Since I can remember, I have had an eagle eye for micro rejections, especially regarding body-language. As an adolescent, I was always the most prepared for detecting others’ discomfort. I’d learn to assign the discomfort as being my fault.
A modest sigh? Sorry, my presence is intolerable.
Eyebrows lifting to indicate subtle surprise? This person thinks I’m a moron.
Slight eye-roll? This person fucking hates me.
I grew up with my fair share of trauma which probably contributed to these anxieties. An alcoholic dad who wouldn’t think twice about throwing a chair out the window or breaking my door down if I slighted him, a man who would scream and harangue me for hours into the night because I didn’t smile when he was in the mood to joke. Throw in a depressive mother too engrossed in her own despair to fight for my safety, and two brothers who were barely present, and I had the American dream of dysfunctional families.
The unpredictable upheavals present in my family provided me with a huge capacity for intensity and for having “strong reactions.” I grew up quickly. I thought nothing of getting high on Dramamine and Xanax bars before my serving shift as a waitress, my sixteen year-old pupils as thin as needles. I’d drive my ’94 Dodge mini van while tripping on mushrooms at night, shoplifted for fun, had sex with whoever wanted it, all while remaining on the honor society. I took 4 tabs of LSD the day before my graduation and was still tripping as I received the dipoma in my hands. I was looking for answers in exploring these things.
My uneven emotions took over so much of what I did in life. The “big” feelings I’d feel towards something “benign” would make my peers feel uncomfortable. I had always been good at that. Good at being un-chill, and good at being what an acquaintance of mine Noah called “cringe.” The drugs could only mask so much, and provide so many answers.
When I was eighteen, astrology became the “answer,” but eventually exacerbated my neurotic ruminations: the combination of looking for predictable human behavior, peering into peoples’ motivations so I could avoid rejection or hurt, and craving intense experiences. The all-consuming, intrusive worry that pervaded every social interaction when my “Aquarius moon” didn’t favorably aspect the moon of the person I was talking to - was, in retrospect, a sign that this was doing me more harm than good. I was examining the world with a damaged lens. There were cracks in my windshield. Astrology made me mentally ill. Or more mentally ill than I already was.
*
My first exposure: receiving a Scholastic Children’s Farmer’s Almanac for my tenth birthday in 2004. The back of the book had a simple chart showing the twelve signs with the corresponding birth dates. My Birthday: June 25th - Cancer. This made ten-year-old me nervous. Why was my sign the name of a disease? I checked my older brother’s birthday: February 9th - Aquarius. Why does he have the cool dude holding the water jug?
Years pass. I am not yet in the mental prison of Astrology. However, during my senior year of high school, when I living in a little rural town in northeast Pennsylvania, the seed is ultimately planted.
I was in a study hall, and a classmate of mine, Joe, who would grow up to become a cocaine-sniffing butcher at the local grocery store, told me to type in my birthdate into a Google search, followed by the words “TLC” and “birthday.” I followed his directions.
A short synopsis of “me” came up:
Cancers born on June 25 are unusually sensitive and apt to find themselves at odds with their true nature and the bold persons they hope to be. They are dreamy and inexact, giving others the impression that they are not focused. Actually, they are more centered than they appear. They are charming people who are often physically attractive.
Because of their sensitive nature, June 25 people have a lifelong tendency to be drawn into quarrelsome family differences. These are people who never truly leave home, at least not in the emotional sense. They are intensely loving to their own children but may suffer "growing pains" as their kids try to make their own places in the world.
Many June 25 natives suffer from uncertain health, although this most likely has to do with their mental attitude. If they can manage a more upbeat and optimistic state of mind, they are more likely to enjoy increased physical well-being.
I was more centered than I appeared! I was unusually sensitive! I was drawn to quarrelsome family differences! While the synopsis spoke to me, I’d realize in retrospect that the synopsis was total bullshit. For some reason, I bought into the bullshit. Hell, I needed some bullshit to believe in. I think we all need some bullshit to believe in, sometimes.
*
Then it was Yahoo Horoscopes. After school, I would park my van in an abandoned cul-de-sac dirt road, smoke a bowl, turn on the ‘personal hotspot’ on my Palm Pixi phone, and use my Macbook to surf Yahoo Horoscopes, obsessing over the compatibility I had with my ex-boyfriend Zach, spending hours reading and re-reading the analyses of our relationship. I also obsessed over the compatibility he had with his ex-girlfriend. He was a Sagittarius, so the readings weren’t too favorable. They were for his ex though, who was a Leo. We broke up within a month of dating.
