December 4, 2023
When I graduated from college, it rained enough that the corners of my mortarboard warped. Maybe I paid more attention to this than most of my peers, because I was about to return to my hometown, to live with and care for my ill mother. My father had died when I was 16, and it seemed my mom might also be dying soon, since her breast cancer had returned and metastasized.
I was the older of two children and the only daughter. Everyone expected that I would serve as my mom's caregiver. Not seeing what other options I had, I went along with the plan dutifully. It was a quietly excruciating time.
One day, I decided to look up my astrological birth chart.
The internet was a less commercial space back then, and there were reams of fascinating, ad-free interpretations available for any of the aspects in my chart I wanted to read about. It was comforting to think that the planets at the time of my birth reflected something imprinted on my soul, independent of my life history and social circumstances. As the saying goes, “As above, so below."
So I pored over descriptions of psychological patterns that I was told I would face in life, no matter what I did. I sifted through the experts’ advice on how to make the most of the cosmic hand I’d been dealt, and, since it all seemed plausible enough, I started to feel a little more at home in the universe.
I can see now, almost 2 decades later, that my interest grew out of a deep, unmet need for mirroring and support.
Astrology couldn't provide the type of support that a human friend, partner, or healer might have given me. But my friends from high school had moved elsewhere for their shiny new post-college jobs and adventures. The only person my age who I befriended in town told me he disliked astrology because his mother had apparently sought guidance in the stars for many of her child-rearing decisions. (I vaguely recall him also telling me about her passionate beliefs about macrobiotic foods.)
I was nonplussed - and thoroughly enchanted by my new hobby.
15 months after I had moved back to St Louis to care for her, after a week of at-home hospice care, my mother died.
After her burial and funeral and shiva, my brother went back to college 200 miles away, in Illinois, where he’d recently started his freshman year.
I reckoned I had to figure out what I would do with my life, now that my mother was no longer here to orbit around. Adrift as I was, I couldn't make anything stick for very long.
In my late 20’s I decided to make a big move--2,000 miles away--to Northern California. I'd come up with three reasons: to be closer to my paternal uncle and his family, to pursue a credential to teach secondary English, and to join a spiritual group a healer I respected had mentioned to me a few years earlier. My trio of reasons sounded solid, on paper, and in 2009, the Bay Area felt like a place where transplants from around the world could blossom.
No one in California seemed to mind my metaphysical leanings. Many of my new acquaintances were just as fascinated with astrology as I was - a couple were even budding astrologers themselves! But over time, my penchant for the esoteric would come to obscure as much as it revealed.
As I sought comfort in the patterns astrology claimed were in play behind the scenes, I began to overemphasize the meaning I derived from what I was reading. It was easier to wax philosophical about cosmic abstractions than turn toward the subtler promptings of my heart, which I'd learned to stifle — or to confront the hard reality of the world right in front of my eyes, and the hard questions I would need to ask myself, and grapple with, to learn how to navigate it alone.
The planets’ symbolism was much more majestic and simple than the messy minutiae daily life kept serving up to me.
The grandeur and sweep of astrology made it easy to chalk up a bad day (or week, or month) to a passing planet aspecting my natal moon; the challenging aspect would pass on its own if I waited it out. I'd console myself after a break-up by rationalizing that it wasn't meant to be because our signs just weren't compatible. I even pigeonholed people, to my later regret, based on what I knew about their chart. It felt easier to see people through this narrow lens, so that I didn't need to meet them as the complex beings they actually were. Sidestepping that, I also managed to avoid meeting my own inward complexity. These fierce knots that I just could not untie.
We all have our defenses, don't we?