My initial reluctance to work with Venus came from something deeper than divine aesthetics—it came from my reluctance to accept parts of myself.
I’d only known Venus through the Greek myths of Aphrodite—or at least the versions taught in school. I saw her as beautiful, vain, shallow, erotic, petty. A divine mean girl. And honestly, that wasn’t someone I wanted to associate with.
And yet, that’s only part of the truth.
Venus is undeniably the embodiment of beauty—born from seafoam, shimmering with allure. So captivating, in fact, that Zeus married her off to Hephaestus, the so-called ugliest of the gods, just to keep the other gods from tearing the heavens apart. Whether that worked is another story entirely.
I, on the other hand, was called Cosmic Cow in grade school—for loving astronomy and being fat. I never felt beautiful. Not once. Schoolmates, sometimes even family, reminded me of this constantly. The people I crushed on never returned the feeling. I grew up believing no one would ever love me. But I didn’t really think much about marriage anyway—not as a kid.
What stuck with me most about Venus were the myths where she bickered and schemed. The golden apple in The Iliad, where she promised Paris the love of the most beautiful woman (already married, oops) and inadvertently launched the Trojan War. Her custody battle with Persephone over Adonis. Her jealousy over Psyche, so intense she sent her own son, Eros, to sabotage her.
Yes, these stories are layered. And yes, they come to us filtered through patriarchy—the lens of male gods and male poets, where goddesses are often reduced to archetypes of desire, jealousy, and vanity.
But I only absorbed the surface. Venus seemed petty, manipulative, obsessed with beauty—everything I was told I wasn’t. Everything I had grown to resent.
Why would I invite that energy into my life?
The truth is, Venus reflects more than beauty. She reflects truth. And part of that truth is that we all have moments of pettiness, jealousy, insecurity. Sometimes we’re the victims of it. Sometimes we’re the ones dishing it out.
Venus doesn’t condemn us for this. She illuminates it.
She holds up a mirror—not just to show us the parts we love, but the parts we’ve rejected. The stuff we’ve pushed into the shadows. She says: This, too, is you.
And most importantly: This also is worthy of love.
She taught me that the “Cosmic Cow” wasn’t some pathetic joke—she was a girl who loved stars and rocks and space and dinosaurs. She loved her family, volunteered in her community, and was a fiercely loyal friend. She also ate too much junk food, got into pointless arguments, cried over dumb things, and sometimes lied. A beautiful, messy, luminous human being.
It’s no accident that Venus—the Morning Star—shares her title with Lucifer, the Light Bringer. Both illuminate what’s hidden. Both reveal desire and shadow.
And I didn’t want to see my shadow. I didn’t want to see the petty, bitter, wounded parts of myself. I thought if I ignored them, they’d go away.
They didn’t.
They festered. They grew. They sabotaged me when I was tired or overwhelmed. They lashed out at the wrong people. They repeated the same old patterns like a broken record. And the Universe, seeing how often I hit “replay,” kept sending the same damn song.
Eventually, I got sick of the soundtrack. I was ready for something new.
That’s when Venus stepped in. She held up the mirror. She said: Look. This shadow, this thing you hate? You needed it once. It got you through something. It was your armor, your crutch, your coping mechanism. It may not have been pretty, but it helped you survive.
And now?
Now you don’t need it anymore.
Once I acknowledged it—owned it—I could release it. That’s when things began to change. New songs started appearing on the playlist. Songs I actually liked. Songs I didn’t know I needed.
I’ll never forget the first time I looked in the mirror and thought, I look…pretty. I didn’t see flaws. I saw me. Not an awkward embarrassment, but a woman who could look herself in the eye and smile.
And I do smile—so much more now.