A lot of life feels destined, and a lot of it feels like false destiny.
All of my planets related to love and commitment, marriage et cetera are retrograde in my chart. Somehow, I didn’t know this until this year. It wasn’t pointed out emphatically in blinking lights when I was born. There was no post-natal astrologer in the ’80s going room to room, foreshadowing to new mothers about their children’s future love lives. Would have been a heck of a business then, if not now.
But I feel, at the age of 41, that I have met my destiny a couple of times, and it was, in fact, false.
A false positive. A positive false.
As a little girl, I wanted to keep up with the boys more than I wanted to be in love with one. I was a late bloomer in every sense. My hair didn’t even turn red and curly until I was well into my teens. One day I looked in the mirror and realized I was a ginger. The freckles I’d been promised would fade had instead intensified. I was turning into someone else than that I was promised.
I don’t know why I was so surprised. I come from a long line of Sicilian redheads. But as a child I was tanned and blonde, with thin hair. Then one day I woke up and became someone else entirely. I wasn’t prepared.
Perhaps that was my first experience with false destiny.
My childhood was in sunny California. Had I stayed there, would I have remained tanned and blonde instead of turning into the ginger vampire I am today? We’ll never know. People look at childhood photos of me and don’t believe it’s me. I barely believe it’s me, but it is in fact me.
I am very good at patterns and connecting the dots. No, I don’t have autism or ADHD or anything like that, as much as people want to impose that on me. I’ve been tested, and the results are always not even close to putting me on the spectrum. Just another club I can’t join.
But when you’re so good at connecting the dots, how do you know if you’ve found a constellation or if you’ve just drawn one yourself?
You don’t, really.
Destiny is something that stays. A direction that takes you on a singular course. There should be a word for false destiny for the people and places and moments that arrive with all the architecture of fate, only to eventually reveal themselves as coincidence.
A fate that expires.
Counterfeit fate.
Everything in life isn’t a lesson. It’s an experience. Sometimes we learn things from experiences, but mostly experiences shape us, our direction and our course.
Maybe that’s what makes false destiny so convincing. It changes the course, too.
But if something changes the course of your fate permanently, but doesn’t stay, is it really false destiny?
Yes. Because impact isn’t destiny.
A car accident can change the course of your life. So can getting on the wrong train, meeting someone at a party, losing a dog, getting sick, moving to another country. We don’t call everything that alters us fate simply because we are different afterward.
Maybe counterfeit fate is something more specific: the thing that doesn’t just change your life, but convinces you, for a while, that you know where your life is going.
And then it doesn’t go there. That’s when we feel as though we’ve been duped, left out in the cold of our own path, holding a map that was apparently wrong despite every landmark telling us otherwise. Maybe the hardest part of false destiny isn’t losing the person, the place, or the future we thought was waiting for us. It’s having to accept that something can look exactly like fate and still not be it. There may be no lesson tucked neatly inside, no cosmic explanation waiting to make the whole thing worthwhile. It happened. It changed us. It mattered. And then it ended. We have to keep walking without knowing whether the constellation was ever really there or whether we drew it ourselves.
Maybe eventually another collection of stars appears overhead and, against all better judgment, we connect the dots again. Because what else are we supposed to do, but keep looking up?
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