Mercury Retrograde in Leo: When the Microphone Goes Silent
When you realize you've been speaking with someone else's voice for years
Mercury Retrograde in Leo: July 17 (or 18) to August 11, 2025
There's a terrible and beautiful moment when you realize you've been speaking with someone else's voice for years.
I'm not talking about mimicking accents or copying phrases. I'm talking about something more unsettling: discovering that your way of communicating, the one you thought was so yours, so authentic, so brilliant, is actually a sophisticated imitation of what you believed the world wanted to hear from someone like you.
This discovery usually arrives, without warning, during Mercury retrograde transits in Leo.
The Great Silence
Leo is the sign of the radiating center, of the voice that needs no permission to sound. When Mercury transits Leo in direct motion, your communication function feels authorized to shine, to affirm, to occupy the sonic space with the confidence of someone who knows they deserve to be heard.
But when Mercury retrogrades in this territory, something strange happens. It's not that you lose your voice. It's worse: you discover that the voice you thought was yours was being generated by very sophisticated internal software, programmed to produce exactly the kind of sound Leo should make.
It's as if for months you'd been lip-syncing to yourself.