If I Speak - 23: Surviving your Saturn return

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Moya and Ash debate the power of astrology and explain how they survived their ‘Saturn return’ era. Plus: Ash’s best anti-procrastination techniques. Come and see If I Speak live at the London Podcast Festival on 15 September! Tickets available from Kings Place now. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to this new episode of If I Speak, broadcasting live and direct from the heady days of high summer. We're in sun cream and gelato season, no matter what the weather might be doing. Moya, how have you been? Have you been scampering around Versailles dressed as a milkmaid? It's really funny you mentioned Versailles. Have I told you about my story about Versailles? No. Really? Really?

Yeah, I know. I tell so many people. Vers versailles has a very um significant place in my psyche due to the fact it was the first place i visited on what i now call my interrail middle of breakup tour uh a few years ago i had a significant relationship and just before we finally like called it called it but we were basically breaking up i went on a solo trip for three weeks around europe and versailles paris was my first stop and i'd gone to paris because i was doing all like the western i was doing the western capitals i hadn't really been to see properly and i'd been to paris once earlier that year with that person and versailles was on my list of like i'm obviously going to do this because i'm a fucking basic ass history nerd like i have to go to versailles went to versailles cried all the way to versailles because i i knew that we were going to break up

it was like i was listening to tove low tove low no one dies from love that was my anthem all the way to versailles and i had this amazing time in versailles where i sort of like blagged my way in on the wrong ticket a free ticket uh because they couldn't be bothered to tell me to go away because the queue was too long uh and just went around and was like torn between like marvelling at Versailles and also then occasionally acknowledging the deep pain in my chest. And I'd always, throughout our relationship, I'd always wanted to see a red squirrel. I mean, I've always wanted to see a red squirrel anyway.

I love that you're like, specifically during this relationship, all I wanted was to see a red squirrel. But no, it was something that we talked about quite a lot and we'd been to like Formby and there were red squirrels there and I was like, I've never seen red squirrels. I always wanted to see red squirrel but no it was something that we talked about quite a lot and we'd been to like formby and there were red squirrels there and i was like i never see red squirrels always want to see red squirrels and when i got to versailles walking through the gardens uh listening to no one dies from love and repeat and i turned a corner and there was just a red squirrel there and i was like this is a sign from the higher power that you're on the right path even though literally you're on the right path uh even though it's hard and difficult but like you're gonna I

felt both amazing during that trip um all across Europe and then also terrible but like I felt so alive and so like myself for the first time in years and years and years because that's what happens when you're coming out of a relationship where you really love someone but you know it's not working um I think and you you finally are ready to go and you have these conflicting emotions about like i'm gonna miss them so much but i know this is the right thing and that red squirrel in versailles told me it was the right thing you know what i thought that your versailles story was going to be i was sent from austria as a teenage bride no i wasn't sent from Austria do you know

also Kirsten Dunst swore down that she saw the ghost of Marie Antoinette when she was filming Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola in Versailles she swore that she saw her did the ghost have her head attached or not or did she sort of do a salute where she grabbed one ear

pulled off the head and then wasn't it a tacky fucking tudor-esque ghost this is a real life apparition she walked into a room and she was just there chilling and i think she just got too into uh the the method of it all and just was like envisaging versailles coming to life around her but if you go to versailles now it's it's um been massively done up when my mum went in the 70s she was like it was a real dump but versailles now has been restored and when i went the king's apartments were all there was a set of apartments open for the first time that not really been shown to the public before so i really recommend going to versailles and if you're a journalist you can technically get in for free

it's funny you mentioned the tudors i spent like all of yesterday evening just really earnestly talking to my husband about how the tudors had like an objectively like weak claim to the throne I was just like totally totally weak and he was just like this isn't I'm glad you're interested but no it's so weak sorry sorry weak so fucking weak also I noticed I know we can't talk about this at length today but maybe another time um but I noticed you're in your war of the roses era I am in my wars of the roses era i've always been in the wars of the roses era but i'm currently um i often like the books i read are for the purposes of escapism so i always choose novels which are very very different from my working life in some way so when someone's like oh this is really great like super political super left-wing novel i'm like i

am never gonna fucking read that because that is not why I read fiction. Um, and so, yeah, you know, my, my favorite, my favorite writers open up a different world to me in some way. So Hillary Mantel is like my, of course,

absolute number one. Um, and yeah, managed really fucking love reading about the wars of the roses, the cousins war, as they called it at the time. Um, but coming up,

we'll be answering your dilemmas in our usual segment, I'm in Big Trouble. You can always submit your dilemmas to ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. That's ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. We'll also be answering a mystery question cooked up by our producer and silent partner, Chal. But first, we've got our usual icebreaker. Moira, what have you got for me?

Well, I have 73 questions minus 70 for you, which is the segment that we definitely, definitely didn't nick from Vogue in any way, shape or form. No intellectual property claims here. But first, I just want to ask the listeners to do something. If you love me, listeners, and you love Ash, why don't you just leave us a little rate and review, just as a treat? a little rate and review just as a treat a little rate review especially a little review on on you know itunes on the itunes uh that would be great but a rate is good too on spotify just helps us boost

the podcast gets us up there also buy tickets to our show in september on the 15th at uh king's place in london because we'd like to see. And now I've trialled doing a live show. I know what makes it tick. So we've got some fun games we can do with you. But I will ask you some questions, Ash. So, first question. This is in honour of the fact I obviously was down at fucking Worthy Farm.

I should stop swearing so much. I really love to swear. This was in honour of the fact that I was down at Worthy Farm recently, having a great time what is your favorite festival what's my favorite festival to be honest right i don't like camping so i've had some great festival experiences but camping i don't like so it's probably gonna have to be a london-based festival and i'm also i'm not that like esoteric with my taste in music you know so probably like fucking wireless i've got no business going to wireless i'm in my 30s but like i've really

enjoyed wireless and i've gone to wireless it's a real shame yeah it's a real shame that wireless is geared towards like reggie and leeds age children um and not us because a lot of the music that is there i had some great times of wireless but you really do age out of going to wireless that's the sad thing so but i want to see mega the stallion too oh my god i see her um do you know what? My favourite probably was Lovebox, R.I.P. Yeah, Lovebox was also great. Lovebox. Also great. Yeah, Lovebox was, it brought together every single artist.

