Destruction comes before creation. If you want to reinvent yourself, you must destroy the parts of yourself that are in the way.
A Twitter friend quoted this to me. They are my words, from a piece I wrote back in 2018.
The timing was impeccable: just as we entered Scorpio season, a season that is all about death, rebirth, and transformation.
We see this cycle of destruction for creation play out in nature all the time, especially at this time of year. Scorpio season arrives in the Northeast United States as the leaves are in the process of turning colors and falling off the trees. All around me, nature is dying. Fruits fall to the earth. What is rotten and decaying is composted into the soil, its nutrients put to use to nourish the next cycle of crops.
All animals also shed what they’ve outgrown. Snakes, lobsters, and scorpions shed their skin wholesale as they grow — literally crawling out of their skin — to fit into new skin, in a process called molting. Here’s a cool video of it.
Humans shed too, albeit in a more gradual and continual process. We shed our outer layer of skin every 2–4 weeks.
Fun fact: Shed skin is actually the biggest component of dust. And before you freak out about the germs, studies show it actually helps reduce air pollutants.
Elimination is Natural
The point is that this shedding is a natural, normal, and necessary part of nature and life.
The sign of Scorpio rules the excretory system, another way we shed what is no longer needed. We eliminate toxins through excretion, sweating, crying, sometimes through bleeding.
When it comes to the biology of shedding what we’ve outgrown or what is no longer useful to us, we generally don’t think twice about it. It just happens. You don’t think about shedding your skin. You don’t try to hold onto it.
Shedding outgrown identities is just as normal, natural, and necessary as shedding skin. But here we can get stuck. We become emotionally invested in our identities more so than we do in our skin.
Honoring the Grief
Scorpio is a sign that also speaks to our need to grieve. There is a loss in whatever we are shedding, even if it’s something that is toxic to us. We must acknowledge that loss and grieve it.
Without fully processing our grief for what we leave behind, we cannot step fully into our new identity.
Scorpio season is not for the faint of heart; it asks us to confront that which no longer serve us and to compost it in the soil to nourish something new that will serve us better.
There is no reinvention without destruction. And we cannot destroy completely without honoring the loss and holding space for the inevitable grief.
This is the work of Scorpio season.