Astrology, take the wheel
I’m normally a huge fan of therapy, just not right now. There’s something about this pandemic that’s making me not want to talk about my feelings, even though I’m having a lot of “big feelings,” as my kid’s preschool calls them.
The last time I had a therapist was right after my son was born, three years ago. I had a history of clinical depression and was at high risk for postpartum depression. My doctor had me go straight from the OB floor to the mental health unit of the hospital to start talking to someone right away. I had big feelings then, too. I had just metamorphosed for the first time in my life. In a shockingly violent and disturbing act, I had very suddenly become a mother. Our family of two became a family of three. We had somehow managed to create something out of nothing. And then there were the hormones — the constant sweating and weeping and bleeding that comes from this transformation. It was a lot.
But after only a few sessions, with my baby sometimes sleeping strapped to my chest in a carrier, I ghosted my therapist. Getting myself and the baby loaded up in the car and driving to the doctor’s office once a week to cry and talk about how hard life was for two hours while my breasts filled up and ached with milk, was too hard. I was fine. Life as a new mother was supposed to be hard and I understood that. But I wasn’t depressed. I felt strong and capable and elated 90% of the time — despite the crying and the bleeding, the torture of sleep deprivation and the near constant pain. I was under control.
I was also under control for the first several months of the pandemic. I run a local public media newsroom in Alaska. My job is essential. At the beginning of the pandemic I reveled in meaningful work. I was checking in on my reporters. I was providing important community information on a daily basis. The web traffic to our news stories was higher than it had ever been. Restaurant owners in town were donating food to my staff. I was working long hours, the days were passing like water and I thought I could keep doing what I was doing forever.
Then, in August, my partner went away for 10 days, and while he was gone, my kid’s preschool closed after a teacher tested positive for COVID-19. I was on deadline that day and I was stuck with him. So, I placed him in front of the computer to see how many hours of PBS Kids he could really watch if I didn’t stop him. It turned out to be four hours, which was a good run and just enough for me to get through two Zoom interviews for a story I was trying to get done before afternoon newscasts. His attention span ended abruptly right as the state health department’s press person sent me the most berating email of my professional career, telling me that I was bad at my job, that left me sobbing into my laptop.
I filed my story and took the afternoon off. I asked my son if he wanted crepes for dinner, even though I already knew the answer. We went to the one outdoor venue in Juneau that was open for the summer and ate strawberry crepes with three kinds of cream at 4:30 in the afternoon. I drank three high-proof IPAs and we walked home holding hands into a sun that wasn’t even thinking about setting yet. We went to bed at 8:00 p.m.
I didn’t want to get out of bed the next morning, and so I didn’t. My son crawled in bed with me when he woke up and played video games on my old phone. I know a game we can play, I said. Let’s see if we can stay in bed all day today. Do you think you can stay in bed until it’s time to go to sleep again?
He couldn’t. We made pancakes and went to a playground around noon. Then it was naptime for both of us. Then we both got in the bath until dinner. I barely managed to make my favorite childhood dish, “weenies con juevos,” which is just sliced hot dog in scrambled eggs. Don’t judge — it’s my culture and my comfort food.
When my partner returned from his trip, I felt like I was looking up at him from the bottom of a deep, dark well. I told him I was checking myself into a local hotel for a few nights, which is my way of saying I was this close to admitting myself to the hospital. I didn’t have a therapist anymore and didn’t know how I was going to find one on short notice when it seemed like everyone in the country was seeking mental health treatment. So, I dug up an email I’d gotten from work about my insurance covering TalkSpace for free until the end of the year and I signed up.
TalkSpace is an online therapy platform. It’s very simple. You fill out some screening questions, they match you with a professional and you just start chatting — text or video — on your phone or your computer. “Message me as often and as much as you want,” my therapist wrote.
But whenever I was prompted to share what was on my mind, I just wanted to write: “I am being crushed by a pandemic, my work, my toddler. And, oh, also the patriarchy.”
I didn’t want to tell someone how I was feeling. I wanted someone to explain to me why I was feeling the way I was. I just wanted to shortcut the whole therapy part of therapy.
Around the same time, an old neighbor of mine from like 20 years ago started doing these beautiful horoscope posts on Facebook around the full and new moons.
When I was in college, Maria was my super cool poet neighbor. The rumor was that she had a pentagram in her yard, but you couldn’t see it through the slats in the fence because of the thick raspberry bushes that were growing. My roommates and I used to pick those raspberries late at night. We were a little bit scared of Maria at first, but eventually someone broke the ice with her and we learned that she was a lovely person — intelligent, intuitive, generous. We became friends. She became a kind of mentor to me. She was easy to talk to about personal problems or problems bigger than that. She also made a little bit of money doing natal star charts. I still have a 90-minute conversation with her on cassette tape, where she walked me through the position of all the planets at the moment of my birth and their influence on me.
We stayed in touch through email and then Facebook. Now, these horoscopes are the kinds of posts that show just a few lines of text and then you click “more” and a column appears at the center of your screen that’s as long as an article in the Sunday paper. They’re beefy and detailed and relevant! Where TalkSpace gives me a blank slate and asks me to share my feelings, Maria’s moon horoscopes tell me exactly what’s going on in the world in a way that totally explains my feelings. I read them over and over. I take notes. I keep track of the phases of the moon because I can’t wait for the next one to come out.
Because what I want right now is to know that something is in control.
It’s been so cloudy in Juneau all year, we almost never see the moon. I can’t even tell you how unnerving that is in a year like 2020. When the thing you want looking out for you, a steady beacon old as time, is obscured by clouds every night, it leaves you feeling pretty hopeless. I live on the coast, though, and sometimes I take my dog on a walk and am amazed at how massive the beach suddenly is. Or sometimes the shoreline is completely gone and the water comes right up to the boardwalk. And that’s when I remember the power of the moon, how it pulls on us, how it has so much invisible influence on us.
So when Maria’s new moon horoscope says something like “At this new Scorpio moon the stage is set for us to experience the power of emerging from darkness and instinct up through predation to perspective and finally a surrender to the fire of deep transformation,” I shut up and listen.
When I tell my chat-therapist that I don’t want to get out of bed ever again what I really want to hear is “As the ruler of our emotional habit both private and public, the new moon calls us to a deep dive into that realm, to experience feelings and situations we may have feared or avoided, to feel their power and to let ourselves be tempered in the fire of renewal.” Right?
Here’s the Pisces-specific recommendation for how to deal with the influence of the Taurus full moon that came right before Election Night:
“The future may seem to be closing in on you with an overwhelming paradox of fate and uncertainty. Don’t give up on your dreams. Relatives or friends may appear suddenly to help or talk things out. Emotional insights can come just as suddenly to you in a way that reverses the seeming inevitability that you fear.”
And so when Maria wondered on Facebook if anyone would subscribe to these moon updates twice a month and pay for them, I immediately signed up. And I ghosted my online therapist. Because it turns out I don’t need a space to talk. More than at any other time in my life, I need a space to listen.
I’m not trying to knock therapy because I’m a strong supporter of — and believer in — mental health professionals. Therapy saved my life. But right now I want something bigger than myself to believe in. I’m not comforted by believing in myself. I don’t want self-discovery. I want to tap into something as powerful as gravity. As reliable as a hunk of rock that follows me in the sky. As expansive as the tides. I want the arbitrariness of the positions of the stars at the exact moment of my birth to matter. I want the dots connected for me. I want all of this nonsense to make sense.
And that’s why, at least for now, I’m choosing astrology over therapy.
You can sign up for Maria’s moon horoscopes via email here.
November 2020
