5th, and I think that I will be creating a lot more when it finally gets into that house for good and then conjuncts my Sun. I’ve been neglecting it since transiting Pluto went retrograde and returned to finish off what it has been doing in my 4th.

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn by Yuhon

My Pinterest is also a Capricorn, which is also perfect because one of my favourite boards is called Saturnalia. I created that board because I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my Sun sign and with Saturn, so I thought that with transiting Pluto so close to my Sun and transiting Uranus close to my Saturn, that it was time for me to make friends with the parts of me I don’t like, or understand all that well. Time for a total rethink of my ego (Sun in 5th) and the areas of myself which I have branded as being taboo (Saturn in 8th).

My Twitter, I think, is a Virgo. I started the account just to read the tweets of some of my friends, and I kept it locked. I did not want to be followed as I did not plan to do any tweeting myself. Then I changed my mind. And now I am loving it. But it took me a while to warm up to it. Very Virgo. I also only do it when I feel the urge, so on my bio I put the word – Irregular – to sum up who I am, what I’m like, and how I do things. At irregular times, and in an irregular way. This takes the pressure off of me to conform… as I know that conforming is something which I do really badly, and usually ends up with me rebelling and eradicating all traces of myself.

I don’t know the exact time of the birth of all my cyber bubbles.

In typical Virgo cleaning mode, made more extreme by having Pluto in Virgo, when I clean I often do it by deleting everything which came before so that there is plenty of space to allow new energy to enter into the place which was once cluttered with old energy that was beginning to stagnate.

So I have no idea what the rising signs of my blogs and other social media outlets are, and I am rubbish at guessing rising signs, thus I also don’t know where everything is in the charts and where the transits are…

Never mind. For now. Maybe later I’ll give this some more thought and try to focus a bit more, analyse the energies and see what they have to reveal… it might even show me where I am going with all that I am doing on the internet.

I asked a question the other day of my favourite oracle about all my social media activities… and it said this was practice. Practice for what!?! I kind of think it is, it does feel that way… I feel as though I am being trained, honed, and prepared for something, but what?

We (as in all of the mes living inside of me) will see…

So, do you know the astrology of your blog?