There’s only one way to answer despair—with repair.

I want to start this month’s horoscopes by just listing out some transits. We will begin October with almost every planet in some kind of debility. The Sun is in its fall. Venus is in detriment. Mars is in fall. Jupiter is in detriment. Mercury moves into detriment later this month. For a lot of us, life has us down. I’m pretty down these days. Down in the dumps.

Now, I want to move this horoscope column into a gentle suggestion: I want us to make some acknowledgment of what we have lost.

I’m talking about political loss, ecological loss, about the loss of people, about lost futures, about lost languages, and the loss of history. I think it’s hard to understand what we have lost. We sometimes try to phrase loss as robbery. “They,” meaning some group of people over there, have robbed “us” of money or space or visibility. I don’t know. We have lost many things together. I hear the denial of that fact in the accusations that we make during this era of political terror.

This last year, we have organized and marched and conspired and mediated and fed. A lot of us have been busy. When we are busy, we become numb to the fact of our loss. The numbing is disorienting. Last October, I had been feeling tapped out by the loss of queer community due to coronavirus. After October, I felt the loss of that community more strongly. Who do I organize with? Who do I trust? Why do I feel so paranoid? Even as I have been keeping myself busy, those questions haven’t left me. Even meeting new friends doesn’t account for the loss in queer community and political context that so many of us have been feeling for the last couple years.

A lot of us are trying to do things. We have been trying to get the attention of our elected officials. We have been trying to talk families into making us feel welcome. We have been trying to get our shit together so we don’t have to ask another friend for a place to stay and we have a place to put our stuff. When those efforts go nowhere, that’s when the powerlessness sets in—the absolute dread and nihilism. Who cares anymore? Why should we?

When we acknowledge the fact of our loss, the sorrow of that acknowledge informs us on why our hearts break when we do. That sorrow tells us that we still have hearts.

When we don’t acknowledge loss, we get overly attached to old tactics. We start to blame other people around us or ourselves. We don’t understand where the fear to start again comes from. We force ourselves to keep going and then get confused when we no longer care about the things we used to care about. Acknowledging loss doesn’t make us weaker. It shows us the way.

There’s only one way to answer despair—with repair. We can’t keep circulating around new people over and over again like the world is a consumable. Our world is only infinite when we take care of what is alive. We have to answer despair with an understanding of how political defeat has destabilizes many of our relationships and an analysis of what realistic repair would entail. Not everything can be repaired right away but repairing what can be may lead the way to more repair.

I think that this October is a big deal. Eclipse season has fully arrived. The solar eclipse in Libra, which happened October 14th 2023, will take place on October 2nd 2024. This month is a Wood Dog month and Dog clashes directly with Dragon year. Last October was a Chicken month and clashed with 2023 Rabbit year. Clashes, in Chinese fortune telling, tend to show us when big breaks happen. This is especially true in earth signs—both Dog and Dragon are earth.

Acknowledging a broken heart may not make us feel better—not right away or even ever. What it does is it helps us understand reality. We can’t keep going until we understand what is actually going on here. Have you ever mended a sweater? You have to understand how the stitches are built and what is actually going on.

Libra

In all of my years of life, I’ve noticed something about relationships. I’ve noticed that the relationships where I can tolerate showing vulnerability are the relationships that tend to last.

I don’t think that tolerating showing vulnerability needs to be complete comfort. A lot of us aren’t comfortable being fully vulnerable for good reasons. Being willing to tolerate vulnerability can look like a lot of things. It can look like being willing to say sorry, to repair and make amends. It can look like being willing to say when too much is too much. Setting boundaries. It can look like hitting someone up when you’re bored or lonely.

You may have many relationships where you are okay with being vulnerable. You may have just one relationship where you can tolerate your own vulnerability and that relationship may be with yourself, a cat, or something not even human.

That relationship, or those relationships, keep you going. They keep you centered in yourself. They remind you that the world has room for you during all of the phases of your life.

