Solar Systems
Earlier this month, I realized that there were several new people sitting just outside my inner circles, knocking on my doors. I found that my impulse was to shut them out—surely I didn’t have the time, energy, or emotional bandwidth for them—but was that true?
Following this train of thought, I needed to evaluate whether I was actually in a state of overwhelm and, if I were, how would I modify my current interactions such that there was room for other people I was interested in?
After putting some thought into it, I decided to make a solar system of the people in my life to determine how many people there were and how close in they felt to me. I put myself in the center of the solar system and started adding orbits around my planet.
As I started plotting people as planets in the solar system, I found it useful to add directionality to each planet to indicate whether I wanted the person closer or further away from their current position to me.
I added an arrow in another color to represent the direction I felt the person wanted to move with relation to me.
As you can imagine, this illustrated the tension in my social life with a fair degree of accuracy and insight.
I also found it useful to add moons for people I only interacted with through a planet in my system. For example, many of my friends’ partners’ fell into this category and became moons with relation to me.
With all that plotted, I had a super helpful reference guide of the people I interacted with and how close each of them felt to me. When the solar system was complete, I had four orbits that landed in roughly these distinctions:
1. Partners/co-parents
2. Chosen family
3. People who influence me and not-so-close family
4. People about to enter my life
The solar system felt full with a little fewer than 20 people on it. Because I was having fun with the idea, I erased that solar system and made a similar diagram with all the creative projects I was working on.
With these, it made the most sense to make the moons collaborators on the projects, if there were any. I noticed quickly that the projects closest to my heart were ones I worked on alone or felt like I had complete authority over. I have known for a while that I need to work on my collaborative skills, but recognizing how I was pushing collaborative projects away urged me into action.
There were a lot more projects than there had been people. I had almost double as many things I was working on or wanted to work on, but I genuinely felt like I was still balancing them all well. That gave me hope that there really was space for more people in my life even without deprioritizing any innermost relationships.
Confident that the model was now useful, I did yet another solar system to represent my sub-personalities, whom I have named. For this system, moons represented people each sub-personality interacted with. I put a star next to the sub-personalities who wanted more interaction.
This solar system was by far the most complicated. I have a lot of sub-personalities, and many of them have made friends or partners of sub-personalities my girlfriend has. And, about six of the sub-personalities were interested in making new connections.
Still, looking at this map didn’t send me into a state of overwhelm. I was excited that so many sub-personalities were expressing social desires. That gave me a tremendous amount of confidence that I could introduce and balance more people in my life.
I found that I was eager to show my solar system to the people closest to me, both just to bask in a mutual feeling of innermost connection and to create an opportunity to speak love to the people I loved most. However, it became very vulnerable very quickly once I moved out an orbit or two because I worried that people would not appreciate where I put them or would tell me they wished they were closer to me. I was very selective about who I showed the diagram to because it illustrated everything and everyone I cared about and exactly how much I cared about them.
Making Your Own Solar System
The solar system as a concept and model to map out interactions catches like wildfire. My partners both felt intrigued and motivated to make one the same day I made mine, and several of my roommates did a few days later. One of them shared about their solar system orbit designations on Facebook, and then the idea started going viral. I’ve seen ink-based solar systems, solar system collages, black-and-white solar systems, digital solar systems. I’ve seen moons mean every variety of thing. I’ve seen elliptical orbits. Which is all to say that it’s easy to customize the meaning and visuals of your own solar system chart.
When you make a solar system for yourself, I encourage you to think about it like a snapshot of your life right now. Obviously, the orbits could shift at any moment since they gravitate in real time, and they might even change as the direct result of making a solar system. I know mine certainly did.
I definitely understand that solar systems can be incredibly intimate and vulnerable, so we invite you to encode yours and comment with a photo below or tag @intuitive-oracle on Instagram if you would like to share yours!