Week of April 5th to April 11th, 2022.
The Springtime makes you sad, Virgo. It always has. Even as a little girl you couldn’t handle this particular changing of the seasons. Despite Spring being a decades long enemy of yours, you’ve never been capable of retaining that information. So much so that you often look forward to the Spring—self-ignorance in full swing.
Part of why you forget about the mysterious sad-grip that Spring has over you is that you also don’t like the Summer. No, no—it would be too much to bear to actively loathe 6 whole months of the year (not to mention the deep Winter—which you don’t like either, making it closer to 8 months of the year), so as a survival tactic you’ve blocked this fact out of your consciousness completely.
When you were unemployed during the pandemic you were faced with massive amounts of free time; the likes of which you hadn’t known since girlhood. At first the free time frightened you; because you have a brain that’s wired towards sadness, and as we know—free time is a container that sadness expertly occupies (with astonishing swiftness!).
With no job and no answer at the unemployment offices, you made Conquering Your Sadness your full time job. In many ways, this rendered great results. With your infinite free time, you decided to try all of the recommendations that People Who Don’t Get Sad love to suggest to People Who Are Chronically Sad.
You journaled every morning, you exercised daily, you gobbled up as much turmeric as you could get your grubby little hands on, you downloaded a Deepak Chopra meditation app, you learned what ashwagandha “is”, you volunteered in your community, you parted with clothes that didn’t spark joy (basically all of them; a coworker once described your personal style as “dressing sad”), you remembered to take your B12 supplement (FYI psychosis is literally a symptom of B12 deficiency! Don’t get lazy with your B12, vegans!), you stopped drinking, you stopped eating processed foods, and you took shots of powdered ginger throughout the day as an alternative to ibuprofen.
And guess what, Virgo? You still got sad.
The resilience of your sadness provided you with feelings of guilty satisfaction. There was something nice about knowing that each time you’d rolled your eyes at a jovial fellow shrieking some evangelical shit about meditation, that you were in the right (after all; if you downloaded a meditation app and still got sad, you’d truly tested the limits of what is possible; meditation-wise). You always felt sure that the sadness was too complex to be tackled by all these simple daily tweaks, and in some ways it pleased you to learn your intuition was correct.
The satisfaction of Being Right is always fleeting, and once it faded you realized you were essentially right back where you started. Only now you were subscribed to a $10.84 a month grocery delivery service that brought amla powder (high in antioxidants, I think?) straight to your doorstep. Other than that? It’s pretty much the same old you. Or at least that’s how it can feel when you’re sad; like in the Springtime; like right now.
This spring you’ll really be struggling. Not for any interesting reason, it’s all your wily internal tectonic plates shifting without your approval. Before you had gone through the list of tweaks that the Sadless love to recommend to the Sad, anytime you were Deep In Sad you could tell yourself the fairy tale that maybe those changes would help you. Now that you’ve basically checked every box off the list (again, seriously, you literally didn’t even try to meditate once; stop acting like you actually tried that) it becomes more and more difficult to fantasize about solutions. What could your elixir be, if not your 19 ingredient morning smoothie?
When you used to drink too much and you’d spend a whole day vomiting, absolutely furious with yourself for the choices you’d made the night before, it was easy to see a solution. It was clear! If you didn’t drink, then you wouldn’t feel bad. And in some ways that’s true. You don’t drink, and you no longer spend full days absolutely cursing the heavens from the top of a makeshift bucket (though you did vomit on your anniversary this year because you ate too many pancakes). When you were still making a million superficial mistakes a day it was easy to imagine that if you weren’t making those superficial mistakes, that you’d magically become a Person Who Doesn’t Get Sad.
You still make plenty of mistakes, but unfortunately the mistakes you currently make are more complicated than simply not understanding your psychiatrist really meant it when she said you could only have two drinks on that medication (whoopsie). Your new problems have deeper roots; which I suspect you’ve always known, which is why you distracted yourself with those man-made, solvable problems for so many years.
When you have the sadness chip, it’s a near-constant lesson in “Wherever you go, there you are.” You aren’t entirely to blame for your blind hope that your Sad is in the rearview mirror. It certainly doesn’t help that Spring is absolutely drenched in “new beginnings” energy, a la Ramona’s party in season 7 of RHONY.
Unfortunately I don’t have much actionable advice for you this week, Virgo (besides trying meditation, seriously, it really helps!). It may help you to remember that all people get sad. So as much as you’d like to believe you alone are filled with mysterious, complex woe; that couldn’t be further from the truth. Perhaps talking about The Sadness could help you manage it a little better? And, I don’t know, maybe write “I HATE SPRING” on your 2023 calendar, so that this annual deep dip into sorrow doesn’t always come as such a surprise.