Welcome to my Astro Advice Column! If you subscribe to my Astro-Kats or Star Kids Club groups you are able to ask me questions about astrology for this advice column.


Hello! I am 23, I have a Sagittarius Moon and I want to play. I want to PLAY! I want to touch and feel and dance with other people and have fun. I want to fuck and go to parties and try interesting drugs and kiss people knowing I'll regret it a bit in the morning, or not. I want FUN, exciting surprises and spontaneity. I want to dress up and look cute, and I want to play! I’ve never really done any of that before. And I want to. But with COVID, it feels like it’s all off the table. I do a risk-assessment and always finds that getting myself, or especially the vulnerable people around me, sick is just too high a price to pay for some friendly adult play. I am very COVID-cautious. Even in the winter, my entire social life is outdoors.

And don't get me wrong! It's not like I feel bored with my daily life, I’m very grateful for it. I have fun plenty. I have fun when I'm being silly with my students (I’m a preschool teacher). I always find something interesting to do with my day and I have fun doing that. And I experience pleasure when I watch a good TV show, and on a nice walk through the city, etc etc.

But I'd be lying if I wasn't wanting sexy, spontaneous, adult fun. Fun that involves my body, where my body feels good, not just my mind and thoughts (Libra sun!). I don’t just want to be titillated, I want to be stimulated sometimes! I feel this sense of grief! Or deep fear that -- oh my gosh, am I just going to miss out on this part of young adulthood? I don’t know what my question is. I know I want to play, with my body, and because of COVID risk don’t know if that’s possible anymore. I’m grateful for my life and also it all feels — avoidant, regimented. Work, a nice walk, a visit to a nice show. I feel like I’m middle aged. I feel detached from my my body, and my youth, and I want to play. Not sure what my question is. But thank you for any insight!

—Wants-to-Play


Oh, to be a 23 year old and living in these pandemic times. You would have been twenty when COVID first hit, yeah? I remember when I was twenty. I was drinking so much because that was right before it got boring due to it being legal. I actually went to parties. I would do crazy makeup with lipstick from the dollar store and I would stay up until 4 AM even when I had work the next day.

I’m sorry that this pandemic is happening. It hasn’t been easy.

I’m thinking of what someone said to me back in March of 2020. They said that disaster doesn’t create new problems—it reveals the inequalities within a society that are already there.

I’m thinking about this frustration that you’re talking about, this deep desire for pleasure that just doesn’t seem to be scripted into an adult life (or even into childhood really) doesn’t just shut up without opportunity for flirtation and fun and fucking. It reminds you, painfully, that it wants what it wants and it tries to tell you that a world that dismisses pleasure is trying to thwart you of life.

I don’t know what to tell you. It’s important that you listen to this desire for life and pleasure.

Yes, there are ways to navigate COVID that you have learned these last few years. You can trust that experience and that knowledge sometimes and then the virus changes also. You mentioned doing your own risk assessment. There are tests that are more available now and there are vaccines. This doesn’t end the pandemic but gives you more tools for keeping yourself and your people safe. You can prioritize the immunocompromised in your life by not socializing in crowds for a length of time before seeing them. You can socialize outdoors.

And, still, I’m feeling this deep grief that you’re feeling about the last few years. We lost millions of people, Wants-to-Play. Of course you’re grieving.

And, you’re feeling this grief also about finding adulthood to be pleasure repressed. You’re twenty three and you’re on that transition from childhood to adulthood. You’ve just survived a pleasure repressed childhood and you’re trying to build an adulthood that supports your pleasure and finding that the adulthood you’ve found more recently to be avoidant and regimented.

That is okay. Guess why? Because you have time. You have so much time.

I think we do tend to feel this thrust of needing pleasure in our transition periods because we become so worried that we won’t have enough time. Can this be all that being an adult is cracked up to be? We feel like we only have until age thirty to play because we haven’t met all of the fun and sexually devious forty and fifty year olds out there yet.

You have time to build a pleasure supported adulthood. Building a pleasure supported life is something that is also hard because pleasure is called devious and superficial and unimportant. We live these lives that we schedule around work and, in these pandemic times, it’s been easy to fall into survival mode, to only work and do basic human functions and not much else.

I hope that there was wonderful exploration in naming all of your desire to play. You described this desire in such fun ways. I love how specific you got, that you want to look cute and have surprises and to also have adult fun. YES to all of that.

We try to figure out how to support pleasure in a world that tries to suppress it and, perhaps, what you are doing, naming the absolute need to play, is where you’re starting because it’s where you’re at. I wonder what would happen if you named this need in detail and sprawlingly everyday with your friends and coworkers and people on the train.

I mentioned how I drank heavily, how I stayed up late, and how I did weird makeup when I was your age. Guess what? It didn’t feel good. Pleasure is denied not just in regimented work but also at the parties. It’s denied in alcohol and it can be denied in binge watching and beauty products. These things can be very fun and you should absolutely binge watch television and go dancing and wear experimental eyeliner but all of these things are not what gives you pleasure. That is a deeper and more complicated exploration.

I guess all I am trying to say is that the duty to build pleasure is lifelong. You have time and you will find tools that work for you. The tools that are most visible do not even have to be the tools that work for you. You want to have fun. Listen to that. Build it. Capitalism and the pandemic makes it hard but fun is a human act and humans are creative. You’re already creative about this search for fun. Keep going, you’ve got this.