During one of these private van internet dives, I discovered Cafeastrology.com and really fell the rabbit hole. I was heavily stoned and primed to be persuaded. The most mundane can seem miraculous when you’re high.
Specific information was needed. Not only did the site request a birthdate, but it needed birth location and time. I entered my information and my full natal chart populated with its subsequent reading.
Immediate elation. There were so many reasons for why I was such a flawed human being. With the variety of planets, sign placements, aspects between planet placements, houses and specific degrees, an entire world of human behavior was waiting to picked apart. I felt like I discovered an equation that could solve every math problem. I wanted something to confirm the direction I was going in. No longer did I have to suffer from the weighted question of “Who Am I?” I now knew who I was. I had chosen to be born, I had chosen my birthday, I had chosen this life-path. No coincidences. Astrology was older than the Bible. This was ancient wisdom.
*
In 2012, my freshman year of college, “This person fucking hates me,” transcended into “Jacky’s Virgo mars feels threatened by my Aquarius moon.” I was living in lower Manhattan, residing in a 300 sq foot dorm room, accompanied by two other roommates. I had cut off all my hair, pierced my septum, and preached about the validity of astrology to anyone who would listen. I got one my roommate, Ainslie, hooked on trying to find answers on this guy she was interested in dating.
We sat crossed legged on my bed, passing a bowl to each other, blowing the marijuana smoke into a toilet paper roll stuffed with Downy dryer sheets. This was to ensure our RA wouldn’t smell our little crime. My computer was nestled in my lap, it’s usual place, and I had The Doors’ LA Woman playing on youtube, with Café Astrology open in a different tab.
“I can’t believe you and Gianni have the same birthday,” I said, chewing the inside of my cheek. “Literally, the synastry between your charts are filled with conjunctions, aside from your house placements.”
Synastry was a fancy word for “relationship analysis between two charts” and conjunction meant two planets were in the same sign, which meant there was an intensity of the “energies” between them.
“I know,” she said, taking a hit. “We’re literally, like, the same.”
She coughed, and I sprayed febreeze into the haze between us.
“Was he weirded out when you asked him for the birth time?” I asked.
“Suprisingly he was cool with it. He just texted his mom and she got back to him.”
*
I began asking every friend and acquaintance I had, for their birth time and date. Sometimes there’d be pushback, or people would just think it was an out-of-place personal question, but mostly people would comply.
I constantly thought about the chart of whom I was speaking to as we spoke, no matter the topic. The chart would hover behind every conversation, every turn of the head, every sustained moment of eye contact. I would try to decipher what part of their chart was influencing their actions.
Was Chris such a man-whore because of his sun-moon conjunction?
Was Jaxson so awkward because of the quincunx aspect between his sun and ascendant?
Thoughts like these would wander effortlessly through me.
I got into a habit of Facebook stalking everyone I knew and finding their charts to better understand them. I would look up the birthdays of couples dating and analyze their relationships. The worst was when I would read someone’s chart, and their chart would relate unfavorably to mine. I would see all the tense aspects, the squares and inconjunctions, and felt that the odds were against me.
No way could I be at ease around a Mars in Aries man.
I would project the ends of relationships that never even began. In fact, as time went on, I began to use Astrology as an excuse for why I said stupid shit. I would go to parties in small apartments, and get so high that I became socially paralyzed. I could never be as suave and charming as I had wished for, no matter how much weed I smoked and how much astrology I studied. I was so focused on fueling my pleasures, smoking bowls ritualistically and doing whatever prescription drugs I could get my hands on, I stopped caring about my grades, and dropped of college after only a semester. I could not admit to myself that I was lost in life because that would mean that there was an unknown unanswerable to astrology.
*
As years wore on, I drifted from menial to job menial job, feeling stuck and aimless. At twenty-one, I was living on my grandmother’s couch in Staten Island, still smoking weed when I could afford to, and still reading the charts of new people I would meet, despite the readings worsening my anxiety. I started to feel like a rat in a maze, like no matter where life took me, my mind would be trapped in this suffocating, labyrinthian way of thinking. I made friends with a goth through a mutual drug buddy who was also obsessed with astrology like me. McKenzie. Also a fellow college drop out.
McKenzie would befriend people, develop an extremely close relationship, and then eventually have a dramatic falling out with them. I had already seen four people come in and out of our her life. After one of the fall outs, she’d call me, and I’d show up to her mother’s brownstone on the upper east side, where we’d sit on the back patio, smoke cigarettes and psychoanalyze AKA shit talk people using astrological language. It was entangled into every conversation we had together.
