You went at the big questions the way you go at everything
You approach the largest questions the way you approach anything, which is all the way in. Mars in Scorpio in the 9th house means what you believe was not received or absorbed, it was arrived at through something that happened, and it is held with the whole of you.
The sign is why the process was total and the house is why the subject is meaning, truth and how one ought to live. That gives your convictions unusual weight, and it makes any casual challenge to them land as considerably more serious than the person asking intended.
The received version was discarded early
Whatever you were told about how things are, you tested and mostly rejected, and what replaced it was assembled privately over years. That independence is genuine and it has been lonely. Very few people know what you actually believe, and it is worth telling one of them, purely so the position exists somewhere outside your head.
Travel undertaken to be changed
You do not go somewhere to see it, you go to be affected by it, which is why the trips that mattered were uncomfortable and the pleasant ones are barely remembered. Choose accordingly and stop apologising for the preference. A holiday designed for rest will leave you flat and a difficult journey will keep working on you for years.
Suspicion of anybody who is certain
Confident authority produces an immediate reflex in you to find out what is underneath it, and you are frequently right that something is. That instrument is valuable and it has no off position, which means you also apply it to people who are simply competent. Ask one open question before concluding. The reading is accurate about motive and poor about ordinary confidence.
Teaching only what you have been through
You will not pass on anything you have not tested personally, which makes what you do teach unusually credible and considerably narrower than your knowledge. Some things can be transmitted on good evidence rather than on experience. Loosen the rule slightly, because the restriction is currently keeping useful material from people who would use it.
You keep going back to what disturbed you
Whatever unsettles you draws you rather than repelling you, which is why your reading, your interests and several of your choices have circled the same uncomfortable territory for decades. That is not morbidity, it is how your attention works, and it has produced an understanding of certain things that almost nobody else in your life has. Give it a form: a subject properly studied, a piece of work, a qualification. Left unshaped it just circles.
The expert on what nobody wants to discuss
You are willing to go into subjects that make other people uncomfortable and stay there long enough to actually know something, which is a rare combination and a marketable one. Fields built on difficult material will pay for it: risk, security, the darker end of research, work with people in serious trouble. Say plainly what you are prepared to look at, because nobody advertises for that and everybody needs it.
People you can say the unacceptable thing to
What you need from a friendship is the ability to voice a view that would end a dinner party elsewhere, and be met with argument rather than with alarm. That is a narrow requirement and it explains why your circle is small. Test for it early rather than after years: say something genuinely unpalatable and watch what happens. The response sorts people faster than a decade of acquaintance.
Somebody who has been through something
You are drawn to people who have been changed by their own experience, because a person with no such history has nothing you recognise to talk to. That is a real filter and it can shade into finding damage attractive. The distinction is whether they came out of it kinder. Check that specifically, because your instrument does not measure it.
You did not keep what you were given
The worldview you were raised in was examined and largely put down, and the family has read that as rejection of them rather than of the material. Those are separable and you have never said so. Tell one relative what you kept. The list is longer than either of you would expect and it changes the conversation entirely.