Gender Jumper

I really love this article on Salty about the difference between disliking and hating (specifically astrology).* It's a pretty concise rundown of all the meaningful ways people can engage astrology, with or without woo, and resonates with my experiences.

I've never formally studied astrology, just thumbed through an increasingly-dated copy of Sexual Astrology I picked up in high school and engaged topics at varying levels with friends and lovers.

In my early 30s, I sat down and made a spreadsheet (I'm not sure I've posted much, but I love spreadsheets and find all sorts of innovative ways to process information in them). I listed over a hundred lovers, close friends, and family members from across my lifespan, and between my memory and Facebook, inserted their birthdays to estimate their sun signs. Then I just... studied it. I didn't think hard about the archetypes from the funny papers, I grouped people together based on the Zodiac breakdown and just meditated on their commonalities, their ineffable similarities. And it made a LOT of sense to me. 

To some extent, I updated the traditional archetypes with some of my own (for instance, I sometimes link Virgos to a prince/ss vibe), but for the most part I just let the patterns speak for themselves, and they've held up well.

I really don't know much about signs other than sun, but what traits I do associate with each sign I consider kind of a foundation, a launchpoint for personal growth (for better or worse). For instance, as a Pisces myself, I associate pretty strongly with sensitivity, creativity, and open-mindedness, but since I have structured my life around these traits (e.g., I don't take myself too seriously, I create without expectation, and I almost never experience indecisiveness any more) I sometimes call myself an "ascended Pisces".

I'm always eager to talk about these sort of metaphysical explorations from a lived experience or empirical perspective.

*The only downside of the article is a pretty glaring editing error I attribute to the magazine/site. I published an essay through them two years ago that had similar problems, because whoever is behind it seems to have very little patience for communicating with writers. I also welcome similarly minded places to submit my next essay, though I'm currently working on one I think will fit Salty well.