Man, I gotta tell ya, back in the day, I used to be all about that horoscope stuff. Especially when it came to love. I mean, who doesn’t want a peek into their romantic future, right? So, picture this: it’s early 2016, and I’m a full-on Virgo, scrolling through every single monthly love horoscope I could find for March. I was really trying to figure things out, you know?
I’d wake up, grab my coffee, and first thing, I’d open up a few tabs. I’d read one, then another, then compare ’em. “Oh, Mars in retrograde, huh? That means trouble for communication.” Or, “Venus is trining Jupiter, so good news for new connections!” I’d literally spend twenty minutes dissecting these vague sentences, trying to force them to fit whatever was happening in my life, or whatever I wanted to happen. I thought if I just understood the stars, I could plan my love life, avoid the pitfalls, and somehow manifest the perfect scenario.
My “process” then was pretty simple: read, interpret, worry, repeat. I’d take the advice, or what I thought was the advice, and try to apply it. If it said “be open to new possibilities,” I’d suddenly try to talk to everyone. If it warned against “impulsive decisions,” I’d second-guess every single text message before sending it. It was exhausting, honestly. I was living my life according to what some random article said about celestial bodies, not what my gut was telling me or what was actually happening with real people.
Then March 2016 rolled around, and something happened that just completely shook me out of it. There was this situation with someone I was really into. The horoscopes for that month, for Virgo, were all over the place – some promising breakthroughs, others warning of major drama. I remember one specific forecast said something like, “Expect a sudden, unexpected twist in your romantic life that will challenge your perceptions.” Sounded exciting, right? I was bracing myself, waiting for this grand, cosmic event.
What actually happened was way simpler, and way more human. I messed up. I said something dumb, totally misunderstood a signal, and just… blew it. No grand twist from the universe, just my own communication failure. And the horoscopes? They didn’t help. They just gave me a bunch of noise that I was trying to fit into an unfittable puzzle. I realized, right then and there, that I was putting all my focus on external predictions instead of on actual effort and understanding.
So, I changed my whole approach. I decided to flip the script. Instead of looking outward, I started looking inward. This became my new “practice.”
- First thing I did? I stopped reading them. Cold turkey. No more opening those horoscope tabs. It was tough for a few days, felt like I was missing something, but I pushed through.
- Next, I started paying attention to my own feelings. Not what the stars said I should feel, but what I actually felt. I’d sit down, sometimes just with a pen and paper, and write down what was really going on in my head and heart. No filter, no trying to fit a mold.
- Then, I actually talked to people. Shocking, right? Instead of guessing what someone meant, or letting a horoscope tell me what their intentions might be, I asked. I learned to ask direct questions, and more importantly, to really listen to the answers.
- I started observing patterns in real interactions. Like, how did my words make them react? What actions did they take, and how did that make me feel? It was about direct cause and effect, human to human, not star to human.
- I even embraced messing up. Because I knew if I said something wrong, or misread a situation, I could apologize, learn, and try again. It wasn’t some unavoidable cosmic fate; it was just part of being human and trying to connect.
This process of doing the actual work of understanding myself and others, it wasn’t some instant magic. It took time, it took some awkward conversations, and yeah, I still made mistakes. But what I gained was so much more valuable. I built real connections based on honesty and effort, not on vague predictions. My “romantic outlook” stopped being about what some external force was dictating and started being about what I was building through my own actions and willingness to engage. I realized the only “romantic outlook” that truly mattered was the one I was actively creating, day by day, word by word, action by action.
