It’s Not Just Water and Tears: The Real Cost of Being a Messy Fish
Man, let me tell you. I never bought into the whole astrology thing, not really. It was always just a fun little detail, right? Until it wasn’t. Until I looked back and saw a pattern—a massive, soggy pattern of self-sabotage that finally exploded in my face and took the best thing I had going with it.
My last relationship? We were great. Like, really great. But the moment things got real, the moment we had a massive house purchase to sort out and his mom got sick, I just… vanished. Not physically, but emotionally. I cloaked myself in this thick blanket of anxiety and self-pity. I became the ultimate martyr—the one who was so overwhelmed and delicate that I couldn’t possibly deal with reality. I didn’t mean to, but I weaponized my sadness. Everything became about how I felt, how much I was suffering, and how nobody understood my deep, ethereal pain. What a load of crap.
He finally just looked at me one night and said, “You’re drowning both of us, and I can’t be your life raft anymore.” That hit me like a truck. I mean, I cried, naturally. A lot. But this time, after the snot and tears dried up, I forced myself to stop swirling in the victim pool and actually do something. That’s when I grabbed the title for this post and went hunting.
I dove into every corner of the internet, not for spiritual fluff, but for hard-nosed, expert commentary on the negative side of the Piscean coin. I was looking for a technical manual on fixing a broken me. I sifted through all the garbage until I found the real stuff, the experts who didn’t just talk about being gentle dreamers but about being manipulative avoiders. I started a new notebook. I specifically wrote down every negative trait they listed, checking off the ones that absolutely defined my recent behavior. It felt like an intervention I was hosting for myself.
- The Martyr Complex: I always make myself the biggest victim. I use feeling overwhelmed as an excuse to shut down.
- The Escape Artist: Rather than facing a hard conversation, I zone out, sleep, or obsess over something completely unrelated (like a new hyper-specific hobby).
- Passive Aggression: I never directly say I’m angry or disappointed. I just get moody and wait for the other person to read my mind and apologize for whatever they did wrong, even if they didn’t know what it was.
Why did I hit rock bottom so hard this time that I’m sharing this raw mess? Because this isn’t the first time my “watery nature” has ruined things. The last time was professional. This happened just after I signed the lease on my first tiny apartment, before the big relationship mess. I was working on a huge project, a backend migration that was super high-stakes. I got some tough but fair feedback from my manager, saying I missed a huge dependency and screwed up the deployment timeline. It was a simple technical mistake, fixable, but I couldn’t handle the direct criticism.
Instead of saying, “Got it, I’ll fix it,” my Pisces brain kicked in. I felt personally attacked. I immediately ghosted. I logged off the Slack. I stopped answering my phone. For three days, I essentially disappeared from my job. My logic? If I don’t respond, the feeling goes away, or maybe they realize how mean they were to little ol’ me. When I finally crawled back, my manager wasn’t angry; he was just disappointed and confused. He didn’t even care about the dependency anymore; he cared that I proved I was completely unreliable the second pressure hit.
That incident at work, losing trust over my inability to handle a simple correction, was the blueprint for what I did to my partner later. I saw the connection, and that’s what truly horrified me. I realized this wasn’t just my zodiac sign; it was a deeply ingrained, destructive coping mechanism. I had to rip it out. I needed to change this.
I immediately started forcing the “expert advice” into my daily life. This wasn’t gentle yoga and meditation; this was hard, clumsy work:
My Clunky, Un-Fish-like Action Plan:
- I Started Talking Ugly: I literally forced myself to use blunt language. If I was upset, I had to say, “I am angry that you forgot to do X.” No hints, no sad eyes, no vague sighs. Just facts and feelings, owned by me. I wrote down three scripts for difficult conversations and practiced them out loud.
- I Scheduled Conflict: I stopped running away from inevitable tough talks. If my partner (yes, we’re working on it, slowly) said, “We need to talk about the budget,” I made myself say, “Okay, let’s do it now. We have fifteen minutes.” I physically kept my phone on the desk to stop the urge to browse into a different reality.
- I Embraced the Boring: The experts talked about the need for grounding. I created a spreadsheet of my finances—not just dreaming about being rich, but listing the actual, painful numbers. I forced myself to deal with the most annoying, mundane tasks first thing in the morning to kill the illusion that reality is too much to handle.
It’s a daily fight. I still feel the pull to just sink into the couch and let the world happen around me. But now, when that happens, I stand up, I put on shoes, and I force myself to take a walk and notice three things that are factually, undeniably real: the rough texture of the brick, the sound of the traffic, the smell of the damp earth. It’s helping. It’s making me a worse Pisces, maybe, but a much better partner. And that’s the trade-off I’m finally willing to make. The old me is gone. The new me is rougher, less “sensitive,” and thank God, finally grounded enough to build something that might actually last.