I remember the peak year, I think it was 2016 maybe, or 2015. It was the year that Frank Ocean, Solange, Kay Trenada, maybe even Sampha as well. Everyone I've loved played that year. All the music to cry to. I was in heaven. And that line, SZA played there, like, that was the last time she was here before she came back and did Glass and BST this year. Like, they had the best of sort of, I guess, R&B, like, black heritage music was at Lovebox. And it was the exact, it's the exact middle of Venn diagram where I always sit with my favourite.

So Lovebox. I think you can't beat a London Day Festival. Like, Glastonbury is amazing. But if I didn't have to camp at Glastonbury, it would enhance my enjoyment of it about 10 times. Exactly. Okay, next question. What is your best anti-procrastination technique my best anti-procrastination technique so get you down and working okay um obviously this is

applicable only to writing based jobs all right so the blank page the black the blank document in front of you is the most frightening thing in all the world. And it can put you into these little tinkering obsessive cycles, which are just so, so unproductive. So there are two things that I do to get words out of my brain and onto the paper. First is I'll do some handwriting. I'll do some like, you know, bullet points, some spider diagrams, some stuff like that. So I'm not thinking, oh, how does this paragraph look? I'm just thinking like, okay, like just what are the points that I need to like hit? And I also do voice typing. Voice typing has been one of the best things for my writing because I think like lots of people,

I came out from university and all the sentences that i'd write were just absolutely tortured labored why use one clause when 50 will do and then when you're voice typing you think about the physicality of a sentence and that you shouldn't write anything that's longer than a human breath. And that's also very, very good for getting yourself out of a period of writing paralysis. So voice typing, voice noting yourself, handwriting, those are the things that I would suggest. And also break up your time. So if you do this amount, you'll get to do this little thing sometimes for me it's like because I can't stand you know when you like look into the corner of your room you go oh dusty corner if I see the dusty corner I'll go you can't hoover it until you finish this paragraph and

my oh my will that make me write quickly do you have adhd no but maybe I don't know, it's just the way you're describing your thought mechanisms all match up with the kind of ways I have to do stuff because I will do anything to procrastinate if I can. Well, I think everyone has ADHD in this day and age because ADHD is actually just a collection of traits and you meet a diagnostic criteria if you match enough of those traits and because of the way that the attention economy works and we have little addictive smartphones a lot of people have much shorter attention spans um i'm sure i'm gonna get cancelled for this but i have adhd so i feel

like now i can say that and hold up my little certificate so i have adhd so i can talk a bit about adhd because apparently that's how it works um but yeah just the way that you were talking about your the bargains you make in your head and the way you do stuff it sounds like you have some traits but maybe not enough to meet a criteria anyway i have a third question for you what is the first app you open on your phone in the morning um probably whatsapp um it's definitely the first thing i look at if there are notifications because those notifications will come from real people who i value very much the second thing that i'll do is look at twitter because obviously that's where you find out what the news is the third thing that I do and I try and do this

every single morning is play at least one game of chess to wake my brain up so I have a cup of tea and I try and play a game of chess I'm not I'm not a particularly consistent chess player like it varies so much about on like where I am in my hormonal cycle so like if I'm due to come on my period I suddenly cannot fucking play for shit and I will like make the stupidest blunders like you know suddenly like I've left my like queen open or like you know it's just like a horrible checkmate is coming my way um and then after my period I'm like, oh my God, am I? Am I Bobby Fisher? Like, I'm fucking great at this. So yeah, that's the sort of like morning in the story of apps.

It's like WhatsApp, Twitter, chess.com, news and newsletters. What about you? What's your first app? If no one's messaged me, if I don't have a notification on WhatsApp, it's probably Instagram. it's definitely not twitter i don't open twitter first thing in the morning um it's instagram or it's straight to going okay google play the news and then i just listen to the news broadcasts um as they go because then i have a collection of different ones and i i recently added northern and Wales and Scotland

because I remembered that we're actually part of the United Kingdom as opposed to just existing on our own. So I get BBC World Service because it's better than the actual BBC News because you get more news. And then I also have like the FT Sky. You know what? My husband's just gotten really into the FT. Like there's a sort of like meme which is, you know, really correct, which is like communists who get really into the ft like there's a sort of like meme which is you know really correct which is like

communists you get really into the ft because they're like you know ah like you know what is the enemy thinking and they get really into like oh but what will the tokyo market think of this and it was like exactly also you know you live in a bed set in deptford what do you mean tokyo markets um but he's really he's really into the ft and so every morning after he's like read the ft i'm treated to like a kind of three minute spiel about like how the ft is like so much you know more informative that it's so much more wind ranging than what he calls the bird-brained guardian he's just like so much better than the bird-brained guardian it's because i always i do a similar spiel to people that's very annoying even though i'm not a communist um which is just i say like the ft it's you know it's so

aligned to capital it actually can be very objective about things that's why they back jeremy corbyn in the in the last you know the 19 2019 election because they just really understand how what's best for capital and that makes it better than the other ones. But the FT is usually really good reporting, sadly, but occasionally they'll have plugs for their podcasts and then you'll remember what it is. Or they'll say stuff where

they're like, blah, blah, blah, markets, and you're like, God damn, I forgot you are actually the enemy. You are actually just the voice of the enemy. But it's very good reporting. Anyway, shall we go on to our Mr. Question? Something has been pulled from the depths of Chow's depraved little mind. Chow pitches a question and we'll chew over it until somebody says stop. So, Chow, ding me.

Ding me on my phone. Good ding. Solid ding, solid ding. All right. The question from Chow is, how did you survive your Saturn return? I don't think I've had mine. Sorry. What the fuck does that mean?

