What’s up with Mars and getting pissed off?

Welp, that’s easy. Mars loves a fight. Mars loves TO fight. Mars is gonna cut a bitch… because he’s great with blades of all kinds and it’s likely the guy on the receiving end had it coming!

But!

There’s a time and place for Mars action… and while we enjoy the lifetime Inigo Montoya spent readying for the battle against the coward who killed his father in the masterful storytelling that is The Princess Bride, it’s not so great to wrap up a lifetime in battles that may only ever take place within ourselves.

ESPECIALLY because — depending on the sign and house Mars is in, in the natal chart — Mars’ ire can actually cause physical damage meant for energies outside ourselves. I can mark up my life’s calendar with places when Mars took me to the hospital, put me in emergency surgery, and did other very specific physical things in my life.

I can also see where that specific story of mine stopped needing to play out that way, thanks to my doing regular Chart Harmony with Mars.

By getting Mars’ energy OUT rather than holding it IN, we can balance the energy of this raging fireball of a planet without getting all that witchy-woo.

I introduce to you: The Bitch Book.

Back when I was in grad school, I had the most amazing therapist (seriously, if you’re ever enrolled at a college that offers therapy — so its PhD students in psychology can put in their pre-degree hours of practice on you — take advantage of it!!! I loved my main therapist so much that I followed her out into private practice and began paying for what I could continue to get for free at the school, had I wanted to keep doing that with someone other than her). This amazing therapist suggested that I stop filling my regular journal with my complaints (I had a lot of them) and instead start using a dedicated BITCH BOOK for my rage.

Specifically, she clocked that I was using my existing journal (and my journaling practice has been extremely consistent since I was about 10 years old) to work out my issues, negotiate my problems, try and understand my conflicts, and so forth. And while that’s fine for a journal’s purpose, she wanted to have me experiment with having to go to a separate journal when I just wanted to “get my angries out.”

Her theory was that I didn’t actually need to do a lot of working out of the issues; I just needed to EXPRESS my pissed-offed-ness and do so in a way that would allow me to leave it behind quickly. Writing about my shitty landlord, my assholebrother, or the stupid parking ticket I got didn’t always need to be a problem to solve or a deep-dive I had to do in my journal. Sometimes it could just be a VENT.

I loved this assignment even before I new how powerful it would end up being. I bought a small, red and white composition notebook (like this):

With my black Sharpie, I wrote on its cover, in all caps: BITCH BOOK. And then I drew a scowly angry face. (This was in the days before emojis, but it was basically the line-drawing version of this: 😡)

I tossed this little notebook into the front pocket of my backpack (while my proper journal rode in the main section of my backpack, with my purse and textbooks and notebooks and such), and any time I needed to get another of my angries out, I’d reach for The Bitch Book and start angrily — joyfully — writing. No need to spell anything correctly. No need for punctuation at all. No need to even make sense… because the purpose was to get the rage OUT and onto the page.

Even as I write this, 30 years later, I’m lit up with glee for how good it felt to start purposefully using a separate, dedicated journal for no purpose other than expressing rage that I’d grown up believing I had to swallow, avoid, internalize, or otherwise hide away. Oof! This is some good stuff.

Today’s action (from my awesome pop-up course, IF MARS AIN’T HAPPY…): Grab a little notebook and designate it your Bitch Book. It doesn’t have to be red. It doesn’t have to be small. You don’t have to write in all-caps. The rules are yours to create (and break, as you wish). But start using a dedicated place for getting out some of your angries. For example, today, I would write — without context — WHY ARE THEY LIKE THAT?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?!? No expectation that I’m going to be able to work out the answer to those questions; just getting the pissed-offed-ness out of me so I can get back to doing things other than obsessing about how cruel and bizarre some people can be.

Of course, feel free to share how this feels (before you do it, as you do it, after you’ve done it… anytime you’d like to share about it at all) below in the comments or at our Discord space. I’m inspired to pick up this habit again for a little while. Yeah, eventually, I realized I wasn’t writing in my Bitch Book anymore and I retired it from “carry it around constantly” status. And maybe that was part of its purpose too. But still today, anytime I feel myself turning my regular journal *into* a Bitch Book, I remember that I can — and maybe should — pull this little bit of Mars Chart Harmony out of the toolbox.

Much love,

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!