Last night I stepped outside of myself. The day before the ending of this episode of Mercury Retrograde. I almost made it safely to the end.

Almost.

But I didn’t. I got off last night from telling someone that he is a vile human being and I don’t even feel badly about it as I normally would. The only thing I feel is disappointed that it had to come to that. I give people so much space to be. And so many chances. Yet somehow they still run out of room. And perhaps that is the problem. Too much wiggle room gives people the opportunity to wiggle too much. (And trust me, if they have the chance to wiggle, they will wiggle.)

I’ve got to stop doing that.

Still, this version of retrograde, which was supposed to have a heavy focus on the work environment as opposed to health like the one earlier this year, was like an emotional tilt-a-whirl for me. I was up and down and around so much that it’s a wonder I’m still alive and functional and didn’t vomit at every turn. But I made it all the way to the last day, coping how I cope until finally, I let someone incite me in the 11th hour.

I thought I was prepared for Mercury this time, but dammit, you got me again you little red devil. (I say that with all the love.)

Maybe it was partly my fault, for initiating the conversation, but my God. Where do some people get off?

I promise you guys there are ways to communicate without being unnecessarily rude. And there are also ways to stop a conversation when you feel you aren’t in the right mind space to have it, without being insolent. Nobody alive, or dead, can force anyone to do something he or she doesn’t want to do. We all know this. But it doesn’t really give you the right to act superior, because if we all have the same capacity or propensity for action/inaction then that means the playing field is leveled.

At any rate, I didn’t come here to talk about my failure that was communicating yesterday specifically. But I think this retrograde in general has been the most taxing on my emotions of all the retrogrades that I can remember. I haven’t quite found the key to surviving them, although I know that it probably starts with focusing on the bigger picture. Often times during retrograde you lose friends, your machines stop working, your emotions go off the charts, your past revisits, and traveling is basically a nightmare. All of this can surely be stressful, but the undeniable veracity of the Mercury retrograde is that it gives you insight, albeit in that backward ass totally fucked up way that Mercury likes to deliver its messages, but it gives nonetheless. Those of us who are ruled by Mercury, specifically, are deeply affected and often taken back to a prior incident where we get a chance to learn something that we didn’t learn before or look at it in a whole new light. It is, in essence, a time for reflection, but oh how it will stretch you out slowly in the process.

Think of it like this. The retrograde is kind of like a slingshot. Even though we know that the end result of a sling is that it will propel you forward with great velocity, it first has to pull you back, slowly, until the tension is virtually unbearable. It will make you uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. And sometimes it’s hard to see it through when your emotions are screaming out for help because they feel the tension about to break, even though it won’t. But in the end, you will end up ahead. You will still, always, go forward.

In this run, my emotions have been at a peak all on their own because of the trauma and grief that I’ve been coping with since the untimely passing of my brother and the subsequent ent passing of one of my father’s best friends (and twin). Add in a little astral “regression” from my favourite planet and it’s bound to be a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately, though, the worst is over. Mercury goes direct today, bringing the most powerful retrograde of 2015, in Gemini, to an end, and leaving me to finally grieve in peace.

And boy let me just say, if I could kick Mercury in the ass on its way out, I would with no hesitation.