Questions for Libra for October 2024:
What is one relationship where you can tolerate some degree of vulnerability?
What is one memory you have of enjoying any degree of vulnerability immensely?
What is one memory you have of not enjoying vulnerability but still being okay after feeling vulnerable?

Scorpio

I think that October will feel like an immensely creative time for you. I don’t mean that in a lighthearted way. I think that we tend to get the most creative when we realize what we have lost.

I used to write the most beautiful poems immediately after a breakup. I have felt the most erotically creative after losses of family members. I see the left writing the most beautifully eloquent pieces of writing as we experience political defeat after defeat. I think that there is something in loss that makes us realize our power of creativity more urgently than before. Of course, that in and of itself is melancholic.

We have been living in the end times, in a time of death and ecocide, for generations now. People you know have been creating ways to survive for generations now. Too many of us still treat our creative powers as mere side hustles or luxuries. Your creativity is not a luxury. Your creativity is necessary and will bring you into the future. When terror and defeat forces the creativity out of you, that’s you trying to imagine a future using all that is available to you.

And, yet, creativity is not a resource. Very often, creativity is found in heartbreak.

Question for Scorpio for October 2024:
Where do you feel your heartbreak?
What resources your life?
What resources the creativity that you find inside of your broken heart?

Sagittarius

I think that one of the hardest losses to name is the loss of context. Loss of context happens in a lot of different ways. We might grow distant from a friend. We might move. We might experience a defeat over a goal or aim that we organized a friend group around.

This October, I am wondering how you stabilize your friendships even as you lose context every now and then. I’ve been in situations where the intimacies I developed in one organizing space just seem to fall apart as our goals shift. Usually, this happens when small interpersonal injustices are glossed over. I’ve also been in situations where relationships outlast our one or two declarative goals.

What makes friendship itself a structure? Not a goalpost or an agreement or even a set of demands but friendship itself as a moving structure. When does a friend become your context? I don’t believe that all friendships need to last forever. Some friendships just exist under some other social structure. But I think it means something when a friendship becomes its own thing. There’s a special kind of kindness that we don’t find anywhere except for between friends.

Relationship for relationship’s sake—this feels existential because, to be friends for the sake of being friends, you have to accept that you are beloved. You are friend material without needing to prove yourself.

Questions for Sagittarius for October 2024:
What makes you feel like a friend has your back?
How does friendship change you?
When was the last time you hit up a friend for no reason?

Capricorn

October is a good time for tracing your lineage’s relationship to literacy. I’ll speak from personal experience. My parents’s generation was the first generation to be literate in childhood. My grandparents’s generation was mostly illiterate but one grandpa found literacy as a young adult. A lot of things had to happen for literacy to take place—language had to become standardized and I had to go through ESL.

When did your people first enter literacy and what was that process like? I’ve noticed that the digital world has us taking literacy for granted. We read over texts from revolutionaries in the 1960s and we forget that only small sections of the world were literate during that era. We tend to forget that our own literacy was a years-long process and that this process is not neutral or spontaneous but educational.

When you look over your lineage’s relationship to literacy, what do you notice? Are there any things that surprise you? When you learned how to read, did you also learn how to write? What else did you learn when you learned how to read? Do you remember the texts that first taught you written language?

What languages are you illiterate in? What reminds you that, even when you are semi-literate, you’ll always remain illiterate?

Questions for Capricorn for October 2024:
What are you illiterate in?
What are you literate in?
Why?

Aquarius

Recently, I watched a very messed up reality TV show called Dream Academy. The show is about the casting of a six person girl group and trains twenty young women and girls to compete ruthlessly against each other. At one point, one girl decides that she has had enough and leaves the show. “I’m happy about my choice,” she says. “I don’t think this is good for my life.” When that girl leaves, the competitive atmosphere of the show breaks and all of the rest of the contestants are able to come to a more clear headed decision about whether they want to stay.

I learned something from that young girl on the reality TV show. I think that capitalism has us competing against each other for our dreams just like the contestants on the show. It uses our dreams against us. We start to believe that our chances are limited and that, if someone else gets an opportunity, we will lose out.

