Cancer Season

It’s my birthday tomorrow, and my birthday always makes me melancholic. Does your birthday bum you out too? I guess mine does because I’m a Cancer, and we’re highly sensitive creatures. We develop hard shells in an attempt to defend ourselves, but our insides are ultra-soft. I’m not the most astrologically attuned, but I like the sense that our inner emotional patterns are connected to the push and pull of the planets. It gives us a way of feeling intimately connected to the cosmos.

I do find it fascinating that a ton of my most politically active friends are all Cancers. I think we all share a deep personal anger at injustice and unfairness, which makes us dogged organizers, even if the pain of confronting the world’s sins really gets to us. The funny thing about being this type of person is you get used to telling people about the injustices of the world and getting very little in response. You can spend years telling people about the cruelties of the police and our carceral system, spelling out the horrific realities of our immigration policies, or telling the truth about what Israel does to Palestinians, and get nowhere. Then, suddenly, there will be bursts where it feels like people are finally ready to absorb the truth, and you get excited to share it with them. People will inevitably settle back into their routines and decide the stuff you’re still so sickened by is too annoying to deal with while there are bills to pay. So we Cancers go back to trudging through the injustices and being upset with them in private. I could just be making all this up based on vibes from astrology meme pages, but it’s a commonality I feel with my fellow Cancers.

In the Chinese zodiac, we’re in the Year of the Fire Horse. I don’t know much about the Chinese zodiac, but I am impressed that the last Fire Horse Year was 1966, arguably the time when the Civil Rights Movement was really kicking into full steam and anti-war organizing was starting to bubble up. It’s hard not to feel like we’re in a similar pattern at the moment, like the injustices that were acceptable background noise for decades are suddenly too loud for people to drown out. It’s easy to take a cynical angle and say, “Well, the New Left didn’t accomplish enough, they didn’t win full equality and sovereignty for Black people, and they didn’t end the Vietnam War fast enough. Most of them grew up to be Reaganites.” But it doesn’t change the fact that there was a window where American society was pretty radically challenged and reshaped, where serious material gains for equality were reached, however imperfect. It doesn’t seem like a delusion to imagine we’re in a similar moment now.

Of course, the thing you can’t understand about living through a moment of great historical upheaval until you’re in it is how much it fucking sucks. You can read about righteous organizing pushes in the South, brave people facing down cops’ water hoses and racist scumbags’ shotguns, but it’s hard to wrap your head around how scary and shitty it is to actually do those things. We’re also living through a moment where the ability to act on a deep moral outrage has never felt more stymied.

Substack writer Anamaria put it perfectly in an essay titled “We’re Fighting the Wrong Dystopia”:

“The mechanisms that used to convert individual moral conviction into collective moral fact — the church, the union, the party, the shared narrative, the institution you could trust without performing irony — have all been either discredited or captured.

What replaced them? The market and the algorithm, which are the same entity, and which have exactly one value: continuation. The algorithm doesn’t want you to feel good or bad. It wants you to feel, because feeling generates engagement, and engagement is the only metric the system recognizes.”

I’ve been really feeling how deadening and useless Posting feels. Engaging with takes on any social platform seems utterly pointless. Everyone is reheating discourse from 2016, 2020, or 2023, and contributing nothing novel. The Graham Platner scandal is playing out exactly how anyone with a modicum of sense could have predicted it would play out, with all the players either rending their garments or doubling down just as you’d expect them to- it’s exhausting. Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) wrote a phenomenal essay back in May that opens with the line: “One of the most upsetting realities of everyday life is that we are psychically incapable of comprehending the state of the world we live in.” She uses psychoanalysis to explore how the lived experience of our moment is an inability to admit that the collapse is really happening and has already happened in many ways, and to then let ourselves feel the despair we need to feel to reckon with the weight of watching the world we used to know be ripped away completely. So much of online discourse is dancing around this reality, because we are all atomized and powerless to convert these feelings into material action.

I think for most of our existence as a species our desire to study the stars has been the most universal thing about us, regardless of what part of the planet we found ourselves on. After all, what else was there to do when it got dark other than try to understand the patterns in the stars, or sit around fires and try to understand the patterns in our hearts. I feel like there’s a reason people increasingly find themselves reaching for the zodiac for answers; the way our ancestors tried to understand themselves within the universe is a comfort when we otherwise feel so dislocated and crazy. It’s only very recently that we’ve blotted out the stars with light pollution, and I think that inability to orient ourselves with the celestial bodies makes us all a little insane. There’s a reason it feels like only Elon Musk gets the privilege of thinking about space these days: He mostly just wants to colonize it.

I’m grasping at astrology and psychoanalysis, subjects I frankly have no business writing about, because the realm of pure politics feels barren and inadequate right now. The thing I hate about being a Cancer is that my birthday always overlaps with the Fourth of July, and this year was an especially depressing affair. How can you look at the America 250 Fair and not feel a sense of spiritual anguish? Even if you have no emotional attachment to this country, the fact that a global hegemon couldn’t get it together enough to even pretend to be excited about its mythical founding is bizarre. As funny as the images of the empty fairgrounds and the disgusting reflecting pool are, they’re simultaneous reminders that the breakdown is already in motion due to the choices of our wicked and selfish rulers.

I think the comfort in astrology is the knowledge that no matter what happens, the Earth will keep turning and the seasons will keep changing. Everything eventually decays and withers away, but it’s always giving birth to something new as well. This stasis that we’re in, this wretched transition period where everything feels so uncertain, will have to shift into a new season one way or another. History and the trajectory of the planets may follow certain patterns to guide us a sense of our choices in a given moment, but we still ultimately have the will to decide our destinies.

I just finished reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is a modern re-interpretation of the Garden of Eden story and the story of Cain and Abel. Not to spoil a book that’s been out for decades, but it spends a very long chapter trying to track down the truest interpretation of God’s commandment after Cain has murdered Abel. One of the book’s central characters, Lee, is fixated on understanding the true interpretation of the Hebrew word “timshel”: “Thou mayest rule over sin.” This interpretation of the word means that man has a choice over whether or not to sin, that we are not strictly defined by predestination, or even our past sins, but that we always have the agency to choose a better path. May this season of heightened awareness of the injustices we’ve allowed to fester around us bring us closer to timshel.

Stray Thoughts:

My friend Ashley Brim writes a delightful astrology themed newsletter: This Movie is a Cancer, check it out!