I Will Never Read A Horoscope Again

Don’t look at the weather in Dallas when you live in San Jose.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

At first they were just a page in the back of a magazine, a three-line morsel with information so diluted it’s a wonder they didn’t float away. I never really connected with any of them, gathering no more wisdom about my sign (Cancer) than the fact that it…likes to stay home sometimes? Honestly I’ve met Magic 8 Balls with more predictive power. But that’s how we’ve been groomed to see them, as toys.

What I’ve come to understand over the last year or so, and even more deeply in the last handful of months, is that astrology is an incredibly layered, highly personal practice that cannot possibly fit into something a graphic designer can lay out to appear opposite a back cover. It’s highly personal, with endless variables, based on when and where you were born, and what our universe (that old so-and-so) happens to be doing at any time.

It always seemed odd to me, there somehow only being 12 available personalities on the planet. Maybe I’d throw a bit of numerology in there every now and then or attempt to identify as the year of the Dog. But everything felt flat, limiting, and truly like hocus pocus, which is only acceptable when Bette Midler is present.

I have an endlessly curious mind, which I’d always attributed to being a writer and loving fodder in general, and as soon as I found out there was so much more to astrology than just our signs and rising signs, I thought, “fuck it, why not—let’s get into it.” That curiosity, as it turns out, isn’t because I’m a writer. But I might be a writer because of that curiosity. I’ll explain.

Hey, it’s me. Image via Co-Star

Recently I’ve explored my birth chart, using apps (it’s 2019, what do you want me to do, consult the scrolls?) like The Pattern and Co-Star to give me a more full picture of the moment I arrived on this plane. The more I learn, the more my curiosity expands, and the more I understand that astrology is there not to tell me the future, but to educate me about circumstance, and help me prepare myself to fully engage with the world around me. It’s also there to help me understand the whats and whys of who I am…