Not a Believer, But . . .

For most of my life, I've thought of astrology as an overly complicated system of mumbo-jumbo for people who had so little confidence in themselves that they wanted some mysterious cosmic force to dictate everything from their everyday decisions to their ultimate destinies. But because people asked about my zodiac sign from time to time, I looked it up and learned that my mid-July birthday puts me squarely in the Cancer sign.

Still, I had no interest in astrology beyond that. It all seemed ridiculously illogical. Celestial objects with no intelligence, memory, or feeling could randomly line up to determine whether Person A should meet a friend for lunch on a given day or when Person B should invest in the stock market? Seriously?

Along those same lines, astrology struck me as both deterministic and overly simplistic. In theory, people who are born under the same sign (a thirty-ish-day span) will have the same traits. Reader's Digest estimates that approximately 20.8 million people have a birthday on any given date. If we do the math, that means about 624 million people will supposedly have the same qualities regardless of factors such as culture, upbringing, and life experience. All determined by the accident of being born within a certain window? It just didn't make sense to me.

Ironically, since young adulthood, I've had a strong interest in personality tests of all types. From the Color Code to the MBTI assessment to enneagram types, I've found that most serious personality tests describe me surprisingly well. Sometimes reading my results feels like looking in a mirror and seeing all sorts of traits or quirks I'd known about subconsciously but never put into words. Yet it never occurred to me that astrology is, essentially, another type of personality test.

Well, not until I looked up what a Cancer is supposedly like.

This Cosmopolitan article has this to say about Cancers:

Cancers bring enormous compassion and care to people when they're at their lowest. No other sign has their emotional intelligence or genuine understanding of human nature. This is a Sun sign you want in your corner! Cancers love the ocean and the Moon (their ruling planet), being cozy and snug at home, and being in love.

That hit me like a blow to the sternum.

The first sentence had a particularly strong impact because it describes exactly what I do. When someone I care about is hurting or in trouble, my first instinct is to try to make them feel better, solve the problem, or otherwise “fix” the situation. One of the most important lessons I ever learned from a mentor was to ask, “Do you want advice, or do you just need to vent?” That counsel has helped me through the lifelong process of realizing that no matter how much I want to help, I can't fix everything—nor do I have to.

After that, it gets a bit complicated.

The claim of Cancers having high emotional intelligence doesn't quite ring true for me. I have a terrible time reading certain social cues. For example, during my brief career as a teacher, I didn't realize until colleagues told me about it that I had the epicenter of the sixth-grade girl drama in my homeroom. I suspect because I generally approach life with utter sincerity, I have a hard time imagining that, and therefore recognizing when, someone might do otherwise.

On the other hand, I concur with Cosmopolitan's assessment of my human-nature understanding. Some of it, unfortunately, I had to develop to survive growing up in an emotionally abusive home. Since then, this skill has had more-positive opportunities for growth in tandem with my career as a writer and editor. I have to understand the motives and behaviors of the people (fictional or real) in a piece so I can portray them in a true-to-life manner. At the same time, I have to tease out the motives and existing opinions of potential readers to make sure the piece's message has its intended effect. Whether I'm producing my own content or editing someone else's, familiarity with human nature makes all the difference to the success of my work.

As for the things I love . . . well, this little article nailed several of them. Something about moving natural bodies of water has a deeply calming effect on me. Ocean waves fit the bill perfectly, especially because I've spent most of my life in landlocked areas and the sea retains much of its novelty for me. Similarly, the moon has fascinated and soothed me on many a night, particularly when it appears larger or differently colored than usual. And as much as I like to see that moon from under different skies, I have strong homebody tendencies, especially when I can curl up under one of my crochet projects—finished or not!—on a chilly night. Having never been in love before, though, I can't (yet) give an informed opinion on it.

What I find most interesting about this exercise is that I've developed all these qualities, likes, and abilities over the course of my life without knowing anything about my sign beyond its name. I'm still no believer in astrology. But I may now be less of a skeptic.