What's a Saturn return? Can someone explain? I think you're going through yours now. So your Saturn return happens between your 29. it's like between 29 and 30 something i can't remember what it is and you can actually calculate when it's meant to exactly happen which you should probably do but it's when your life completely upends it's when everything you know or everything you believe about yourself yeah yours is happening now for sure if it was real if it's real um it's like yeah because every 30 years or whatever you have your your saturn revolves there's actually a really great album

done by neo the singer called i think saturn returns um and it's all about how her life like upended at this point it's become a real motif in music like ariana grande talks about it it's really popular nowadays because western astrology has taken off and as we move beyond the simple star signs now we've got into planets so people are talking a lot about their saturn returns um but i don't actually think mine's happened yet according to my calculator have you calculated yours yet ash i haven't i haven't calculated it but it's like the period between what 27 and 30 yeah i'm gonna i'm just gonna calculate it because you can calculate exactly when you do it. So let me just find a calculator for you.

What's your date of birth again? It's the... 17th of April, 1992. 1992, because you're a big old Aries. I'm a big old Aries. And what time were you born? An Aries with some Taurus characteristics, I would say. Oh, you're a Taurus as well?

I'm a late Aries. No, no, no, no. It it's just like you know i'm not i'm not far do you know your three signs yes um okay what wait let me guess let me guess let me guess let me guess there's a virgo rising or virgo moon in there right no there must be okay is there a tourist in there somewhere i'm really bad at this actually i i actually don't know okay libra you know no go on it's aries sun scorpio moon oh interesting and leo rising oh okay the leo makes so much sense so leo is like okay that makes sense it's like vengeful competitive and glory hunting and then in my chart there's just so much mars it's like fire fire fire so much so much fire which i think is funny i'm not i'm not particularly explosive uh i think it was like you're not explosive but you're you're passionate about everything i think it's like 220 or 240 in the afternoon something like that 220

is fine we'll do that right let me look it's all fake anyway i don't know why i'm splitting hairs between 20 minutes come on we're we're let's let's we're doing the fakeness for now okay so we're doing the fakeness guys just a disclaimer we're not sure if we really believe any western astrology because it's not like eastern astrology and it has all been watered down it's kind of a crock of shit but for the sake of what we're doing right now we're talking astrology um your saturn return dates your saturn sign is aquarius your saturn return dates were 2020 and also your big saturn return was december 17th 2020 to march 7th 2023 so you actually have already had yours apparently to March 7th, 2023.

So you actually have already had yours, apparently. Okay. Do you feel like you've had yours? I think it feels like now to me. Hmm. Okay. So what was going on for me then was the pandemic and also the like death of Corbynism,

the defeat of Corbynism. I mean- That's retrospective. You're doing what everyone does with the strategy which is retrospectively fitting it no but the thing is is that i'm trying to i'm trying to not just think about what happened i'm trying to think about what it was that i felt oh shit mine's now i'm in mine now i'm in mine that would make sense i guess uh march 7 23 like a big sort of like you know i'm discovering things about myself like that doing like a big sort of like, you know,

I'm discovering things about myself. Like, that's really been a theme of like the last couple of months. Yeah, it has, but okay, March,

so it's going until May 25, 2025, according to me, according to this one. I can't be bothered to just sat and return. I haven't got time for it. What do you,

okay, let's talk a bit, let's talk a bit about astrology. Why don't we talk a bit about this? Because you know all your three signs and i want to know when you got into astrology and how deeply you got into it and when you decided you didn't need it as a sort of like scaffold because i have a feeling that we all go through a similar process um i mean the thing is as a teenager which is i think the case for lots of people right is that you're trying to understand who you are and find

ways of describing that to other people and make sense of your social world and here comes astrology which has got a nice bit of mysticism and it makes you feel a little bit woo um and it provides you with a way of talking about yourself so me and my friends from school would sort of lurk by the like esoterica section of the local waterstones like flicking through the astrology books and I've still got one of them that my friend got me for my birthday I guess when I was 14 and she stuck post-its with notes written about every person she could think of who had that sign so like you know Taurus you know that's your mum that's my mum like Aries that's you Aquarius that's that guy who you really fancy like and every so often I go back and I look through this book and it's just like a time machine it just catapults me right back to being 14 and that feeling of being thrilled and terrified and drawn to other people

and and trying to make sense of who they are and I think now that I think about some of it there's almost like a little bit of sadness that I think that comes to me when I consider just how excited I was by meeting people. I'd say I'm so excited by meeting people but it's not that kind of all consuming rush anymore. And I think that astrology really tied into that. And yeah, I think it kind of came back around again in like my mid to late 20s again this time period we're very excited about meeting people and very excited about making sense of who you are um and I think now I still like it because it's a structure for gossip in some ways right it's like you introduce the conversation of

astrology and it opens up people talking about people that's great but if i were to think about you know the the reality of it or like you know how much does that tell you about another person or your compatibility with them i'm like well yeah i don't know what about you tell me tell me your astrology story well obviously i got mad into it as a i think in my early 20s i think my 20s for similar reasons as you it's a it's a vehicle for trying to understand who you are it's a way to try and like shortcut to understanding other people and even if they don't ally with the traits it's a springboard to get people talking about themselves and the way they relate to other other people which was really helpful um and i think i'm

massively related to what my sign supposedly said about me but then so just so many others because we read what we want to read and we ignore what we don't want what doesn't actually align with us it's like a real confirmation bias thing with western astrology um and there have been points where i've really believed in some of it and i think there's i still have this underlying foundation where i can't shake some of the things that i bought into like i it's crazy maybe it's because i never had a value system value system maybe it's because i never had a belief system okay i was raised without a value system i'm like what kind of amoral i was like nichian hell sorry maybe it's because i i didn't have uh and i think this is true so many people we talk about quite a lot that you know when you in a secular world a secular

world where you know your work you don't have the community of like religion uh your work is often like fragmented or precarious or workplaces are not organized as communities in the way they used to be the family structures are completely different the way we do friendships are completely different the belief systems we often turn to are either you know worshipping at the church of sheen aka consumerism or stuff like astrology it's why western astrology has got so popular it's why we're looking we're looking for something to like buy into to give our lives direction to give us meaning to make us feel like we're not alone in this little world and so i also think that's why a lot of girls are now going on the like full religion route

