Living Through a 1st House Profection Year
(it was good until it wasn’t but that’s life huh)
☉♏︎ ☽♏︎ ☿♐︎
(happy scorpio new mooooon!! 🦂)
The profection years! This is a method of astrological tracking that suggests your age aligns to any one house on a natal chart.
The house that your in then provides the theme for that year of life.
Look for your age in the graph below to see what house you’re living through!
So this is a documentation of my past year, on living through being 24 and in a 1H year.
The first house is associated with our senses of self, the way we come off to the world. I also see it as the way we may forget to view ourselves. I say forget because while I related to my rising sign in terms of what physical attributes it may bring, or how people see me, I didn’t quite feel like my rising sign yet.
Since your birthday is the marker of the house change, I’ve always seen how I spend my birthday as a fortelling, even if I don’t necessarily understand what it means until way later.
I spent my 24th birthday with nothing really planned. It was a Wednesday and I was working at a new job for less than a month so I didn’t feel I worked there long enough to ask for my birthday off. Imhotep came into Houston from NY at the beginning of the week. He texted me that morning, asking if I would like to hang out in the park after I finished work.
He got me a cake, some melon, and a few more friends came and sat through the sunset with us. Though it was my birthday, and though I had a cake, this day felt like an ordinary day. I didn’t know what the fortelling of this birthday would be at the time, so more on that later.
Living through a first house profection year was a constant questioning of “who am I really?”
And this begins with my hair journey.
I have very thick, very coarse hair. Once when I was younger, my mother used my hair against me as punishment. I was in the 7th grade with very long hair that I loved, we got in an argument and she took me to the salon to have it chopped into a horrible bowl cut. I was in middle school, so it was a tender time. This was when I was 12, the last time I lived in a 1H year. I remember being very insecure about my hair, my clothing, shoes, my glasses, everything. At the end of that year, my hair grew out a bit more and I dyed it a burgundy red. I remember feeling like it was my color!! I got to be a new person with red hair, and though now looking back, it was the most not-red sort of red but it was new and exciting for little 13 year old me.
This was something I felt wounded me into my adulthood, so I decided to go back to where I started: with my red hair.
It’s important to note that I’m a Libra rising, a sign that is ruled by Venus. Venus rising puts this extra emphasis on the way we look, and the sense of beauty we create for ourselves. I also have an Aries Venus, (in my 7H conjunct Saturn but that’s a diff deep dive lol) so I felt red hair was always going to be my safety net.
I started safe with a burgundy red, the type of red hair that only really shows up in the sunlight.
My birthday is at the end of Spring, and gradually through the Summertime I dyed my hair slightly more red every time.
The Summer let me be more confident in my appearance. I had my two biggest tattoos done the previous Winter and they were just fully healing into my skin (I have eczema so it takes a longer time lol), my thrifting game was on the up and I began to venture more and more into estate sales. My estate sale addiction allowed me to have a new sense of originality, I loved the clothes I was wearing more, my space was filled with estate sale finds big and small, my collection of astrology books grew as well as my own knowledge because of them.
Being 24 was a good time for my hobbies.
This was also the year I decided that I’d make more of my own clothes. I’ve been sewing for a few years at this point, but mostly doing alterations to thrifted clothing. I started to learn basic pattern making so that I could draft clothing specifically for my body type. I was making tops, pants, hats, tote bags. I loved being able to say that I made the clothes I was wearing.
Internally though?
I was a mess. I was fresh out of my 12H profection year and was completely living alone for the first time.
I enjoyed living alone, it gave me a space to no longer worry about how I was being perceived by others. I could play my music as loud as I wanted to, walk around with no pants, cook myself a whole meal at 1AM, I felt unstoppable — but only to myself.
I was doing online school and working from home for a good amount of time prior to living alone that it definitely affected my people skills. I felt like I didn’t know how to approach other people. I kept up with my small circle of friendships via text, phone calls/facetimes, or instagram messages, but when it was coming to IRL interactions, I’d get a knot in my throat and feel an insane amount of pressure to “perform” as me, rather than simply be me.
