We get into astrology because someone we love or want to love tries to love us through the language of astrology.

For me, it was a queer friend, a fellow sex worker, and then strangers on the internet. I got into astrology before it was on the fashion magazines—when the first few pages of google, when you googled your placements, were weird conspiracy theory websites filled with strange fonts and pictures. A girl I worked with had Libra tattooed on her side. My old roommate helped me look up my rising sign. Strangers on the internet helped me analyze my abusive relationship.

I got into astrology at a time when my personality was disintegrated. I was on drugs and the me on speed working fastidiously during the day and the me at night stoned and disassociated at night were two completely different people. I was going to school, I was putting myself through school, and I felt as if I were performing myself rather than being myself. My mom was abusive and, when I was younger, all I cared about was making my own money. I fucked eight men a night and made what I thought was a lot of it but, in retrospect, wasn’t. I didn’t have a good relationship to sex work. I got beat up a lot. Even now I get very angry at people who do not do sex work but see sex work as sex empowerment. It didn’t work that way for me.

Astrology was a common language—white queers who didn’t quite include me, working girls whose real names I didn’t know, and anonymous people on /x/ all talked about astrology. It appeared in all of the worlds that I found myself in.

I learned about astrology by doing client work. I saw that a lot but I really mean it. I didn’t take a course. I bought a lot of astrology books. I looked for resources where I could. I started doing readings as soon as I could. I wasn’t charging for them at the beginning. I just wanted to do it. I learned through dialogue, through talking about the planets in the signs and being wrong, being told I was wrong, being trusted with life stories, and working through hard issues with clients without having all the answers or any answers at all. I learned astrology by talking to people with trauma, people who want desperately to change their lives and the world, and people who are trying to transform their relationships. My clients taught me about their charts and, in doing do, taught me astrology.

Because I learned astrology this way, as a amatuer, I do not believe in debating about technical details. I don’t debate the merits of sidereal versus tropical or about modern versus traditional or about what house system we should all use. I don’t really care about technical things even if I am impressed by people who do care. I don’t think that theory is what animates astrology and gives it life.

The people who can afford the courses, who have studied Latin, and who cite dead white guys like they’re the fucking Bible will never be as good an astrologer as the weird queers, often femme, who use astrology not as a way to talk down but as a thing that builds conversation. I do believe that people who other people talk back to are better astrologers than people whose identities afford them the privilege of appearing as authorities on things that they are not. People who other people talk back to often learn faster, in real time, and at the speed of trust. I believe that people who know only sun sign astrology but take what they know to truly listen to others are better astrologers than those who have studied all the Romans but do not hear their communities.

Astrology is a language and languages only work if you give them a purpose. Languages have a certain history but languages are, by nature, traitorous because they can always be claimed and reclaimed for everyone’s purposes.

A lot of people ask me how I started with astrology. I never know what to say. I started with astrology from a place of trauma. In some ways, I used astrology to disassociate. But it also helped me reintegrate myself. I was an addict, exploited, and toxic. Astrology, to me, is about service and dignity.

The reasons that I continue to practice astrology are not the reasons that I started with, though they are similar. I want to build self sovereignty in relationship with other self sovereign people.

If you are learning astrology, I firmly believe that you should treat it like learning any other language. Learn it by learning what you would like to use it for. Do not learn it on another entity’s agenda, because you want to extract from it, or because you believe in universalities. Astrology is not a thing that will give you purpose. It is just a language and, like all languages, it is a pseudoscience at best and a charlatan at worst. If you extract from astrology, you are only extracting from your own self sovereignty. Performing at being an astrologer, even or especially if you know all the Latin phrases, like all performances of self, is an act of self disintegration that will leave you mirrored and disassociated. Astrology is not a performance and nor is it an identity. There is no truth or freedom to performance or identity unless those things also become action. Doing astrology, on the other hand, is a thing that responds, changes, and revolts against the things that only appear to be resolved.