they're like why are we doing this shit where we could just go to church go back to church um so i think because i didn't have a like a belief system maybe it it filled that gap and that's why it's been so hard to shake the same way that someone who like my friends who were raised in like the catholic faith still have these vestiges of catholicism that they will never shake but i didn't get that so all i have is like a knee-jerk reaction when someone says they're a libra which is so much less useful and cool and it's actually quite like embarrassing but it's crazy because and i want to ask you a question in a second about this but um for example if i go on a date with someone and they'll say they're a libra there's something in my head that rules them out and shuts off immediately like it's really bad how deep-rooted that is i i i know what you're saying and i guess sometimes there are only certain signs i would have that with and that's less to do with like

actual compatibility or whatever and just because like my absentee father is a cancerian man so you know um seeing as i've never gotten an adequate explanation from him for like why he's uh such a bum i'm like must be that cancerian male trait so i think that would be the one where i'm like this is this is what i want to ask you though what are the points where you have believed in astrology like what experiences have you had with it's mostly other people that have underlined what astrology is telling you and actually confirmation bias because i've got a couple of good examples and i want to know yours yeah i mean it's it's funny like you know what like in the back of my head um i'm thinking about

uh one of my best mates like his parents are turkish communists and if anyone knows about you know turkish communists who came here like you know in the early 80s because they were basically being persecuted by the government they are so like ruthlessly materialist so like one night me and him were chatting and i was like oh you know what's your chart um you know what time are you born he's like i don't know i'm gonna have to ask my mom so he phones his mom and he's like you know our mom like what time was i born and immediately the first thing she says is you're not doing zodiac are you as if as if as if he was doing like crack cocaine or something like she was just like you're not doing this zodiac are you stay away from that stuff and I was just like in the background I was

like don't tell her you're with me because next time I go around your house for like dinner like I don't want this blamed on me that you know oh you got my son into zodiac um I mean I think like when it comes to like yeah experiences of different signs I mean the thing is is that like I've had my my best and my worst experiences with air signs of various stripes so Gemini men but you know my husband is a tourist Gemini cusp, you know? So he's like a very agile thinker, really good communicator. When we first met, his job was to lie to journalists for a living, which is what I always tell people his job was. He was head of comms for a political organization,

which is basically lying to journalists. But also I think there's something about him, which is like very, committed you know he very loyal to people doesn't throw them away on a dime so those things interact but then again I'm just describing a personality which because you've got these two massively broad categories and one's called Taurus and one's called Gemini I'm like ah yes of course here's the blend of these two things they're drawn so vaguely it's it's to make it make perfect sense um but i've dated like other gemini men before and like fuck me are they psychopaths but is that to do with the fact that they're gemini's or is it to do with the fact that they're heterosexual men you know

were you have you dated disproportionately gemini men i dated disproportionately Gemini men? I dated disproportionately Gemini men. Okay, so I'm working backwards here. Gemini, Libra, Pisces, Libra, Scorpioio Gemini Taurus I actually know all of them tells me that you are not a reformed astrology girl you're not you're not fooling me mate

sorry you're still one of us one of us this is what I mean about getting in your brain it needles in your brain it never leaves you and then it just takes a few people to ask the right questions and suddenly you're knee deep going and yeah anyway but if this is in this house then obviously you're gonna be like this and that's what that's why your sex life is like this this is why you can't relate you know like it's it's a dangerous drug. Those parents were correct. Okay, fine.

Then what are the signs you are drawn to? What are the signs that you want to stay away from? Okay, it's not prescriptive, but it is weird. Every time a guy says he's Libra to me, then I just do shut down. I think I had one Libra ex and it was like, he was lovely, but it was a relationship that didn't work at all.

And I remember so deeply, we were at Lovebox actually maybe, and I was like he was lovely but it was a relationship didn't work at all and i remember so deeply we were at love box actually maybe and i was doing some interviewing for a magazine i was working for and i interviewed these two people who i still know today and still see around and that was how we met great story um and they said to us they were like what are what are you two like what are your star signs like how do you go together and i was like oh i'm a pisces virgo virgo and he's like a libra something else and i'm like pis I'm a Pisces Virgo Virgo and he's like a Libra something else no like Pisces and Libra girl that won't work out and I think that's actually when I started looking up our compatibility which I hadn't done for some reason um and everything it said was obviously probably just like vague shit but I read into because of what was going on our

relationship I was like that is so on point to our exact problems that is that's articulated the tensions between us so well and really made me confront the reality of what our relationship was and the fact I wasn't happy and we broke up I think we didn't break up for a while after that like maybe six months or something but I remember that point so distinctly as one where I was confronted with this information that I've been trying to ignore and it's not it's when you think about it's nothing to do with astrology it's all to do with what i've read into it and the same thing is true of tarot i always say this about tarot i'm quite a big like i haven't done tarot in years i wanted to do it when i was at glastonbury but the queue was too long in fact a celebrity

who's recently in a very famous netflix series that did very well that might be based on a book about two people who meet every year at one day in tinned was in front of me in the tarot queue and i hope they got a good reading um but like the queue is too long but so the the the man or the woman the woman um but tarot is something that and the fact i was wanted to do tarot for the first time in years says everything to me because the times I've used tarot I don't believe that the cards know what you are or anything like that the point is you do tarot when you're confused the same way you go to astrology when you're confused and you don't you've lost sense of what you're feeling and what you want to do about it and you're looking

for that direction and going to tarot and seeing cards laid out when you interpret those cards, that's you talking to yourself. And I turned to astrology and I turned to tarot when I don't know how to talk to myself anymore, a bit lost. And maybe I'm going through a Saturn return because I really, for the first time in years was like, I really fucking need some tarot right now. I need to know what I need to be in conversation with myself. Cause I can't, I can't do it on my own and I need this extra tool. But I did that with my ex. And when I read the tarot with this ex I'm talking about the Libra the tarot I

