What the Stars Said About Me
A combined analysis of my natal chart, CliftonStrengths, INFJ typing, Enneagram Types, and some uncomfortable truths about love, betrayal, work, and becoming.
I am a Pisces Sun with a Sagittarius Moon and Libra Rising. I have Mars and Jupiter conjunct in Taurus in the 8th house, Pluto in Scorpio in the 2nd, and Chiron in Cancer in the 10th. My North Node is in Pisces in the 5th house. Black Moon Lilith sits in Libra in the 12th — hidden, suppressed, and apparently very done being quiet. This might sound like chinese to you right now. That’s okay.
I am also an INFJ — the Advocate — one of the rarest personality types. My CliftonStrengths top five are Futuristic, Ideation, Intellection, Analytical, and Achiever. I am an Enneagram 8 with both a 4 wing and a 2 wing. I have taken every framework available to human beings for understanding themselves and they all say the same thing from a different angle.
What’s interesting is that I haven’t always tested the same. In high school I was ENFP — extroverted, spontaneous, possibility-oriented, openly expressive. In college I tested INFP — the introverted version, more private, more internally focused, the armor beginning to form. Now in my late thirties I consistently test INFJ. The E became I. The spontaneity became strategy. The open expression went underground and became something more controlled and more precise.
Psychologists who understand trauma know that it changes how we present on personality assessments. The hypervigilance, the need to read rooms before entering them, the careful internal processing before anything reaches the outside world — these are INFJ-coded behaviors that ENFPs develop when their environment stops being safe enough for spontaneity. When I was safe enough to be fully myself, I was an E. When I had to survive, I became an I. The ENFP is still in there — she shows up in the things I love, the emotion in my writing, in the way I respond to life in relaxed moments. She’s starting to come back.
The type journey from ENFP to INFP to INFJ is not three different people. It is one person moving through three different degrees of safety. Which means the goal is not to be INFJ forever. The goal is to be safe enough, long enough, that the original version gets to exist again — louder, freer, and more fully formed than she was at seventeen.
I didn’t understand most of this for most of my life. I’m starting to.
The Convergence
Three completely different systems — astrology, Jungian personality typing, and Gallup’s strengths science — pointing at the same person is not a coincidence. It is a portrait.
The INFJ is the rarest type. Characterized by long-range vision, systems-level pattern recognition, a values-driven internal compass that operates independently of external consensus, and a tendency to be profoundly misunderstood by people operating at a shallower level of analysis. The INFJ sees the end of something before it starts. Builds toward futures others can’t yet see. Feels everything deeply and processes it privately before it reaches the outside world.
The natal chart supplies the emotional and spiritual dimension the other frameworks don’t fully reach. It explains not just how I think but why it costs what it costs. Why the gifts came packaged with specific wounds. Why this particular life, with this particular arc.
When you add the Enneagram and CliftonStrengths to the INFJ and the natal chart, what emerges is not four separate portraits. It is one portrait with four light sources illuminating it from different angles. Every shadow they each reveal is the same shadow. Every strength they each name is the same strength. The consistency across systems is either remarkable coincidence or confirmation that there is something genuinely specific about this particular person that all of these frameworks were built to describe.
I lean toward the latter. Modestly.
The INFJ
The INFJ is called the Advocate. It is statistically the rarest of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types — roughly one to three percent of the population. This is not a credential. It is a context. It means that the way I process information, relate to the world, and move through relationships is genuinely uncommon enough that most people in my life have not encountered it before, and most systems I move through were not built with me in mind.
The INFJ leads with Introverted Intuition — a function that pattern-matches across vast amounts of information and produces insight about the future that feels more like knowing than reasoning. It is difficult to explain and even more difficult to defend to people who need the steps shown. The knowing simply arrives. The reasoning comes later, to justify what intuition already concluded.
The INFJ’s second function is Extroverted Feeling — a genuine radar for the emotional state of rooms and relationships, a pull toward harmony and understanding, a capacity for empathy that can become a liability when it is deployed in the service of people who do not deserve it.
The INFJ shadow — the inferior function — is Extroverted Sensing. Under extreme stress the INFJ collapses into the body, into sensation, into immediate concrete reality in a way that is disorienting and unfamiliar. This is called the grip. I have been in the grip. The blog is evidence that I came out of it. You cannot produce sustained original philosophical work from inside a collapse.
What the INFJ needs above everything: safety, depth, meaningful work, genuine intellectual partnership, and enough solitude to process the interior world before it has to be shared. Saskatoon is giving me all five for the first time in years.
