Thanks to everyone who came to June’s live Yesterday’s Horoscope show! The next show is on September 11th (I know) at 930 at Caveat, AND will be available via livestream.
JUNE
As predicted by every person who has ever been over 30, your thirties have so far been a vast improvement to your twenties, Virgo. You finally have a coat for every type of climate! Not only do you have them Virgo, but you even wear them. You check the weather prior to leaving home and choose a coat that—dare I say—often appropriately aligns with reality.
The lore of this decade has turned out to be mostly true. Increased emotional stability! Gradual healing of old wounds! More patience with yourself and others! Less people pleasing (but not no people pleasing—you’ll have to wait for your eighties for that)! However, there is one aspect to the way people speak about this beautiful decade that has always inspired an eye roll from you: the fabled easily injured body.
You’ve always thought that the frequency of “uh oh, my back!” stories among people in their thirties was another boring story/take/personality available in the public domain. Like how everyone all of a sudden agreed that hearing about other people’s dreams is boring. You don’t think hearing about dreams is boring—but you do think hearing people repeating that extraordinarily popular opinion as if it’s a scintillating original take is.
Hearing people be like “haha im hurt bc im 30 and I didn’t used to be 30 lol” has long been the quickest pathway for you to victim blame. In your wee toxic mind, a 30 year old who is laugh-complaining about an injury whose origin can only be explained with a “lol i am 30” must have invited the injury unto themselves due to a cornucopia of failures you assume they possess.
At last, this month, empathy for people in their thirties with a back injury will reach you via its fastest route: injuring you (a person in your thirties) with a back injury. Others can use the powerful gift of imagination to conjure empathy for others whenever they wish, but in this particular case that doesn’t seem abundantly available to you.
You might be still thinking, Big deal, a hurt back, that can happen to anyone at any age and doesn’t necessarily place me among those who think “lol my body is eroding bc lol i am 30” is the best possible personality for them. Unfortunately, Virgo, the empathy you gain for your 30’s brethren has less to do with your injured back and more to do with the way you injure your back.
Horrified to see the toll your thrown back has taken on your demeanor, movements, and already troubling posture, friends, colleagues, and passersby will fall to their knees screaming What happened to you!!! You will have no choice but to meet the eyes of these concerned people and say: I sneezed.
Because that’s what happened, Virgo. It’s hard to wrap your head around, and I admit it’s even hard for me—an all-knowing cosmic force—to wrap my head around. People will wait patiently after your two word explanation, assuming you’ve simply taken a short pause before explaining what happened after the sneeze. The sneeze reeks of an inciting incident—not a climax—but alas, Virgo, the sneeze is the whole story.
Your recovery from the sneeze will require a few days off from work, acupuncture, massage, and the particular daily exhaustion that comes from ignoring the advice many nice people give you when they recommend you strengthen your core. To one such individual you’ll say, I don’t have the fortitude to start another project from 0 right now.
The zero, I suppose, being your body? Your core strength?
This period of recovery offers you swaths of unexpected free time to sit and consider what this back injury could mean. And boy do you really want it to mean something, Virgo. You want your back injury to not be because of the body, but because of the mind. You want your back injury to be some light cosmic test that you solve by screaming into the night sky, You were right, I was too busy and not stopping to smell the roses!
Look, the back injury definitely only happened because you don’t take care of your body. No cosmic force has time to set these sort of life lesson spawning challenges into motion and see them through. This is just you suffering from a combination of a lack of core strength and powerful, powerful sneezes. In all your hours wondering what this injury “means,” not once did you stop and think it’s because your sneezes have the same horsepower as a Kia Sportage?
Perhaps the best way for you to internalize the lesson from your back injury is to remember one of your most hard learned lessons from your twenties. A bad boyfriend will usually continue to be a bad boyfriend even if you strongly believe you alone possess the taming talents he requires. This took many years of dedicated field work for you to internalize, but eventually it sunk in. No amount of wishful thinking or ignoring reality will make the back injury go away, so please just lay on the ground for literally 3 minutes a day and do some crunches. Your thirties is all about being the good boyfriend to your ailing body, Virgo, Because yes, as much as it infuriates you to admit, the “lol 30 = pain” people weren’t totally wrong about everything.
could not be more timely as I am literally laid up with a back injury right now but in my defense I am in my FORTIES and thus a back injury is allowed to be attributed to "old gray mare she ain't what she used to be" and not a failure of creativity, I think