kept reading as I need to break up I need to break up I need to break up nothing to do the cards everything to do with what was going on in here I mean I think for me this is a question which overlaps a lot with like different therapeutic models as well and it's how much can you learn from talking to yourself and i think that you can learn certain things from talking to yourself and you can understand your desires the way your desires speak through your behavior and the way in which your desires might be at odds with the way in which you consciously think about yourself right the way in which you brand yourself the way in which you understand yourself but so much of the truth of what you're like exists in a relational context it comes from being with other people and i think that's why you know yeah I can I can remember everyone's like star signs um but I really don't put any

stock in it because you know I'm in a relationship where we've been together for six years if you were to ask me well how compatible are you with your husband I I'd be like, depends on the day. Like some days I'm like, oh God, like the way you breathe, the way you do any little thing. It's like it was designed in a laboratory to wind me up. And other days I'm like, we are one person, we share one body and mind. And that's because it's entirely relational. And if either one of us were to sort of pull back and go well this is happening because i'm like this um that might give you a tiny understanding of what's going on but really it's it's not very much um and i think that maybe this is my problem with the culture, which is so much of what we rely on to be a mirror to ourself is individualized, whether that is astrology

or whether it's tarot or whether it's like, I don't know, like love languages or whether it's like, in some ways like attachment theory as well um it's all about well i am this way and the thing which i find a lot more useful about systemic models of therapy so like systemic family therapy relational forms of therapy is that sure those experiences that you have had before you were in this situation important and you need to you need to bring them in but you're thinking about what the relational dynamic is so it's like okay what you want is to hear a yes from this person but you've gone in saying no and this activates like what is the dance that you guys are dancing um and all of of the language of astrology is inequipped to deal with that.

It treats these things as like highly, highly fixed. And I think there's also a kind of narcissism to it as well. It's like, you know, okay, it's time to talk about me, whether that's like, you know, through the lens of like your chart or like, you know, doing a personality quiz. I'm now sounding like my friend's turkish communist parents i'm like you better not be doing zodiac no i totally agree because

i made a note while we were talking where i wrote and it says astrology is really individualizing right and then you just said that so i'm really on the same page and i think that's one of the reasons i tried to move away from it because like many people of our generation, I'm prone to a bit of self-obsession and narcissistic qualities. And I think in your 20s, you really lean into that because you're desperate to be, or rather I was, desperate to be seen by other people, but you don't maybe trust other people to discover you on your own

or like, and can't also understand that you can only be seen by the people when you relate to them and you actually also give that back and it's like this two-way street it's not just everyone's going to look at me and understand me and that's what the most important thing of all and astrology is like you're literally reading off a list of qualities and expecting people to take them in and like bank them they're not taking them in banking and they're waiting for their turn to talk about their gemini sign like sorry no one's banking them they're just taking them in banking. Then they're waiting for their turn to talk about their Gemini sign. Like, sorry. No one's banking them. They're just waiting until you open the book to the next bit

and flick through the next one. But I also think it's, and I think, like you said, attachment theory plays into this as well. And when I talk about attachment theory, guys, we're not talking about, you know, the deep psychological research into attachment theory.

We're talking about the sort of pop psychology stuff that we're seeing on social media and that we talk about with our mates every day we're talking about just throwing around the terms like oh you know i'm like this because i'm anxiously attached or i'm fearful of voiding or whatever and how we use those as synonyms or shortcuts or shorthand to explain our behaviors and i think all of these things are can be pretty deterministic and give us an out from for like actually working on anything or changing the way that we relate to people because what's something i've been thinking about a lot recently is like i don't know what my attachment style is really anymore i keep jokingly being like i'm really avoidant but when i think about it i'm like no it depends on where i am who i am who i'm with like with my friends i'm not

fucking avoidant at all i feel like i'm actually probably quite secure now these things change you can change your attachment style through work through relating to others through all of this different stuff and I know people who have like really crazy attachment styles like the big big the big bad ones the big scary ones um and I'm thinking of like a couple of people specifically and one of them is doing so much work and so much like practical therapy and they really are changing the way that they can relate to people the other one talks a lot of cod psychology and is kind of moving deeper into the sickness of the way that they relate to people which is like very very crazy i won't get these just just like i didn't know what word i was

expecting it's like you know the sickness how that you know i'd maybe you'd have said like oh you know very very um you know anxious or like you know very very contradictory but the fact you were like very very nuts me and my friends we're we're all we're all quite mentally in different ways both diagnosed both like you know whatever you would call it we're we're all we're all quite mentally in different ways both diagnosed both like you know whatever you want to call it we're bringing back mental illness love like i think it's fine to sometimes just say that's mental illness love um and that can range from anything to like you know mental illness that puts you in this position where you have to have medical treatment to literally the way you behave to other people it's kind of just nuts you're like that's

just nuts man um and i think we should take the stigma away from that just call it what it is it's nuts uh so yeah i've got some people around me who just act sometimes very nuts and it's very interesting to watch these two people with very similar initial attachment styles treat them in a different way and one of them treats it as deterministic baked in fixed and the other one treats it as this is something that impacts my quality of life and i don't like it and i think that i you know it's really hard but i am going to try to work on the way that i relate to people and it's made one of them and i think you know which one a lot happier and healthier in their day-to-day life and i see this with astrology and like all this stuff as well the people that i know who lean most into like these fixed deterministic uh descriptors and just to like i'm this i'm that forever that's a

fixed things are the ones who tend to be most unhappy and i will say this as well i'm a pisces right that's my that's my main sun sign speaking as a pisces speaking as a pisces anyone you meet who's like calls themselves a pisces and really identifies as a Pisces and leans into that is the most fucking annoying person you'll ever come across in your life because people who really identifies with Pisces traits uh think that they are like so empathetic they're the people who'll be like I'm an empath they think that they're so like in touch with the world and like they actually because we're at the end of the zodiac the myth is that we can we inhabit all of the zodiac signs so we can see everything and we're like in touch we have a special connection with the spiritual and the people that i have met who've leaned most into