The Enneagram
I am an Enneagram 8 with both a 4 wing and a 2 wing. If you know the Enneagram, you just exhaled and said of course.
The 8 is the Challenger. The Protector. The person in the room who instinctively reads power dynamics and refuses to be controlled by them. The 8 is not aggressive — the 8 is sovereign. There is a fundamental difference between someone who dominates and someone who will not be dominated. The 8 will not be dominated. Will not be managed, manipulated, silenced, or made small. Will confront what others look away from. Will say the thing directly when everyone else is performing around it. The 8’s deepest fear is not death or failure — it is weakness. Vulnerability. Being at the mercy of someone who will abuse it.
The 4 wing changes everything about how that 8 energy moves through the world.
The 4 is the Individualist. The deepest feeler in the Enneagram system. The one who experiences everything at a frequency most people don’t have access to. The 4 is the artist, the poet, the person for whom ordinary experience is never quite sufficient because the interior world is so vivid and so specific that the exterior world always feels slightly inadequate by comparison. The 4 believes at some fundamental level that they are different — set apart — and simultaneously longs to be truly known and understood by another person.
An 8 with a 4 wing is the rarest and most internally complex of the 8 configurations. The 8 wants power and protection. The 4 wants depth and to be seen completely. Together they produce someone who is simultaneously the most formidable person in the room and the most sensitive person in the room — and who experiences both of those things fully, without one cancelling the other out.
I also carry a 2 wing. Which means I am an 8 sitting between a 4 and a 2 — power, depth, and love simultaneously, all at full volume.
The 2 is the Helper. The nurturer. The one who expresses love through provision — through feeding people, through showing up, through making sure no one in the room is unseen or uncared for. The 2 gives generously and instinctively. The 2’s shadow is giving to be loved rather than from freedom — and the 2 can burn quietly when the giving runs in one direction for too long.
An 8 with a 2 wing is sometimes called the Bear. Fierce on the outside. Tender underneath. Willing to fight anyone who threatens the people they love and then go home and cook garlic chicken for everyone. The protector and the nurturer in the same body, both operating at full strength.
The 4 gives me the depth and the artistry. The 2 gives me the warmth and the devotion. The 8 gives me the refusal to be controlled and the power to build something that lasts.
The Enneagram 8’s growth path is toward the 2 — toward heart, toward receiving care as well as giving protection, toward allowing vulnerability without interpreting it as defeat. The 4’s growth path is toward the 1 — toward principled action, toward turning the depth of feeling into structured contribution rather than private suffering. The 2’s growth path is toward the 4 — toward owning needs honestly rather than giving to avoid them.
Which is exactly what this blog is. The 8 protecting herself publicly. The 4 turning private pain into art. The 2 learning to receive without guilt.
If you’ve been reading this blog and felt like you were encountering someone simultaneously formidable and warm, simultaneously private and exposed, simultaneously building systems and writing love poems — now you know why. I contain all three. They are not in conflict. They are the architecture.
The CliftonStrengths
Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment measures 34 talent themes and identifies your top five — the ones that operate most naturally, most automatically, most powerfully. Mine are Futuristic, Ideation, Intellection, Analytical, and Achiever.
Four of the five are in the Strategic Thinking domain. One is in the Executing domain. None are in Relationship Building or Influencing. This tells you something important about how I operate: I build ideas and systems rather than networks and consensus. I need people around me who have the strengths I don’t — people who can connect, persuade, and maintain — so the ideas actually reach people. The first TechFlow hire in the future will be someone who has what I don’t.
Futuristic is the strength that compels me to envision what’s possible before it exists. I am not inspired by what is. I am inspired by what could be and why it isn’t yet. This is where the quantum democracy framework came from here on my blog. The solarpunk future essay. Futuristic people don’t just imagine the future — they pull others toward it through the specificity and coherence of the picture they paint.
Ideation is the strength that finds connections between completely unrelated things and experiences genuine delight at the moment two ideas click into each other unexpectedly. This is why the blog covers quantum computing and garlic chicken and Lebanese generosity and temporal physics and refugee law and 90s nostalgia in the same month and it doesn’t feel incoherent. To me these are all the same conversation. Ideation people are often called scattered by people who can’t see the connections. They are not scattered. They are operating at a higher level of abstraction than the conversation allows for.
Intellection means I think for the pleasure of thinking. Not to produce an outcome — for the intrinsic reward of the process. Long solitary mental journeys. Deep dives that produce original frameworks nobody asked me to build. The scapegoat paper. The AIM methodology. The Face Control System for AI character continuity. Intellection people need significant amounts of solitude and mental space to function at their best. Deprive them of it and watch everything else degrade.