Then my Jupiter return came around, I have Jupiter in Pisces in the 6H and I started a new job.
During this time, Imhotep also suggested I should get a tiny sketchbook. He said it’d change my life. It did.
My tiny sketchbook became an outlet for my mind. I started to doodle, which evolved into shaded drawings, and that evolved into more colorful spreads. I played with how I was drawing text, with how I was drawing people, and I started to write more. I was able to track the progress of my own artistic ability in a way that I never really let myself do before.
Then I start my tarot deck in this tiny sketchbook. When I started drawing through the deck I didn’t have true expectations for myself, I saw it as drawing prompts that I could follow. Then as I went on, I was getting ideas for cards in my sleep, in the car, in the shower, and I knew I had to complete a full deck.
Next thing to note on my personal astrology is that I have Chiron in the first house. Chiron is the wounded healer, there’s a lot that can be said about this placement, but for now all you as my reader need to know is that it signifies your wounds.
Since I knew this about my astrology, I knew I wasn’t going to be fully out of the pain from my previous 12H year until I knew what this wound was.
As the Winter approached, I felt the need to become more and more recluse. Anxiety was at an all time high for me and I felt like the world was going to end. It was this overwhelming feeling of impending doom. Though I was content with my new place of work, content to be living alone, giving myself space to explore all my creative abilities, I couldn’t get over this feeling that it was going to all fall away from me.
And just as importantly, I didn’t know what to do with my hair.
I was over the red by the time Winter came. Red didn’t feel like a winter color to me. I decided on a temporary brown dye to the base of my hair, allowing it to gradually fade as I contemplated what color I wanted to do next. I borrowed pink hair dye from my sister to do my face framing pieces and my last layer of hair, just so that it wasn’t completely one neutral again.
The color was Live, Laugh, Love by Good Dye Young.
Christmas time rolls around and I decided everyone worth giving a gift to was going to get something I had sewn. Which turned out to be mostly bucket hats since they were easy to sew and reversible so it was like a 2-in-1 gift. My apartment started to look like a bucket hat factory at this point. All with the exception of Imhotep, who got a tote bag from me. When making this tote bag, I decided that I wanted it to have some kind of embroidery in it. At this point in time, Imhotep was the only friend I had actively shared my poetry with, so I wrote him a poem. (see tep’s tote) I remember writing this poem and knowing that it was a prayer. I wasn’t sure for what, but I felt like he needed my protection.
Fast forward to March, still 24 years of age, still having a feeling of impending doom.
I was at a wedding for one of my coworkers who I had known for less than a year at this point. My anxiety was through the roof, which prior to the actual day I was really excited for this wedding. It was St. Patrick’s Day so it was aptly green themed, I thought it would be fun, I was ready to dance, but my feeling of impending doom felt like it was at its peak. (I even ran to the bathroom to hide and text my therapist lol)
Then I find out.
I find out that my most vulnerable friendship, my best friend, passed away. It was out of my control. Out of anyone’s control.
I had just spent hours on the phone with him 2 days before, then so quickly he was gone.
I felt like I was hit by a truck. In my fully green outfit, I’m bawling, frantically calling all my friends and screaming my newfound grief out into the world.
This felt like the activation of my Chiron. One day I’ll likely document all of my synastry with Imhotep since I find it so interesting, but something I saw in our synastry from the start was that my 1H (self) Chiron fell into his 11H (friendships).
Meaning, his friendship became a wound that contributed to my identity.
My feeling of impending doom also finally left me. I knew this was what I felt coming.
April happens, one month before my 25th birthday and I needed a hair change. With my magenta hair, who I saw in the mirror was the person who had him, and that person was not me. I was painting for the first time in about 8 years and my painting was green.
In going through all my photos with him, I also noticed a theme of green to these.
So I decided my hair needed to become the opposite of red. I go green.
Anyway, this catches us up to now. 25 and green haired. I’ll likely be keeping green for at least the next year.
Green is the color of growth, color of the heart chakra. But I’ll write my green experience when I’m 26.