“I can’t handle Taurus moons,” she said one winter afternoon, the two of us bundled with blankets and hats.“It’s definitely the placement of it in her 9th house that’s made her so stubborn and impenetrable.
“I still can’t believe you lived in a hearse with her.”
“Me neither,” she said, inhaling deeply on the Marlboro red I had given her. “My heart is still broken over Midnight getting lost. Of course it was during that major Pluto and Mars transit. Vivian and I should have just stayed at a hotel.”
I couldn’t believe she lost her cat. I felt angry at her for this, choosing to fly her cat across the country to San Francisco, only to have it live with her and her newly acquainted girlfriend in a hearse. The stars were not responsible for that fuck up. Was she that psychotic to believe that the planets were to blame for her losing her pet? Or was the blame just too heavy to bear?
“Oh, by the way, I’m telling people I’m a Gemini mars now, I don’t care. But that’s between me and you.”
“What?”
I was taken aback by this declaration.
“How do you consider everything else in the chart to be true then?”
“There’s just no way I’m Mars in Taurus,” she went on. “I’m not stubborn, I’m the most forgiving peson on the planet. I’m not stuffy, I’m organized chaos, which is Geminian energy.” She said every word with conviction, as if she was speaking the truth purely and completely.
First the cat shit, now this. My teeth began to grind, and my breath was growing more shallow as she rambled on. She couldn’t just pretend to have a placement she didn’t have. In the land of astrology, lying about a placement was a big no-no.
Our time together became nauseating, being around someone who shared the obsession. Sometimes I had simply wanted to vent about life, or express a thought, or share a memory, and she would find a way to bring the conversation back to astrology. First this made me anxious, then it irritated me, remembering how she would use the “logic” of astrology to justify being a shitty person. I had lost a lot of friends, as my social anxiety got so bad I stopped being around people. I was not proud to be a dropout, and I didn’t know how to connect with people anymore. I missed viewing people simply as people, not as mythological archetypes.
*
Later that spring I stumbled upon the book “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Beach,” by Henry Miller in a used a bookstore on the upper west side. I had little idea of what the book was about and I was not prepared for the impact it would have on me. In the memoir, Miller chronicles his adventures living in Big Sur, California.
I lay idly on my grandmother’s couch, reading the part where Miller is visited by the French astrologer Conrad Moricand. Moricand had written extensive astrological reports for Miller and was known for introducing Miller to the subject. Moricand’s visit turned into a permanent stay - he had once been rich but confessed to losing all his assets in France. His only income was through giving astrological readings for people in Big Sur, which Miller would help provide. Once that was exhausted, Miller would make up imaginary people for him read, and would pay him for these imaginary readings. Daily fights ensued. Frequently locked in his room, Moricand would plug the windows so that no fresh air would enter. He would blame his lack of money and poor health on planetary transits, and demanded that Miller provide him with drugs and gauloise bleues cigarettes. To quote Miller, Moricand was “a phoney bastard.”
McKenzie flashed in my mind as I turned each page.
Was I on the road to becoming someone like Moricand? Someone possessed by self-prophecy and delusion? How many people had I alienated or lost the respect of because of my obsessive beliefs? I did not want to become Moricand. I did not want this shit to rule my thoughts anymore.
That little used paperback awakened me. I stopped reading planetary transits. I stopped asking people for their birthdays. I stopped reading natal charts, synastry charts and composite charts. I stopped smoking weed and researched the nature of confirmation bias. I began to meditate, to practice mindfulness, allowing the deep ingrained thoughts of astrology to pass peacefully as time went on. I went back to college, graduated, got a job in the sciences, and eventually told McKenzie I didn’t want to talk about astrology anymore. I told her that I felt it was contributing to panic attacks I was having, and not allowing me to “be in the moment” with people, and life. She completely ignored my request; she continued to talk in astrological jargon that wouldn’t make sense to the average person. I guess I was the sixth person to have a falling out with her.
I admire the desire to get to know one’s self. I’m not completely over trying to understand myself through idiosyncratic methods. I’ve come across the 5 Factor Personality Test, a clinical exam given by psychologists to better understand their patients. Would it be surprising to know I scored in the 96th percentile for neuroticism?
When people bring up astrology to me, I pretend to have a surface-level knowledge now. It’s nearly impossible to avoid. I mean, it’s everywhere. Memes, tweets, T-shirts, jewelry, paintings, tattoos. A third of the US population believes in it. But most of them are probably not as prone to addiction, nor are they more neurotic than 96% of the population. But maybe accepting that score is another way of me locking myself in a narrative or belief system.
If there is an ancient truth to astrology, it’s not for me to know. The improvisation of life and conversation will suffice for now.
