Dear readers! I am honored to have contributed a new horoscope to the inaugural issue of Feelings in Form, a fab online mag run by two multi hyphenate creative dynamos, Gillian Myers and Natasha Agrama. My piece can be found here, and you can noodle around the rest of their Spring issue here. They’ve also included audio of me reading the horoscope, in case you prefer reading with your ears. Listening to my own voice caused me to hate myself unequivocally, but let us hope it inspires a different response in you!
MARCH
As you may have noticed, each generation imposes a fresh new set of impossible expectations onto its women, Virgo. When you were growing up, the expectations demanded you be a type of skinny not often found in nature. Compared to your peers, you escaped this dark time with relatively few scars. Sure, you weighed yourself on a Wii Fit for ten years, counted calories from middle school through college, and thought that fruit was unhealthy because of the carbs, but these simple inhumanities cannot compare with the colossal personal damage others endured.
Times have changed, but it’s not as if the limbo stick of beauty standards has been placed at a comfortable height, it’s just not as punishingly positioned as it once was. That said, the skies have noticed another set of insidious expectations have emerged. Replacing the demand to be gaunt is the demand that suddenly, despite all of human history, women must love themselves no matter what :)
On its surface, this doesn’t sound like too terrible of an idea. The result could be harmonious! A world full of women who, at the snap of culture’s rugged hands, unlearn every terrible thing they learned in their first few decades and embrace themselves and their bodies.
However, meeting these new standards has been far more abstractly challenging for you than the demands of the past. Sure, the past impositions on women were inhumane, but the directive of “hate yourself!” has always felt a little more practically actionable than “love yourself!” for you personally.
Still, over the last several years you’ve tried to meet the moment and change your relationship with food, your body, culture, etc. It’s an enormous amount of work, but with your years of experience guiding you, you’re prepared to bend to the will of society whenever it changes its mind about how it thinks you should be.
This month, your new era of Loving Yourself No Matter What Because Society Is Forcing You To will be tested further than ever before. That’s right. This month, all of your pants will stop fitting. A pair or two still close on a technicality, but the technicality doesn’t feel sturdy enough to brave the unknown elements beyond the threshold of your apartment.
As a woman insistent on bowing to the present societal expectations, you know you are meant to feel totally neutral about this. A body is just a vessel for your amazing soul!!! But also, as a woman who invested a pretty penny in her collection of pants (and I do mean a pretty penny. Please find a way to become more financially literate because it is unwise to choose pants as your sole asset!!!) and rarely attends events where no pants are no problem, your body’s change presents some practical hurdles.
At cultural gunpoint, you've spent years rehabilitating your relationship with food, but you get nervous when data suggests your eating may require examination. You’re afraid that if you look at those habits critically, the whole sandcastle of modern womanhood you’ve assembled will come crashing down. This usually leads to you pretending that there is absolutely no way that your eating habits could have anything to do with your weight fluctuation. From there, all it takes is your acupuncturist—a person whose advice you typically ignore and ridicule, unless she agrees with you—agreeing that your body’s sudden change is “suspicious” for you to reject any obvious explanation.
With no money for new pants and no strength for examining your habits, you deny your way into a conclusion: you’re pregnant.
Despite a copper IUD guarding your cherished childlessness and a very recent period, you’ll be convinced that the only reason you could’ve possibly gained weight is that you are—surely—with child.
You’ll wait until the perfect moment to reveal your imagined pregnancy to your husband: right when he leans over to say goodnight and turn out his light. For it is somehow easier to imagine navigating a pregnancy than it is to imagine getting enough money to buy pants all over again (and enough gall to justify the enormous expense of said pants).
After a night of comfortable sleep, lullabied to dreamland with warnings that your imagined pregnancy is probably ectopic and therefore likely to be grave, your husband heads out to buy you pregnancy tests first thing in the morning. Tests, Virgo. Knowing that one negative test wouldn’t be enough to soothe your burgeoning mother’s intuition, your husband will arrive home with two. The first is inconclusive (probably because it’s ectopic, you’ll sneer), and the second says you are not pregnant (a sentiment echoed by your, again, very recent period).
This, fortunately and unfortunately, brings you back to the drawing board. You’ll ask yourself the central question of your time: is it…possible (?) to gain weight….without being pregnant?
You are probably nervous that I’m writing about weight gain, Virgo. I am too! I am worried that you may find the skies unmodern. But isn’t it very early 2000’s of us to hate women for not meeting ludicrous expectations imposed by culture? And isn’t abruptly loving yourself completely and feeling no practical or emotional response to weight fluctuations a ludicrous expectation imposed by culture?
Look, I don’t want these things to matter any more than you do. For the most part, you’ve been able to ignore your roots (enthusiastic self hate and body dysmorphia) in favor of the comparatively healthy modernity of weight not being the most important thing on this earth. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything practically or emotionally difficult about a changing body.
If it’s painful for you to examine the pounds of cashews you eat each week, then don’t! The harsh realities of your cashew consumption will be there when you’re ready. In the meantime, since you don’t have the kind of cash on hand for a full pants reconstruction, the skies recommend adding more of your dresses and skirts into the rotation! They’re fun, flirty, and don’t (presently) require replacement.
It’s difficult to meet the demands evolving eras place onto women, but don’t let hating yourself for not loving yourself enough get in the way of appreciating that you’ve made some progress. No more are you a literal child recording the calories of your two allotted microwavable Costco flautas while watching an episode of 7th Heaven. Instead, you are a woman so deeply removed from reality that you blame your hard earned body fat on imaginary unborn children while watching an episode of Survivor. That’s something, right?
Succinct, witty, and poignant. This is one of the few sub-stacks that I can’t wait to read every time it comes out!! Awesome work!
pants as investment! the sandcastle of womanhood! "but the directive of “hate yourself!” has always felt a little more practically actionable than “love yourself!” for you personally." once again you've nailed it.