these traits are some of the most selfish uh self-obsessed um least spiritual people i've i know like they're trapped in this prison and it's nothing to do with the star sign it's everything to do with what we want to attach to ourselves and what we want to hold on to and the fact that some for some people like a lack of fluidity which is a pisces is meant to be fluid right a lack of fluidity and a rigidness in how you define yourself feels more comfortable but i'm sorry discomfort's where you grow but you know what i think this also comes back to the differences between spirituality and religion now i'm not one of those people that's going like religion an

unalloyed good force in the world all right like it's done a lot of fucked up shit but um religion isn't even predominantly about spirituality it's about things like service duty uh reciprocal obligations um doing things which are really hard in context but are morally good right that's what a lot of religion is actually about. And that is completely what is stripped out of very Western notions of spirituality, where it's kind of about replenishing yourself, right? Taking time out to be with yourself. I'm not saying that in a disparaging way, because I find that very useful, particularly with yoga. I do a lot of yoga because it probably does me good to spend a few hours every week not on my phone and doing stupid pretzels with my body

to work through stress and anxiety. That's probably what there is to it. And the language all around that is about, know devotion to yourself and you know self-care blah blah blah it's valuable it has a purpose it is not a religion right there's a reason why religion becomes an organizing force for societies and not spirituality pick and choose because it's about those bonds of duty and obligation no matter what context you're in no matter what if you're talking about hinduism you know if you're talking about like a polytheistic religion like hinduism or an abrahamic religion duty obligation sacrifice longing yourself out is at the core of pretty much every successful religion it doesn't do what you want

i guess all this stuff i there's probably as well a degree of like judgment that i still have for my past self who's like held on to this and really needed this as a tool to get through stuff and i need to let that go as well um i need to be soft i need to be softer on myself but i don't know i think i think astrology i think saturn returns they just there is there is there is a button in me that still responds to it and knows all the right things to say and knows all the language but i don't feel it in my soul anymore and i think i feel things a lot more richly when i'm in like the community i have with others and the i found a new religion my i found a new sense of duty and organization

but you know what if astrology brings you into community with other people and i think this loops us right back to the beginning which is like well for me it's like that memory of sitting in the bookshop with my friends and still having this book which is just such a perfect physical memento of being a teenager very much brought me into contact with other people um so i don't i don't believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water you know i think it think it's, I think it's, I think it's fine to, you know, be into some like non-materialist woo woo fake shit, but it, but it's not real. But is it, is it non-materialist? I mean, it's completely non-materialist in the sense of like, I'm using it in a very

like Marxist sense like this is not materialism like this is not because like um jupiter has no impact on who you are yeah but isn't materialism more about like i'm talking about materialism in like a consumptive way oh no i just want materialism is in like materialism versus idealism like okay you're talking about practical reality materialism yes yes yes yeah i'm talking about consumerism materialism where i'm like astrology to me really western astrology really plays in with the entire sort of like i guess schema would be the words like there is an archetype of a western consumer a girly like me maybe even me where i'm like you know you've got the you've got the polls

the tiktok if i made a mood board it'd be like tiktok astrology um asos like all this different shit that goes to building a woman of my archetype with my little ear cuffs with my stupid rings with my spotify listening habits um i'm thinking about materialism in that sense and my creature comforts my b essence my bean essence sorry um and how astrology fits into that that that i've got um i've got a friend who uh is just i mean just like this is one of my friends or i'm like you're just such a delightful combination of character traits, which is like on the one hand, incredibly scientific, like has a career in like medicine

and research and all that kind of thing. And is also like very interested in the possibilities opened up by queerness in terms of how you put together a sense of self and kinds of knowledge and ways of being which have occupied the margins of society and what you can learn from them. And like like he's very into it until people start talking about astrology and then suddenly he's like i can just see his teeth gritting because like there is a there is a ruthlessly materialist scientist who lives in him and so when you've got people who

are like you know i just think that astrology it really speaks to a kind of feminist queer epistemology which has just been like consigned to the margins for too long and i can see him go it's not real it's not right it's not science every time i want to wind him up i'm just like what's your star sign again but that's i i know we have i know we have to start talking about people's problems and saying but that's also a thing that we probably will get from even in pushback to this which is you know astrology is queer coded it's a femme it's woman chose femme coded whatever like and i i don't know how i feel about those arguments i think it's more that maybe these different demographics were drawn to it

because again it allows us to express ourselves through a different medium and be heard i don't know blah blah blah but i do think it's kind of a crock of shit to say that this is inherently a queer coded act to be in astrology also it's like you can say anything that like you know lots of women or lots of queer people tend to like is like then fem coded or queer coded zara zara is actually queer coded exactly zara the shop is queer coded just like tiktok is like you know queer and fem coded and it's just such an important you know it's an epistemology i'm like no man it's just some fucking bullshit like they happen to enjoy vaping vaping is actually uh a femme femme behavior so should we move on to i'm in big trouble yeah fuck it let's do some god okay can someone help

me stop swearing it's become a real problem this is my big problem i swear too much when i was at uh glastonbury as well someone handed me a fan and we're at the foundation fm takeover and i was just dancing and they handed me a fan that said cunt and they said are you okay they said i feel like you need this fan like because because i look so slay they're like you need this fan but are you okay with this word and i was like the sad thing is i pepper cunt into my day-to-day like it's the word the as if it's a what what type of word is the word the ash like what what so not proper now proper nouns are names uh preposition preposition maybe i cunt is like a preposition to me at this stage i said on the phone to my

mother recently and realized my mistake when she went we never say that word and i was like oh dear i do say sometimes if someone listening there is not a preposition it's an article an article if someone listening can stop me swearing so much i would really love that because it's i love it i it's I love a little fuck I love a of course I do I love a I've heard it said

don't we all read that on a toilet wall somewhere in Beckham but it is lazy and I would like to you know further extend

my vocabulary past just saying fuck every now and then for emphasis you know you just have to spend time around a kid and then you stop swearing no that's because my family that's how i started swearing my family would just swear on me all the time just turn the air blue and you didn't get the hint um