What is the point of having a dream if that dream is used to weaken our very spirits?

A dream teaches us hope. Your dreams are more flexible than capitalism tells you. You have more agency over what your dreams mean to you than you are told. You have agency over where you place your hope. Dreaming is not naive and dreaming does not reduce our power, making us helpless to gatekeepers and industry. No structure has a monopoly over our dreams. Dreaming clarifies the source of our hope. I think that the eclipse in your ninth house illuminates what agency you have in dreaming this month.

Questions for Aquarius for October 2024:
What does hope feel like in your body?
What do your dreams teach you?
How have your dreams changed throughout your life?

Pisces

I recently learned that nostalgia was first invented as a cure for homesickness for soldiers. Soldiers who craved their real homelands learned to substitute their connection to an actual place with a symbolic and fantasy homeland—homeland as a symbol. Nostalgia was a symbolic cure prescribed by army doctors so that soldiers would replace their real connection to a place with nationalism.

Are you ever homesick? Not nostalgic in that politicized way where you are told that a savior will come to make something great again but properly homesick. Homesick for a real person, a real food, a real home. What is the homesickness that your nostalgia is covering up?

Sometimes, homesickness is just too much. It’s too much loss. The reality of homesickness is too painful. Even so, I’m not sure that nostalgia can cure this pain. I’m not sure that there is a cure for homesickness outside of stopping ecocide and living. I sometimes feel homesick but I can only take a little bit at a time. Sometimes, that’s enough. Even just a taste of real homesickness tells us a lot about what we miss and what we are here to mend. Even when we don’t feel homesickness, our hearts feel it. A little taste of awareness over the situation doesn’t add more hurt.

Questions for Pisces for October 2024:
What foods or plants or places remind you of your homesickness?
What is the feeling of homesickness inside of your body?
Does your homesickness tell you anything when you attend to it?

Aries

October is a great month for doing work that you want to or need to keep private.

Technology makes us feel like we know everything about what everyone is going through all the time but this couldn’t be further from the case. We don’t know what people around us are going through. At all. We only know the public, declarative side of their personalities.

We only know the public and declarative side of people’s politics. We only know the public and declarative side of people’s relationships. We only know the public and declarative side of people’s ambitions.

You are allowed to have privacy. You don’t need to explain everything that you are thinking about or doing all of the time. You need time to figure things out not in secret but just in privacy. When you give yourself privacy, your thoughts feel more free. You are willing to allow your mind to change more.

Too much of the time, we say things that we really don’t know how to mean yet. We declare principles that we want to stand by before we figure out how to build those principles into our lives. Giving yourself privacy is a way of giving yourself time. You have time and, so, you have privacy.

Questions for Aries for October 2024:
What do you sometimes wish you had more time for in the past?
What do you currently wish you had more time for in the present?
What do you want more privacy for?

Taurus

There’s this really funny Chinese dating show where two young people will appear and try to date. However, both of their families also show up and negotiate relationship boundaries and issues in the same room as the young people. Whether the two people can date isn’t decided by them but by their family members.

Of course, this show is a sick satire. However, I think it illuminates something that we tend to forget in individualist societies. Every relationship lives inside of a social context. When you fall for someone, you are also falling for the people who nurtured that person into being. When you build a relationship with someone, you’re building relationships with every single one of that person’s chosen families, biological families, all of their pets, and even their neighbors. Relationships are expansive.

What is the social context around your most trusted relationships? Is there something in the community that surrounds you and the people you stan that just make your most beloved relationships work? If there is, then what is that something? When you met the friends you have in your life, what was it about the space around you that made it possible for you to meet people?

Questions for Taurus for October 2024:
What is the social context around your most trusted relationships?
What makes it easier for you to make friends?
What makes it possible for you to make friends?

Gemini

October is about sobriety. I remember when I got sober. That first year was one of the loneliest periods of my life. I think that, when we go through these drastic changes, we tend to lose people. That’s something that happens but there is also something about individualism that makes us feel like we have to let go of people in order to change—that was true for me. I’m not sure if this is applicable to anyone else.

