JUNE
For many, the Spring is a time of rebirth—the thawing of rigid Winter pain and the ushering in of a potent hope of what’s ahead. But you are not many, Virgo. In fact, Springtime has traditionally been a time of complete emotional devastation for you personally. However, as this Spring comes to a close, you can’t help feeling that this year wasn’t as violently dispiriting as is typical.
As you initially examine the data of your paltry few memories and flimsy self evaluations, you’re in disbelief that you could escape the Spring in one piece. The thing is, on paper, this year seems like it should have been more spiritually ruinous than other years—not less. You’ve recently changed jobs, and while there are plenty of positives, you’re making significantly less money than you used to and no longer work from home1.
Less money and less time seem a ripe combination for tectonic emotional upheaval, but at first you appear to handle this transition with relative calm.
It’s almost as if you have become too busy to wallow in self pity, which, in many ways, doesn’t square with your worldview. As each day passes without a violent emotional fit in response to, like, seeing a bird’s nest or something, you wonder if schools of thought you’ve dismissed in the past for being myopic or unfeeling were actually right about emotions. Is busyness as insulation from pain revelatory instead of foolish? Could these decades of Springtime sadness have been avoided if you kept the company of a no nonsense cowboy telling you to buck up and shut up?
Unfortunately, emotional states are not as simple as your imaginary cowboy wishes they were. Sure, your season is without the typical signifiers of inner despair, but that’s just because the cracks are forming elsewhere. In other words, your busyness is a girdle of your sadness—something you’re used to seeing has been managed, but that doesn’t mean the baggage is gone.
That somewhere, you soon realize, is your sleep. One morning, a plate resting on your kitchen counter serves as a reminder to you that the night previously you’d sleepwalked into the kitchen to find the right serving dish for a cake you were serving guests in a dream. Your husband was awake for this episode, and provided the disturbing details. You jumped out of bed, paced around muttering to yourself by your desk, then ran off with spine-chilling purpose to the kitchen, where you stomped around some more (while you were deciding, to yourself, which plate the non-existent cake needed for the non-existent event you were hosting).
Historically, most of your bizarre sleep behavior is related to hosting and food. During childhood, your parents witnessed you cooing Strawberry milkshake, strawwwwwwberry miiiiiiiilkshake in your sleep. You’ve been witnessed on many other occasions doing various other domestic duties with the energy of a put upon cook in a period drama (looking at you, Mrs. Patmore) while asleep. You also have the deeply disturbing habit of laughing in your sleep, which happens with terrifying frequency.
Mornings after sleepwalking are often filled with the same combination of salacious curiosity and unsettling incredulity that followed nights when you drank too much to fully remember. What do you mean I rearranged the whole dining room when I was asleep? What do you mean I demanded everyone listen while I solemnly sang Travelin’ Soldier at my family’s Easter celebration?
Zeitgeist wisdom of the mysteries of sleepwalking suggest that it’s best not to wake a sleepwalker, which is why your more active sleepwalking episodes have gone uninterrupted. It could also be why no one stopped you from performing a five minute and forty three second song during a family get together (despite you not possessing a scrap of musical ability).
The plate sits on the counter as a bitter reality check that even though you appear to be surviving Spring, in reality, you’re coming apart at the seams.
Thankfully, sleepwalking won’t remain the sole example of your inner collapse. Shortly afterwards, you'll receive a displeasing message, which you’ll react to by calmly walking into your bathroom and shaving both of your arms in their entirety. Hair removal tends to also be a tell of your flailing emotions, but typically this takes the form in trichotillomania, which for you means compulsively pulling out your own eyebrows (particularly your right eyebrow—it’s irresistible!).
Despite the evidence of yourself becoming a human Jenga, with few remaining pieces inhibiting your collapse, you pretend none of this means anything bad. Sleepwalking might be healthy, even! Parties aren’t fun unless a dead-eyed woman fumbles through a country music performance that includes numerous hummed instrumentals?
As Spring’s end, the weather is heating up unbearably, so you and your husband will go into your apartment building’s scary basement to retrieve your AC unit from its Winter storage. When you realize it’s been stolen, that you’ll need to buy another one for the heat wave you’re amidst, you’ll burst into an inconsolable state of explosive emotion. What would normally be a simple setback requiring a few minutes on the internet and a few hundred bucks, you respond as if you have just been made privy to the end of the world and all you hold dear.
The piper’s gotta get paid somehow, Virgo. The problems do not disappear because you have a punishing schedule or shapewear, they just scoot somewhere else. Sure, your stomach has flattened, but now you have what appear to be four butt cheeks.
Thankfully, once you get this breakdown out of the way, you’ll never feel sad again. Just kidding! You’ll feel sad every Spring, and on many many occasions in between. I know this doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable period, but I still think you have reason to look forward, Virgo. For even though it would be preferable to avoid emotional wreckage, from what I understand, that’s one piece of the uniquely complex puzzle of being human—no matter what that imaginary cowboy mutters to you under his whiskey breath.
Thank you to the angelic google formers for reassuring me last month that no grizzly bear population matters more than my happiness! More of you have seen bears than I expected, I hadn’t known this project would attract such adventurous spirits. If you’d like to say hi hyper-specifically, the google form for this month is here. If you’d prefer to bear witness, my instagram is here. Thank you for reading!
bed
ate as usual