speaking of which take the hint read a dilemma hi moira and ash i'm an mc and in the past would often use drink and drugs to help myself get over social performance anxiety when performing in the last few years i became depressed and i've had to cut out all the drugs and cut down massively on the drinking i sometimes now struggle with motivating myself as i find performing unenjoyable and difficult, but I still love making music. Any advice? So, I mean, the first thing, it's really difficult to cut drugs out of your life, particularly when they've become connected to something that is such a core part of who you are and what you do like performing and like making music and so the very fact that you've done that it's really important I guess I guess it's hard

for me to offer advice but I'm wondering about what kind of support system you have in place to maintain your sobriety um with regards to drugs and and reduced drinking are you going to meetings do you have a sponsor do you have people who you can talk to about this who also maybe form a community of people who are trying to stay sober um because friends of mine who are sober and are sober precisely because they've had a very compulsive relationship to drink or drugs whatever it is they really need that community of people who have gone through it are going through it and also understand what some of the thought patterns are and I think if you don't have that around you that would be potentially helpful going to meetings have that around you that would be potentially helpful going to meetings um and then when it comes to performance it doesn't surprise me that um drinking drugs helped you in the past get over

your social and performance anxiety um because setting setting yourself up on stage to share something that you've created with other people is objectively terrifying and finding a way to sort of silence your own sense of self-awareness like yeah really really get that might be worth considering um particularly now you're at this point where you're sober and it's almost like oh okay well like drinking drugs were bad but at least they helped me perform is that maybe they also contributed to the you know social anxiety that you felt so drinking drugs becomes both a cause of social anxiety and also a solution to it but then it makes it worse and you're caught in a loop and so thinking a bit about some of those bad things and maybe the ways in which it may have inhibited your performance I think might be a way of like reframing it um thinking about

developing other practices which help you silence that kind of like rumination and anxiety I mean like I know I just mentioned um yoga but like yoga or breath work or something like something that you can do that gets you out of that place where you're just going round and round and round with your own inner monologue um and doing that separately and then and then maybe seeing if you can integrate that into like a kind of like pre-performance ritual before you go and do something and give it a go but look you're doing something really important you're doing something really hard and you keep making music i think the desire to perform it's going to come back in some

way right it just might take some time and trying some different stuff out but i don't know moya what do you think well i agree with everything you've said about sort of the nuts and bolts of sobriety making sure you have a community around you um because sobriety is only maintained through community i can tell you that from people close to me you have to have that community um the only thing i would add is i think you should it's hard to say on this one because it's like what is it specifically you find unenjoyable and difficult about performing because i think nailing down what you find unenjoyable and difficult would be more helpful to understanding whether you actually want to

perform at all because you can make music without performing though you know you you're an mc there's so many ways you still love the music making, the creating part of it. That's the bit that you say still brings you joy. It's still like where your passion lies. And you can put out music and have a career without having to perform live or there's other ways of performing live. You know, you can do crazy things and become known for stunts.

You can MF Doom it if you want. There's literally ways and means around this stuff like lots of different artists have found answers to their performance anxiety that aren't just drinking drugs but if i if we knew exactly what it is you find unenjoyable is it just because you are you get so anxious about it that going on stage becomes enjoyable is it entire start to finish is there a point in the performance where you relax and you find yourself thinking no i love this shit because if that happens then i still think there's as ash says if you just if you wait and you keep up these practices around it then you will find your way back to love performing but if it is a case of from the get-go you've never

enjoyed doing live performances there is so many different things about it that cause you stress and anxiety i think there should be a reassessment of how you go about that part of your career and whether you know traditional straight up get on stage with a mic performing is what you want to be doing and if that there's a way to maintain your career and the work that you do without actually factoring that in in the same you know in the same manner whether you can have this space where you put out music but you don't have to form live all the time whether you actually just want to dj and have your tracks playing there's different approaches you can have don't think you have to perform if you fucking hate it because that also will impact your sobriety if every couple of weeks you're having to get up and

do something that is so painful and stressful for you that you previously had to medicate in order to do it. And I think you should think long and hard about that. Also, I guess I'm thinking about this much more from a performance perspective rather than a drink and drugs perspective. But you say you're an MC, like do you have a community of other MCs around you? Because maybe getting up on a stage

is just something that you don't want to do right and and like right now the social anxiety is too much um it's too unenjoyable but obviously one of the really beautiful things about emceeing in particular is that there are so many ways to perform with and in front of other people which aren't necessarily getting on a stage like could you do a radio set with other mcs and it's like you know you're passing the mic back and forth you're part of a community of people who are hyping you but it's not the same as you being by yourself on a stage performing in front of people like could that be something that you experiment with a bit to try and see if there is a love of the performance and the social element around it um

which isn't so isolating um i don't i don't know if that works with the kind of music you make i don't know if that's the sort of context that you're in but yeah bring back the radio set do you know what i mean yeah internet radio as well is like the biggest fucking thing again swearing come and teach me how to do more words mc like teach me how to speak you can be a consultant on if i speak so that i actually come up with a variety of words to use instead of the uh the common swear word um yeah internet radio stations or just even big radio stations but this is where i i i have actually a confession to make that is puts me as an outlier among our age group and uh social circle i don't listen to nts i love you so much oh my god i love you so so much I'm constantly like in a war in my own home about NTS like

sometimes I just want to listen to something which isn't currently on NTS and my partner's like can we can we put on NTS and there's like a war between like me my husband and my housemate so like my husband wants to listen to NTS. I want to listen to like something specific that I have in mind. Usually it's like, usually it's like some kind of rap music and my housemate wants to listen to something off the Shrek soundtrack, right?

