Back in March 2018, everything they said about the whole career transit drama for us Virgos? Yeah, it was all true. A total dumpster fire. I remember sitting at my desk, feeling like I was the only person in the entire organization who could see the cracks forming in the wall, only to have everyone tell me I was the one holding the hammer. That whole period wasn’t about being meticulous or organized; it was about watching every single thing I tried to meticulously organize absolutely crumble. My usual methods, the ones that always worked—the color-coded spreadsheets, the insane checklists, the triple-checking of every detail—they all just became fuel for the fire.
My main project at the time, this massive quarterly overhaul that was supposed to streamline three departments’ entire workflow, was already a mess. It was supposed to be my big shine moment. Instead, I had my boss, a Taurus, breathing down my neck because I kept pushing the launch back, not because the code was wrong, but because the font in the documentation wasn’t standardized. Seriously. That’s how deep I was in the Virgo pit. I was focusing on the useless six inches in front of me while the entire horizon was burning.
The Event That Made Me Just Stop
I was dealing with all this crap, right? The pressure, the feeling of incompetence, the sleepless nights reviewing things that were already perfect. And then the absolute worst happened. It wasn’t the slow burn of the transits; it was a specific, brutal hammer blow. We were hours away from a major integration with our largest client—a make-or-break moment for the company’s next fiscal year. I’d warned everyone, dozens of times, about this one tiny API dependency we were relying on from another team. I put it in the risk register, I put it on the daily standup notes, I even sent a goddamn memo about it in all-caps just to see if anyone would read it.
Guess what? They didn’t. Two hours before the integration went live, that dependent system failed. Totally offline. The whole thing. I didn’t get angry, I didn’t yell. I just walked out to the parking lot and sat on the curb for maybe an hour, just staring at the pavement. My phone was blowing up, and I knew exactly what they wanted: me to come back and fix the problem that I had warned them about, because I was the only one who even knew where the bodies were buried in the code.
I didn’t go back for three days. I just quit answering the phone. They eventually got the system running again, but I used those three days of forced silence to actually look at my life outside of a spreadsheet. That’s when the real practice started, not the astrological reading, but the painful, real-world adjustment.
My Implementation Process – Breaking the Virgo Cycle
I realized my biggest challenge wasn’t the transits or the company; it was my own process, which had become my prison. I was trapped in a perpetual state of fixing things that didn’t matter. So, I forced a complete and agonizing reset. This is what I did:
- I Stopped Writing the Memos: I deleted all my multi-point, hyper-detailed email templates. Any email requiring more than three bullet points, I delegated the writing of it to a junior member, forcing myself to only approve the final, simplified version. This broke my need to control the narrative.
- I Instituted the “Three Fixes and Done” Rule: For any piece of work—a report, a line of code, documentation—I allowed myself exactly three review passes. After the third pass, regardless of whether it felt “perfect,” I had to hit send. I physically had to hand the file to a coworker to hit the “send” button if I felt tempted to look at it one more time.
- I Found a New Obsession: Instead of focusing on work details, I redirected that Virgo energy to something completely outside the job. I started doing an hour of intense cycling every morning, forcing my body into structured exhaustion. The perfectionism went into my bike maintenance, not my quarterly reports.
The whole point of this shift was to use the pressure of the moment, the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by external forces, to change the one thing I could control: my response. The transits weren’t going to let up, so I had to learn how to exist in the chaos without letting it turn me into a burnt-out shell. I stopped trying to control the uncontrollable variables (other people’s incompetence, big system failures) and focused only on making my own actions efficient.
The Aftermath and Realization
When I finally went back to work, I wasn’t the same. I was less interested in being right and more interested in moving forward. The irony is that once I stopped trying to be the perfect organizer, everything around me actually started to get more organized. My boss, the Taurus, stopped bothering me, maybe because I was no longer giving him an eight-page document to review every other day. The quarterly overhaul project shipped, and honestly, it was about 85% perfect, not 100%, but it was done, and nobody complained.
The big takeaway from that rough March? That whole period was like the universe forcing my hand, saying, “You can either keep polishing tiny useless rocks, or you can build the damn bridge.” It took a total breakdown and three days of radio silence to finally choose the bridge. My career didn’t fall apart; it just got a lot simpler and a lot less about my ego. I still use the “Three Fixes and Done” rule today. It’s saved my sanity more times than I can count. Sometimes, the only way to handle heavy pressure is to stop trying to lift it and start finding a way to work around it.
