On 12 January 2020, Saturn and Pluto met in Capricorn. It was also my fiftieth birthday and I was in the middle of my Chiron Return.
At the time, I had no idea that my life was about to unravel. Looking back, however, I can see the pressure building long before the conjunction became exact. My anxiety levels had been rising for months, and every instinct I possessed was screaming that something was wrong. I couldn’t have explained exactly what I sensed, only that something immense was approaching.
The following day, the COVID-19 narrative exploded across the media. Within two weeks, I was convinced that we were witnessing the largest psyop of modern times. Whether you agree with that assessment is ultimately beside the point. This is not an article about COVID. It is an article about what happened when I trusted my own perception and discovered that the price of doing so was exile.
At the time, I believed I had found my tribe. I had spent years building friendships within the Tarot and Pagan communities. These were people I admired, respected, and trusted. Many considered themselves intuitive, psychic, spiritually aware, and capable of independent thought.
Then the fault lines appeared.
What shocked me most was not that people arrived at different conclusions from my own. What shocked me was the speed with which fear seemed to transform thoughtful people into enforcers of a narrative that could not be questioned. Questions became dangerous. Doubt became unacceptable. Nuance vanished almost overnight. Censorship and cancel culture were used to control those who dared to think for themselves.
My own body was screaming at me not to take the vaccine. Everything in me said no. Thankfully, I listened. Thankfully, so did my husband. Had he not eventually begun seeing things the way I did, I honestly don’t know where I would have ended up.
The social consequences arrived quickly. I was blacklisted and publicly attacked. Videos were created with the sole purpose of targeting me, and comment sections filled with accusations that bore little resemblance to reality. I remember scrolling through one thread in disbelief as complete strangers confidently explained who I was, what I believed, and what motivated me. Apparently, I was racist. Apparently, I was dangerous. I was all sorts of things that I had never been.
The details matter less than the cumulative effect. Years of unresolved religious trauma, complex PTSD, and undiagnosed autism collided at exactly the same moment. The pressure built until my nervous system simply could not hold it any longer.
What followed was an object lesson in what happens when religious trauma, autism, and a global panic collide.
At the height of the meltdown, I publicly declared myself a Christian and announced that I wanted nothing more to do with the occult. I packed up my Tarot decks, boxed my books, and loaded statues, ritual tools, magical journals, esoteric texts, and spiritual treasures collected over decades into the car. Then I asked my husband to drive me to the local recycling centre, where I got rid of nearly all of it.
At the time, I believed I was doing the right thing. Today, I see something very different. I see an AuDHD nervous system desperately trying to restore order in the middle of overwhelming chaos. I see a traumatised woman trying to find certainty in a world that suddenly felt hostile and unfamiliar. Most of all, I see someone searching for solid ground.
Once the worst of the meltdown subsided, I found myself facing an uncomfortable truth. The evangelical Christianity of my youth no longer fit either. I had imagined that I was returning home, but there was very little there for me to return to. The certainty I was seeking did not exist, and the answers I needed could not be found inside somebody else’s belief system.
And so began the long and often humiliating process of rebuilding. Not only did I have to figure out what I actually believed, I had to do it in full public view after having very publicly burned down the life I had spent years creating. It turns out that humble pie is every bit as unpleasant as people say.
Recovery was neither quick nor graceful. There was no lightning-bolt moment of revelation and no dramatic return to who I had been before. Instead, I found myself slowly picking through the wreckage, examining assumptions I had never previously questioned. I had to learn how to distinguish faith from fear, discernment from paranoia, and authentic spiritual experience from groupthink. More importantly, I had to learn how to trust my own perception again.
For a long time, I questioned everything. I questioned my judgement, my intuition, my ability to read people, and even my ability to make sense of the world. Yet that questioning eventually led me somewhere healthier than certainty ever could have. It forced me to become more honest, more curious, more willing to admit when I did not know something, and ultimately more willing to think for myself.
Only years later did I fully appreciate the symbolism of my Chiron return. Natal Chiron sits at 2° Aries in my 11th House. Aries asks us to become ourselves, while the 11th House asks us where we belong.
My Chiron return forced those questions together in the most brutal way imaginable.
I lost friendships. And I lost my sense of community. I very nearly lost my business. For a time, I even lost my sense of who I was. Yet the deeper lesson had very little to do with the people who rejected me and everything to do with the parts of myself I was still willing to reject in order to belong.
As I write this, Chiron is preparing to leave Aries and enter Taurus. Because Taurus falls in my 12th House, I suspect the next chapter will be less visible than the last one.
Chiron’s journey through my 12th House will be more about what has been operating behind the scenes all along. The old wounds around belonging, the fear of being too different, the lingering echoes of religious conditioning, and the unconscious survival strategies that once protected me but no longer serve me all seem likely candidates for examination. I also suspect it will bring me face-to-face with a deeper question: why I spent so much of my life searching for somewhere to belong rather than recognising that I belonged to myself all along.
If Chiron in Aries asked me to stand alone when necessary, perhaps Chiron in Taurus will ask me to become comfortable in my own skin. Perhaps it will be less about fighting for the right to exist as myself and more about fully inhabiting the person I already am.
Time will tell.
What I do know is that the wounds remain part of my story. Religious trauma remains part of my story. The public attacks remain part of my story. The meltdown remains part of my story. None of those experiences can be undone, nor would I want to erase them if I could. They shaped me, humbled me, and forced me to rebuild on stronger foundations.
Most importantly, they taught me that losing a tribe is sometimes the beginning of finding out who you are because there is nobody left to tell you.
If you’ve been through your own season of exile, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Looking back, can you see a hidden gift in what you lost?
