Released Your Inhibitions
🎵Feel the rain on your skin!🎵
Attention New York based readers! At last, Yesterday’s Horoscope is returning to the stage! June 23rd at Caveat! Save the date and prepare to HEAL!
APRIL
You’re a people pleaser, Virgo. Please hear me when I say: people pleasers are not a monolith. There’s plenty of variety beneath the people pleasing umbrella. Your particular breed of people pleasing is most easily defined by its own self aggrandizement. At your core, you sincerely believe that you can please everyone. You appraise all people across all time and think I’ve got what it takes to please ya.
In your experience, people pleasing is thankless work. And in this unique case, you’re right—no one does offer any thanks for your “work,” largely due to the fact that you’re not “pleasing” anyone. You are under the impression that you are “sensitive” to the “energies” of everyone around you, which makes you eager to attend to each person’s unique needs. Unfortunately, those “energies” and “needs” are basically just wild fictions you’ve privately designated as fact and acted upon.
To this end, you make most social occasions bend to fit your anxious, imagined conclusions. Who could offer up a word of thanks after you’ve monopolized yet another dinner party because you “sensed” that people “needed” you to entertain them with another little anecdote about bread?
During a particularly busy stretch of this month, your schedule will be so overloaded with wide ranging responsibilities requiring wholly disparate parts of your brain that you will no longer have the resources your routine anxious spiraling requires. Since a daily thrashing from panicked thoughts is the core pillar of your identity, without it you at first feel alien to yourself. However, your total energetic collapse has one exciting symptom, Virgo: you no longer have the bandwidth to people please. In fact, a far cry from trying to make everyone comfortable, you actually notice yourself making people uncomfortable.
When you’re people pleasing in a larger group, you tend to babble. You go on and on, worried someone needs coaxing out of their shell, or realizing they aren’t actually in a “shell” they just do not wish to converse with you, or worrying that they’ve grown to despise you because of all your failed coaxing and talk of “shells,” or ensuring they do grow to despise you because of your over apologizing and inability to let anything lie.
Though believe me when I say you’ll never be fatigued enough to discontinue babbling itself, this month the content of your babbling goes through a remarkable change. Instead of each unsolicited monologue centering the imagined needs of another, your babbling begins to center the self. Yourself. With no possible mental space for a filter, you feel completely uninhibited. Though you haven’t touched alcohol in years, you feel a sense of social inebriation. You begin to speak to people with the meandering reflectiveness of a barfly revealing his Past.
When you’re in the wily throes of people pleasing, you struggle to correctly identify the way your behavior is being received. You can come away from a social event in which you’ve alienated all believing that you—alone—are the bridge to peace in your community. With so much inner panic you’re left with no resources for interpreting the facial expressions of people watching you verbally dig your own grave. Conversely, this new era of happy, selfish, babbling does allow you to take in the way you’re being received. The reception? Disquieted shock.
After an event, you process your new babbling with your husband. You describe the looks of moderate alarm on the faces of people during your unsolicited sermon. Unfazed, he’ll respond “Yeah, I’ve definitely seen people look at you like that before.”1
If you weird people out just as much when you’re feeling free as when you feel gripped tightly by anxiety, then it seems pretty obvious which path will bring you the most peace. However, leaving anxiety behind won’t be quite that simple. Your newfound social guilelessness will affect other areas of your life, too. During a brief stopover at a cheap motel, you agree to stay on the ground floor even though it makes you uneasy to stay in a room in which the windows look out onto a busy sidewalk. You are under the false impression that people would risk it all to catch a glimpse of you in a tank top, so windows are a whole can of worms for you even in the best of times. These windows have sturdy shutters instead of curtains, so you ignore your instincts and quickly make yourself at home.
In the cold fluorescents of the motel, you’ll parade around naked, pluck various hairs from various locations on your body, and take a long, uninhibited nap—mouth agape. As you leave your room that night and move to shut the door behind you, you’ll see that the shutters on your window—though sturdy—were not properly closed. In fact, they were basically not closed at all! Any person—whether they had the desire to risk it all or not—would have been able, for many hours, to walk past your room and see your naked body in various unflattering contortions beneath the startling fluorescents.
Though the constant companion of your anxieties and desire to people please may mostly feel like a burden, it’s possible these instincts are so integral to your selfhood that to be without them is to lose all basic sense. That is really the only explanation I can think of as to how you looked at those akimbo shutters and thought All right, now’s the time to start plucking my body hair.
As always, I am a humble advocate for balance, Virgo. Would it be possible for you to maintain a rigorous enough schedule to stay lightly liberated without accidentally showing San Diego your body’s every nook and cranny? If not, then I suggest going back to your old ways—a time when you were so tied up in mental knots that you could barely move. At least then you’d be less immediately trusting of the position of shutters. We really need to make sure that never happens again, okay?
Thank you to my dear google formers for your scintillating insights last month. Especially for the responder who said “We will all traverse the Williamsburg Bridge for the last time, one day. <3” I feel so lucky to have such a sweet audience for this kooky lil project. If you’ve got something I need to hear, the google form for this month is here and my ig is here. Thank you for reading! <3
Your husband is the sort of calm and confident person that has no issue whatsoever with the earth’s population coming to the shared conclusion that his wife is off-putting, so it had never occurred to him before to mention that your social wake is full of befuddled expressions.