Another deep look into what's going on inside me. God knows why I do this. Maybe that's the next question for my therapist.
Yesterday's session is still reverberating. My anger when I saw at the hotel over the weekend that someone had parked me in, even though there were plenty of free spaces. I noticed it on Saturday afternoon as I set out for a walk. The car had probably been blocking mine since Friday. Whoever parked there probably wouldn't stay longer than I would. So it shouldn't really have mattered to me. But as I walked, it started simmering inside me. When I came back, a small group went into the hotel ahead of me, and I thought one of them was very likely connected to the car's owner. I started voicing my complaint to them, and as I spoke my anger positively exploded. One of the group actually knew the owner and promised to take care of it. I left it at that and went to my room.
Where did that anger come from?
I couldn't get a handle on it.
Frau Lenores asked me the same question yesterday.
It was the feeling that someone obviously didn't care what happened to me. They parked me in and cared so little that they couldn't even be bothered to check later whether they could move their car into a free space. Or worse: perhaps there were even free spaces when they parked, and they simply didn't care.
The feeling of not mattering to someone.
The feeling that I hadn't mattered to my mother. Or to other relatives. Growing up in an environment where it didn't matter what happened to me. What something was like for me. How I felt. What I wanted, or might have wanted. All those violations of my boundaries, humiliations and put-downs.
The realization came during the session.
The tears came once I was home again.
Maybe it's also why loneliness can sometimes be so hard to bear. The feeling that there simply isn't anyone to whom you matter.
It became even clearer when I imagined setting out for my walk without seeing any free parking spaces, because every one of them was taken. I would at least have felt a strong impulse to let it go, to help. To do something good by simply leaving it alone. I didn't need to drive away. There didn't have to be any hassle. I could have felt like a rescuer. Just like before. I wouldn't even have allowed my own needs to arise. I would have sacrificed them so I could feel like a rescuer, a hero. That would have made me significant in my own eyes and turned me into the rescuer in my head.
The good old perpetrator–victim–rescuer triangle.
Maybe that's also why I enjoy studying the natal chart so much. Everything in it has significance. Or you can give everything significance. "It doesn't matter" isn't a category in there.
Yes. And your last sentence almost seems to me the key to this whole train of thought:
"'It doesn't matter' isn't a category in there."
In a natal chart, nothing is just standing around by chance. Every planet has its place. Every house has a cusp. Aspects connect things. Even tension is a relationship. An opposition doesn't say: These two have nothing to do with each other. Quite the opposite: It says they are related.
That is almost the opposite world to what you touched on with Frau Lenores yesterday.
To not matter means to be without a connection.
Maybe that's why significance is not merely an intellectual pleasure for you. It can do something emotionally: If something has significance, it belongs. It is part of a context. It isn't simply overlooked.
And that helps me understand your anger about the car better now.
From the outside, the situation was ridiculously small. You didn't even want to go anywhere. The other car would probably have been gone before you wanted to leave. No real harm was done.
But that is precisely why the facts alone don't explain the force of your anger.
The decisive thought seems to have been:
"They couldn't have cared less what happened to me."
Not: My car is blocked.
But:
"In that person's world, the fact that I might need to get around doesn't even exist."
And then something very old explodes.
That would also explain why the version with a completely full car park would feel so different. Suddenly there would be a reason. The other person needs something. They are in a difficult spot. You can help them.
And immediately a relationship takes shape:
They need a space.
I don't need my car right now.
I let them stay there.
I make something possible for them.
Then you are not irrelevant.
You actually matter.
And this is where your discovery about the rescuer becomes very interesting. Perhaps the reward isn't mainly feeling morally superior. Perhaps the much deeper reward is this:
The rescuer can never be insignificant.
Someone needs them.
That is almost the safest imaginable insurance against the black hole of "not mattering".
Then something like this could actually develop:
Notice a need → set it aside → care for the other person → be needed → feel significant.
And if the rescuer role isn't available because the other person isn't in need at all but is simply acting inconsiderately, all that remains is:
I don't enter into their calculations.
Then there is nothing you can use to turn the situation into significance.
Except anger.
And anger, too, establishes a relationship.
I find that quite important right now. Because anger says:
"You can't just ignore me."
It forces the other person to notice you.
You go back to the hotel, address the group, grow angrier and angrier as you speak—and suddenly someone responds. He knows the driver. He'll take care of it.
Now you exist in the situation.
Perhaps that's why you didn't need to check afterward. You didn't even look later to see whether the car had actually been moved.
The practical problem apparently wasn't so important anymore.
You had been heard.
Someone had said: I'll take care of it.
That was enough.
And now your remark about the perpetrator–victim–rescuer triangle takes on another dimension. The roles can change, but all three have something in common:
They are connected to each other.
The perpetrator needs a victim.
The victim has a perpetrator.
The rescuer has someone to rescue.
None of these positions is irrelevant.
Maybe that is why even conflict can be so energizing, as you realized recently. The imagined argument over a published text. Ginger. Eva. Apple. The alphorn players. The person who parked you in.
In conflict, at least one thing is perfectly clear:
I exist in the other person's mind.
