People find out you cannot be scheduled, and that you deliver
Colleagues learn two things about you in the first year and they seem contradictory. Mars in Pisces in the 6th house makes your daily output tidal rather than steady, so the hours are unpredictable and the total, over any reasonable period, is high.
The sign is why it cannot be evened out and the house is why it lands on ordinary work. That makes conventional employment a poor fit and unstructured work an excellent one, and it means most of your professional difficulties have been about form rather than about substance.
Work that has to help somebody
Your effort engages properly when the outcome makes a difference to a person you can actually picture, and disengages almost entirely when it does not, regardless of what the work pays or how interesting it is in the abstract. That single variable accounts for more of the difference in your output than talent, hours or motivation ever have. Choose roles on it explicitly, because no amount of professionalism has ever compensated for its absence.
The boundary that keeps moving
You take on what other people cannot manage, absorb tasks that were not yours, and end up with a job description nobody could reconstruct. Each addition was reasonable and the total is not. Write down what you actually do once a year, and give one item back deliberately, because the drift only ever runs in one direction.
The environment does half the work
Noise, light, the person at the next desk and the general mood of a workplace affect your output more than the difficulty of the task does, and you will read a bad month as a personal failing. It is usually the room. Change one physical thing about where you work before concluding anything about yourself.
Recovery is not optional here
The flood periods are genuinely productive and they draw down something real that has to be replaced, and pushing through the ebb produces very little at a cost that arrives later. Build the low mode into the working year rather than treating each occurrence as a personal failure: lighter tasks, input rather than output, the work that needs presence rather than force. The two modes together are the system.
Two speeds, and only one of them is allowed
You treat the productive stretches as your real self and the slow ones as a lapse to be corrected, which means half of every year is spent in a low-grade argument with your own operating system. Nothing about that argument has ever produced work. Name the two modes, plan different tasks for each, and stop grading one against the other.
Structure has to come from somebody else
You supply the sensing, the care and the quality, and you do not supply deadlines or administration, and attempts to become the sort of person who does have consistently failed. Partner with structure rather than manufacturing it: the producer, the manager, the colleague with a spreadsheet. It is not a weakness to be corrected, it is a role to be filled.
Being useful is not the same as being used
Your willingness to help is genuine and it has no natural limit, so the difference between contributing and being drained is decided entirely by other people's restraint. Some of them have none. Set the limit yourself, in advance and in specifics, because nothing in your own responses will tell you when it has been passed.
Bill for the work you did not count
A significant proportion of what you do goes unrecorded because it did not feel like a task: the advice, the help, the extra thing. Log everything for one month without changing your behaviour. The list is the argument, and you have never had it available at the moment somebody was deciding what you are worth.
The daily upkeep you quietly absorbed
In a shared life you take on the practical maintenance because you notice it first and mind about it least, and after a few years the division is so uneven that raising it feels like an accusation. Put the actual list on paper, without a complaint attached, and divide it as though neither of you had done any of it before.