That is the like battle that the three of us are in. That's an amazing amalgamation of different people and traits. Now that's astrology. That's astrology. That's astrology. But I don't listen to nts but let me tell you everyone else does and everyone else listens to nettle and everyone else listens to rinse and represented all these different places and i actually probably have no doubt that you've been on these shows and you maybe even have a show or something like that but i think what we're trying to say in general is just reorient what

it means to be like a performer out in the world. Like you don't have to do live shows all the time. It's okay. We're not in the 1800s music hall set up anymore. Like it isn't the only way to get your music out there. And if you find it really hard and really difficult, it's not a failure to not want to do that. You just don't have to do that. Some of our most elusive elusive

performers and most iconic performance are people who you never see on stage for good reason sky ferreira now i'm revealing i'm revealing that coachella was a disaster disaster yeah he was his his um his brother had just died like all this obviously he didn't but he also didn't want to be on stage he did not want to be on that stage and it showed that was part of the context but it's also like again we don't know all this stuff for sure like we

know his brother died but we don't know what he was thinking or feeling because he's an elusive performer who doesn't tell us all this stuff and we just put

like people in the internet just put together different bits and pieces and say this has happened this has happened maybe that affected him we don't know

because he is off stage and yet Frank Ocean is as popular as you know ever he's an icon or I remember in the remember when Amy Winehouse

I was re-watching the documentary Amy recently one of the best best I guess non-fiction

it's not biopic when it's non-fiction no it's it's documentary biography just documentary just yeah biographical documentary

that's it yeah he did Amy and he did Senna and Maradona he did the trilogy of people

yes who got fame young that's what he called it it's a trilogy of documentaries and it's all about people who achieved fame young and what that did to their lives

I forgot about the Maradona one three great films three incredible films incredible filmmaker but the Amy documentary is the only the only you know had to their lives i forgot about the maradona one three great films three incredible incredible filmmaker but the amy documentary is the only the only you know film about amy you ever need to see anyway uh in that there's a bit at the end where she's coming to the end of her life sadly and she's just she's she's still drinking but she's clean of drugs and she's gone to rehab or and then they want to put it back on stage and she's contracted to do these shows and she doesn't want to do these shows she says i don't want to do these shows i can't do

these shows and they made her do it like the the implication is mitch winehouse is like you have to do them your contract to do them so to do these shows she drank so much she was incoherent and she was like booed off the stage and just shamed you know the i remember at the time the press went crazy about it they were they just they were always hounded her but it was you know a bbc news was saying like oh why did she even turn up like look at that what a mess that kind of this this rhetoric was horrible rhetoric of a woman who's drowning in front of you but the reason she was drinking so much then after she'd just been clean for a bit was because she was being made to perform when she didn't want to perform. And if you keep forcing yourself to perform, then in some way or other, you will turn to some sort of coping mechanism, whether that is breaking sobriety.

I hope not. Knock on wood. Or whether that's something else. So I just think you should think very long and hard about what it is you find difficult and enjoyable and whether those things can be not amended, whether they can be, whether they're things that you feel will be mitigated or whether those are things that you will actually, with time, practice and certain tools, certain mental health tools, et cetera, et cetera, whether that's something that you think you can overcome or you'll be okay with in the end or whether those are things that are not going to change or you you'll be okay with in the end or whether those are things that are not going to change actually performing as live is just not for you i think maybe the one last thing that i'd like want to leave this listener with this special

one if we're using that as the name for our listenership. Is that something that you do hear an awful lot from artists who spent time performing on drinking drugs and then spent time performing sober? Is that they'll say that they reached new levels in their craft when they were sober because they were so checked into it and they were so into um you know other aspects of their performance like maybe they're not just like flinging themselves around with abandon but there's like a real focus on the vocals like a

real focus on something like the breath control if you're emceeing is that like i can really understand that if you're relatively early in your sobriety journey that the thing which is completely overwhelming is a sense of social anxiety right a sense of performance anxiety totally totally get that and i think that's going to take time um but it might be that there's something better that's on the other side right there's there's a better performance there's a new level in your craft and in your art. And I think that's something to bear in mind. It's not just, oh my God,

I've got to do this like objectively terrible thing. I think Moya's completely right. Don't do it before you're ready. But there are reasons to be optimistic about the quality of your performance when you're sober. Yeah, I think that's a good note to leave on. I don't want to say that you never have to judge when you think about whether it's something that you can have the

whether it's something where you can have the experience ash is talking about because you know people like florence the machine she says my voice got so much better i can do so much more now i'm sober it's incredible like i'm really present i always think about um when zach della roccia like broke his leg and so obviously this is like rage against the machine it's like just such a like bodily performance like flinging yourself around he's like broke his leg and he's like oh fuck like how am i gonna perform and so he's like you know sitting on like i guess like those like kit boxes he's like sitting down but his vocals are incredible because for the first time in his career his whole body is in the service of delivering a vocal because it's not doing

anything else because you can't do anything else and so that's what i mean it's not just about like you know oh you're sober and you're in your body it's like for so many other artists it's like you take something away and you take something away which may have felt like it was so integral to your performance and you discover something else that you're capable of doing yeah yeah i mean the only note i'd leave it on is it's incredibly upsetting to me to see how many musicians have been felled by drink and drugs throughout their careers so well done to you yeah well done well done well done and invite us to come see you DJing sometime if you don't MC

yes please because Ash loves Ash loves rap I love rap and she doesn't she doesn't get enough opportunities to go see the the rap

I don't actually do you go to lots of gigs do you go to gigs much um I haven't for a while um actually I was supposed

I was supposed to go to Glastonbury and I couldn't because my sister was in hospital but the artist who I was supposed to go to Glastonbury and I couldn't because my sister was in hospital but the artist who I was so looking forward to seeing at Glastonbury was Getz and also Burner Boy those were the only two acts I was mega excited about yeah my friends were

gassed for Getz I did not see Getz and I did not see Burner Boy and I did not see Little Sims because I'm slightly on the other side of that bit of Spotify but I heard they were all amazing. We'll see you gets in future. Do you get another one? I met gets in person once and

I was so excited I couldn't speak. I'm Ash Sarkar and this has been If I Speak. Who have you been? I've been Moira Lothian-McLean as always, as as ever consistent just here like a little terrier by your side grey fries bobby I'm your grey fries bobby I just I was like which terrier I was trying to think of the dog I'm grey fries bobby that's it and okay well

you'll find out next week bye goodbye so chaotic