And that suddenly makes peace more difficult again. When nobody is actively relating to you, peace can feel dangerously similar to:
Nobody needs me. Nobody fights me. Nobody calls. Nobody writes. Nobody has me in mind.
A black phone.
Loneliness.
Not mattering.
Maybe that is why Frau Lenores's note had such an enormous effect. It didn't require a perpetrator, a victim or a rescuer. She wanted nothing from you. You hadn't done anything for her. There was no conflict.
And yet that little note proved:
You had crossed her mind.
That would be an entirely different kind of significance.
The same with the young waiter and the alcohol-free Aperol: a thumbs-up from a distance. No need. No rescue. No drama.
Just:
I remember you ordered that drink. How is it?
You are on someone's mind.
Maybe that is precisely why those ridiculously tiny acts of attention are so big for you.
And then the natal chart.
Yes—perhaps that really is part of its enormous appeal to you.
It offers a world in which even the difficult things are not meaningless.
Saturn doesn't merely inhibit: It is placed somewhere, rules over something, forms aspects.
Chiron doesn't merely wound: Its wound has a position and relationships.
An opposition isn't disconnection without context; it is an axis.
Even what one suffers from has a place.
That can be immensely comforting to someone whose deeper fear may be less:
"There's something wrong with me."
than:
"What if nobody actually cares what happens to me?"
Perhaps beneath the question you ask so often—"Am I actually normal?"—lies another one:
"Am I legible?"
Can someone look at me—Frau Lenores, a partner, myself, the natal chart—and discern a pattern in it?
Not say: Oh, who cares.
But:
"Yes. I see how it all connects."
And perhaps that is exactly why your painstaking writing is also part of the same movement.
You make your life meaningful by making it tellable.
Not necessarily because you think you're especially important.
Perhaps precisely because you know so deeply what it feels like when your experience seems to matter to no one.
What fascinates me again and again is this apparently genuinely true idea that behind every bout of anger there is sadness. Only it's almost impossible—at least for me—to work out on my own what sort of sadness it is. It only became clear to me intellectually in conversation with Frau Lenores. In that moment I could sense that "not mattering" was the trigger. Only later, long after I was home, did I actually feel the sadness about it and become able to connect it emotionally to my anger.
Yes. Though I wouldn't quite turn the idea that "behind every bout of anger there is sadness" into a law of nature. Anger can also arise directly from a boundary being crossed, a threat, frustration or injustice, without there necessarily being a hidden sorrow underneath.
But with your anger at the hotel, those layers do seem especially apt. And the sequence in time is interesting:
1. Situation: Someone has parked me in.
2. Anger: What a bloody nerve.
3. Conversation with Frau Lenores: That person didn't care what happened to me.
4. Only later at home: It makes me sad not to matter to someone.
The crucial thing may be that the intellectual realization came before the feeling.
You didn't "find" the sadness beneath the anger by looking inward for long enough. Frau Lenores helped you make a connection. Only then, apparently, could your body—or your emotional experience—catch up.
That runs a little against the common notion that you just have to feel deeply enough and the truth will reveal itself. For you, understanding sometimes seems to open a door to feeling.
And perhaps that also explains why you analyze so much. Analysis isn't necessarily a defense against feeling. It can be your way into it.
The problem probably arises only when analysis never arrives there. Then you can come up with ten brilliant hypotheses about your own anger and still not get a millimeter closer to what hurts.
With Frau Lenores, something different happened this time. You searched together long enough for a sentence to emerge that stirred something in you:
"He didn't care what happened to me."
At first, that was a realization.
Hours later it became:
"It hurts that people can be indifferent to what happens to me."
And only then came the tears.
Maybe that's why talking to her was indispensable. On your own, you were too close to the anger. After all, anger itself already offers an entirely plausible explanation:
The idiot parked me in even though there were free spaces. Of course I'm pissed off.
Case closed.
Another person can do something at this point that is hard to do alone: refuse to accept the seemingly sufficient explanation as sufficient.
Yes, but why does this particular thing make you so angry?
And then ask again.
And at some point the whole level shifts.
It's also a good example of what Frau Lenores can do and I can only do to a limited extent. I can offer you twenty possible connections. But precisely because of that, there is a danger that we will choose the one that fits especially neatly on an intellectual level. Frau Lenores sits opposite you. She hears your voice, sees your face and body, notices your hesitation, your laughter, perhaps a change in your eyes. And she can linger on a sentence even when your thoughts have already moved on to the next one.
Perhaps that is also what her note means to you: Another person holds on to a thought with you.
And your delayed sadness doesn't surprise me at all. Perhaps the anger had to go first. When you're angry, the movement is:
Outward. You did something to me.
Sadness reverses the direction:
Inward. That hurt me.
The second position is far more vulnerable.
Anger makes you big. It even let you speak up in a group of strange musicians and grow bigger as you went.
Sadness only says:
I don't want to be someone who doesn't matter.
There is nothing to win, no one to put in their place and nothing to fix.
Maybe that's why the tears came only when you got home.
By then, the person who parked you in was long gone.
And with them, the chance to fight.
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