Analytical is the quality control function. I don’t just generate ideas — I interrogate them. Find the evidence. Map the argument. Stress-test the logic. Demand that it holds. This is why everything on this blog is either verifiable through existing science, documented through personal record, or clearly marked as speculative framework. I cannot publish something I cannot defend. The Analytical strength and the Achiever strength together explain the particular quality of this site — high volume and high rigor simultaneously. Not for performance. Because that’s the only way the mind knows how to rest.
Achiever is the engine underneath all of it. Every single day starts at zero and requires me to produce something tangible before it ends. The list is never done and that motivates rather than exhausts me. The Achiever will not let the vision stay theoretical. It demands output. Every day. Without exception.
The combination of all five together produces a very specific kind of mind: one that sees futures, generates original connections, thinks deeply for its own sake, verifies everything rigorously, and then drives relentlessly toward making it real. This is not a comfortable combination to live with. It is a very effective one.
The Mind
Mercury in Aquarius in the 5th house. My mind runs ahead of the present by about twenty years and expresses itself through creative work. Mercury square Pluto makes it investigative — obsessive, if I’m being honest — capable of going so deep into something that it finds what everyone else walked past.
The Emotional Architecture
Sagittarius Moon in the 2nd house. My emotional security is tied to truth, freedom, and my own values and resources. When my freedom is threatened or my values are violated, the disruption is total — not dramatic, total. There is no emotional okay in a philosophically wrong circumstance. I cannot separate the two.
I used to think this was a flaw. It isn’t. It’s integrity written into the emotional body.
Moon square Venus exactly. This is the one that has cost me the most in relationships. It means my emotional needs and my relational behavior are in direct tension. I feel one thing and present another. I need truth and give harmony. I need to be chosen clearly and accept ambiguity quietly. I have historically loved people who received my devotion without matching it — not because I couldn’t see the imbalance, but because the Moon-Venus square is very good at convincing you that managing the other person’s comfort is the same thing as being loved.
It isn’t. I know that now.
The INFJ shadow confirms this pattern — the type is prone to absorbing others’ emotional states, suppressing their own needs in service of the relationship, and staying long past the expiry date out of loyalty to a vision of the person rather than the reality of them. The 2 wing deepens it — giving to be loved, burning quietly when the giving is not returned.
The Work
Pisces Sun in the 6th house. This is a soul built for service, systems, and meaningful work. Not passive service — transformative service. The kind that converts suffering into wisdom and intuition into infrastructure. The 6th house is the house of daily work, craft, health, and the unglamorous labor that actually builds things. Pisces here means I bring spiritual depth and emotional intelligence to work that other people might treat as purely mechanical.
This is why technical writing — which most people experience as dry administrative labor — became the container. I don’t just document systems. I make them legible in a way that changes how people understand what they’re doing and why.
The Capricorn stellium in the 4th house — Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all in Capricorn — gives the Pisces vision a skeleton. Capricorn is endurance, structure, the long game, building things that outlast the conditions they were built in. My Part of Fortune is also in Capricorn. My greatest fortune comes through building. Through patience. Through the kind of sustained effort that most people abandon before the result appears.
Mars and Jupiter conjunct in Taurus in the 8th house — enormous latent power around resources and transformation. Taurus doesn’t rush. But it finishes. Mars conjunct Jupiter is one of the most potent configurations for building material wealth but it requires time and it requires surviving the transformation the 8th house demands before the resources arrive.
Chiron in Cancer in the 10th house means the wound lives in the career — in public identity, in being seen and protected and recognized in the world. But Chiron healed becomes Chiron as gift. The healer’s wound becomes the healer’s power. The 10th house Chiron heals publicly, through their work, through the very visibility that was once the site of pain. The blog. The business. A new start. The frameworks published under my own name. This is what Chiron in the 10th looks like in recovery.
The Achiever strength means I need to produce something every day or something feels unresolved. The Analytical strength means I cannot publish something I cannot defend. Together they create the particular quality of the work on this site — high volume and high rigor simultaneously. Not for performance. Because that’s the only way the mind knows how to rest.
The Wound
Chiron in Cancer in the 10th house. The wound is being publicly unprotected. Not claimed. Not defended. Not loved in ways the world could see.
Chiron in Cancer is the wound of belonging — of wondering if you are truly held, truly safe, truly chosen by the people and institutions that were supposed to choose you. In the 10th house this plays out through authority figures, institutions, career, and reputation. The systems and people that were supposed to protect me publicly either failed to or actively worked against me.
