As I've learned more about astrology, one of the biggest surprises has been how much less seriously I've come to take it. I don’t worry that everything is going to fall apart every Mercury retrograde like I used to. I hardly pay attention to Mercury Rx, other than treating it as a reminder to slow down and accept that sometimes things won't pan out the way you hoped. In the worst-case scenario, your dry cleaners will donate the things you left for six weeks too long. I refuse to let the transits stress me out the way they did in the past (don’t even get me started on eclipses), and I don’t fall for the videos that say this is the best year ever for Pisces, because everything depends on our individual birth charts and we will always have free will.
I’ve loved astrology since the days I had a subscription to Seventeen magazine. I later graduated to reading Susan Miller’s monthly forecasts, then Chani Nicholas, until I got my first natal chart reading around 2015. I quickly learned that there was a vast world to astrology outside of sun sign astrology (seriously, it’s the least interesting part of our charts). By 2019, I decided I wanted to learn the ancient texts (coincidentally aligning with Saturn transiting my 9th house of beliefs). I wanted to be able to read my own chart and know what the hell all these retrogrades, eclipses, and cazimis were really about. So, I took an astrology class, and, more importantly, I studied all the books we were assigned and then continued to build a little astrology library of my own.
Now that I’m seven-ish years into this, I don’t let astrology dictate everything about my life. I generally have an idea of what’s happening with the planets on any given day, but that's in the background. I don’t use it to predict anything because one of my biggest takeaways is that we don’t always know how a transit manifests until we live it. I’m still in the driver's seat of my own life.