October is about sobriety—I think that October is about adhering to your own standards about reality. We live with a lot of information in our contemporary age and, as humans, we tend to get superstitious about other people’s opinions. If someone says that something is true, we tend to believe them at their word even if they live in a different reality from us.

I wonder what holding onto a sober view of the world around you while not giving into the individualist urge to just cut people off when they think differently from us would look like. I used to think that sobriety was a choice. Now, I think that it is a continuous transformation. Sobriety is about not reading too much into the well wishers or the doomscrollers. It’s about knowing yourself, about knowing that reality has your back even when you wish you could live life as someone else. Reality has your back—that’s your mantra for October, Gemini.

Questions for Gemini for October 2024:
What do you know to be true about this moment in time?
What do you know to be true about the world around you?
What do you know to be true about yourself?

Cancer

Our mythologies about home exposes some of our greatest vulnerabilities. When our attachment to a place is reduced to a single origin myth, we start to see some of the greatest dehumanizations start to occur. All nationalisms are founded upon myths but they are not only myths. Nationality is a political structure, one that is decided by people each and every day.

And, still, home is not a fact. Home is a myth.

What myths tell your stories about home, belonging, and social acceptance? How do you retell those myths? Who gets to retell them? Do you include yourself in the people who get to tell your own myth about beginning and belonging?

Myths are just myths. They can give us narration power over the question of where we come from. Or, they can reduce that power when we allow our myths to undergo standardization and simplification. Your home is more than your home. Your home is a set of stories, all colliding and all weird. You get to retell a story and, in your retelling, that story becomes a new story.

Questions for Cancer for October 2024:
What myths tell your stories about home, belonging, and social acceptance?
How do you retell those myths?
Who gets to retell them?

Leo

What are the words for sibling and cousin in your language and what do they mean? Do you have one word to describe all of your siblings or cousins or do you have many words that can’t be translated? Are any of the words you know gendered and are there more words to discuss siblings or cousins of one or more genders? Do you know any gender nonconforming terms for sibling or cousin?

In your own words, how would you describe your kin? What words do you use? What words do you know? And how do all of those words you know change depending on context?

I think that our words for siblings and cousins change the most depending on context. I might call my cousin my sister in one setting. I might call her a cousin in a more formal or English setting. Some of my words for siblings aren’t even titles but are just nicknames. We have nicknames that only our siblings call us—not our parents or friends or partners. Just our siblings.

If you could change your sibling-related names, what would you change your names to?

October is about exploring your siblings. The eclipse occurs in your house of siblings and language. I think of changing your name, the name that only your siblings know. I think of not changing that name and cherishing it in a new way.

Questions for Leo for October 2024:
What do your siblings call you?
What do you call them?
How do these words feel in your mouth?

Virgo

October is about deep research. What are you researching?

I wonder what parts of your multiple histories remain siloed even to this day. I think the way that we learn history tends to be very siloed. We learn about the history of modern science but we don’t connect that history to the mass production of narcotics. We learn about the history of one thinker but we don’t learn about all of the people who taught that person how to think.

Learning is like this—you always find that there is more to learn. In October, I want you to learn in an incredible way. I want you to learn in a way that teaches you just how much you do not know. I want you to believe everything you read and then to read it again, believing absolutely nothing and doubting everything. I often read the same book twice—believing it the first time and doubting it the second.

I want your brain to go haywire because you have so many cool ideas that you’re playing around with and you want to put all of the pieces next to the other pieces. I want you to investigate words that you think you know and find that you don’t know them at all. I want you to go off the deep end a little bit. I want you to learn.

Spiral a little bit—just intellectually. Go surf Wikipedia. It’s a fun sport. Have fun.

Questions for Virgo for October 2024:
What is a book you believe to contain true ideas?
Can you read it again while disbelieving everything?
What about a book you didn’t believe the first time around? Can you find something you believe in that book?