I have some thoughts to share about what it feels like to write as a Mercury in Pisces because I am one and I just finished a long work of fiction.

First off, I've been listening to Smells like Teen Spirit over and over again when I shower. Kurt Cobain was a Mercury in Pisces. You can hear it in his lyrics because his lyrics are mostly gibberish. They make no sense, not logically, and he rhymes a bunch of words that don't rhyme. Even the title, which came from a piece of graffiti referencing a deodorant brand that Cobain wasn't aware of, wasn't really intentional.

I think that I do this, as a fellow Mercury in Pisces. Sometimes, you don't need to tell a story or find the exact, right word. You just have to find a word and that word, whatever it is, can mean more than the right word if you truly just use it.

Mercury is considered to be in its depression or fall in Pisces. In addition to that debilitation, Mercury is also in detriment in Pisces. That means that many astrologers tend to think of Mercury in Pisces as Mercury's weakness placement by sign.

The way that a Mercury in Pisces works is through association which is a very different art from discernment. When you practice discernment, the way a Virgo might, you differentiate between things, ideas, and people. You understand that things are fundamentally different because they are unique and that, if you're going to be observant, you will treat those differences as real.

Mercury in Pisces, on the other hand, doesn't do this. Instead, Mercury in Pisces can only see the connections and similarities between things. All things are alike because they are things, first and foremost. Because all things are alike, all words are alike and interchangeable. One truth does not eclipse another truth and must never be compared. Mercury in Pisces, hacks when it comes to reasoning and scoring and organizational charts, can be good at mathematics and poetry. We are forgetful enough to do these kinds of activities.

But there's also one particularly trait about Mercury in Pisces that I think is worthy of calling out, one that matters very little to people who don't have the placement and is significant to those of us who do.

When Mercury in Pisces writes a fictional story, I think that we sometimes end up running into characters and situations that we thought was a figment of our imagination in our real and living lives.

I'm not sure why or how this happens. I've spent the summer writing a story about a coup that doesn't change very much about a particular society, writing out a cast of characters who are mostly motivated by personal interests and self protection rather than big ideologies. I made a character who stands with the former regime but is collected by the new one. I made another character who is bad at politics but seizes the government by retaining control over the military. I made a third character who stands with protestors on a popular level but stands something to gain from a foreign government—a liberal.

The way I made up these characters was pretty simple. I just pulled them out of my ass based on pure feeling and what I thought people acted like during coups.

Weirdly enough, when I went to my parent's home while I was writing this story, my mom started to giggle because she just had to show me a very funny clip of Zhao Ziyang speaking Henan dialect when he met with students on a hunger strike right before the Tiananmen Square protests, a speech that took place a few days before Deng Xiaoping ousted him with Wen Jiabao standing right behind him.

Never before had my parents really talked to me about Tiananmen which is why I don't know much about it outside the fact that my mom went and her parents weren't worried because my mom was their tough, middle daughter but my dad was and that was one of their first moment of intimacy in their marriage. The reason why my mom showed me the clip of Zhao Ziyang speaking was pretty simple. She, also a Mercury in Pisces, forgot that there had been a Henanese Premier, forgot that Zhao Ziyang never learned how to speak proper Mandarin, and thought that the speech was funny in hindsight because his dialect is so familiar to us.

After she showed me the clip, she started to tell me a bunch of stuff. Back then, the USSR had just fallen and everyone was arguing about what to reform. Zhao Ziyang's speech was a turning point because students were considering giving up until the Premier stood with them. He was a liberal whose autobiography was smuggled to the United States on cassette tapes as leaders of the protests immigrated. Wang Jiabao, the last to stand with the old regime, was left in power by Deng Xiaoping, who controlled the military, because Deng Xiaoping was paranoid enough to believe that someone loyal enough to stand with a failing leader could be trusted.

I hadn't been thinking about Tiananmen when I was writing the story about a coup. I thought that I was thinking about something a little more contemporary, about January 6th or something. But there they were—my three characters. The loyalist who used loyalty to signal disloyalty, the liberal with a bloodthirsty past who looks heartfelt and maybe is, and the guy who ends the conversation because he has the soldiers.

So, it's an eerie feeling, having Mercury in Pisces. Maybe it's just associative memory, like you run into characters from your fictional universe in your life because you knew them once and forgot about them. Maybe it's something more supernatural. You run into characters after you conjure them with your imagination because you've told the world that you're ready to know them now. I'm not sure what it is but I thought that I'd record this experience on my astrology blog. If you're a Mercury in Pisces and you write, maybe you also mix up the fake with the real.