The wound is not imagined. It is written in the sky on the day I was born.
The healing path for Chiron in Cancer in the 10th is becoming your own public protector. Building your own institution. Claiming yourself loudly enough that no one else’s silence on the matter becomes the default story.
I am healing Chiron by building the thing that was supposed to exist and didn’t.
The Betrayal
Pluto in Scorpio in the 2nd house, opposite Mars and Jupiter in Taurus in the 8th.
This configuration is one of the most intense in astrology for betrayal specifically through intimate relationships and shared resources. The 8th house rules deep merging — with people, with finances, with trust. The 2nd house rules self-worth and survival resources. Pluto in my self-worth house in Scorpio, opposing the house of what I share with others, means I have experienced profound betrayal by people I merged with completely.
People who had access to my resources. My body. My trust. My future.
And the betrayal didn’t just hurt. It threatened survival.
Mars opposite Pluto is the aspect of power struggles that feel life or death. Because to me , they were. This is not hyperbole. This is the chart.
What the chart also says: I survive it. Pluto transforms. It does not destroy the person with enough Capricorn in their bones to outlast it. And I have Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all in Capricorn in the 4th house. I am built from the inside out of something that endures.
The INFJ under extreme stress goes into what the type community calls the grip — the normally controlled and visionary mind collapsing into obsessive detail, paranoid pattern-matching, catastrophizing. I have been in the grip. I have also come out of it. The blog is the evidence. You cannot produce sustained original philosophical work from inside a collapse.
The 8’s response to betrayal is to become more armored, more controlled, more sovereign. The 4’s response is to feel it completely, to let it become art. The 2’s response is to wonder what they gave that wasn’t enough. I have done all three. I am integrating all three.
Love
Sun conjunct Venus in Pisces in the 6th house. I love through service. Through showing up. Through doing the thing that needs doing before anyone asks. Through care that is practical and devotional simultaneously. The risk — the historical risk — is loving people who receive the service without returning the devotion.
Lilith in Libra in the 12th house. Black Moon Lilith in the 12th is the hidden feminine rage, the suppressed power, the part of me that knew my worth and was forced underground. Lilith in Libra means that suppression happened specifically in relationships. My power, my boundaries, my refusal to capitulate — made invisible. Punished. Pathologized.
Lilith in the 12th eventually surfaces. Usually through writing. Usually loudly.
Hi.
My 7th house cusp is Aries. I am drawn to bold, direct, initiating energy in partners. Aries on the 7th also means partnerships have historically involved conflict, independence battles, and people who challenged rather than sheltered me. The person I need is someone strong enough to match me without needing to manage me.
The Moon-Venus square and the INFJ’s relational patterns together with the 2 wing create a very specific dynamic — profound loyalty to a vision of the relationship, delayed self-advocacy, and an eventual reckoning when the gap between what was given and what was received becomes undeniable. I have had that reckoning. Multiple times. Each one more clarifying than the last.
The 8 in me knew every time. The 4 in me felt it completely. The 2 in me kept giving anyway.
I am learning to let the 8 lead in love the same way it leads in work. Not dominance. Sovereignty. The right to be chosen clearly or not at all.
What’s Coming
Saturn transiting my 6th house is restructuring my entire daily life, work, and health systems right now. New routines. New discipline. New clarity about what the work actually is and what it isn’t. This transit rewards structure and punishes avoidance. I am in exactly the right response to it.
Pluto transiting my 5th house is burning away old creative self-concepts and old romantic patterns simultaneously. The blog launching. The ezine. The AI fashion work. The portfolio. The applications to quantum computing companies and AI training roles. All of it is Pluto doing its job — installing something truer and more powerful in the place where something smaller used to live.
Jupiter is moving toward my 10th house. Career and public visibility expansion. Not yet. But coming.
The North Node in Pisces in the 5th house is the soul’s direction for this lifetime. Creative expression. Spiritual depth. Being seen fully — not through service, not through self-effacement, but through the full expression of the interior world I have been building my entire life. The South Node in Virgo is what I’m moving away from — perfectionism, self-criticism, making myself useful at the expense of making myself visible.
My destiny is the building, the research, the writing, the art. The complete, unmanaged, unfiltered version of who I actually am.
Ashley Fay writes at ashleyfay.com. Her natal chart was interpreted in conjunction with INFJ personality typing, Clifton Strengths top five: Futuristic, Ideation, Intellection, Analytical, Achiever, and Enneagram type 8 with 4 and 2 wings.
ASH & INK 
Leave a comment