When using astrology to talk to yourself, it’s important to understand what astrology is. Your natal chart is not you. Your natal chart is an image of the moment of your birth in a very specific language. Every language has its own histories and the language of western astrology was made to describe some things better than others.

The language of western astrology was made to describe the West. The representational values of the planets and signs are tied to western histories. You can use western astrology to talk to yourself about what, precisely, your relationship to the West looks like.

When working with your chart, it’s important to make moral decisions. Moral decisions belong to you. Because the natal chart is not you, it also doesn’t prescribe events or traits to you. You are responsible for how you express your chart. You are responsible for your own relationship to the West. This responsibility doesn’t mean that you have all the tools and agency that you need to determine how the West influences you. The West is a power relation to which we are subordinated. Responsibility means that you take the time and space you need to respond instead of reacting to the West.

A lot of the time, the moral decisions involved in astrologizing get pulled into questions around what it means to be a good version of your sign or a bad version of your sign. What’s a toxic Leo trait versus a good Leo trait, for example? Some people use the word evolution, which has its own weight (evolution is intimately connected to eugenics). What an evolved Scorpio trait versus an unevolved one?

A lot of our language around moral decision making mimics the logic of decontamination or ascension, as if we are able to swerve and avoid abusive behaviors or ascend away from it. This is not true. Abuse is a system that we live inside of. This is not the point of using western astrology. We use western astrology when we are complicit in the West. Western astrology is a language that reveals our complicities.

In her work on abusers, Lundy Bancroft writes that abuse is not an emotional problem but a mental one. Abusers do not abuse because they are drunk or because they are hurt. Bancroft writes that the myth that hurt people hurt is just that—a myth. If the myth that hurt people hurt were true, then we would see more femme, queer, and poc abusers. Bancroft writes that abuse is a mindset. Abuse is how patriarchal racial capitalism behaves when it is believed and enacted.

When you work with your chart, you are working with the moment of your birth as described by a western cosmology. There is nothing in the language that was built to help you decide how you want to act in the present as a person who resists, complies with, survives, assimilates to, struggles against, and responds to the West. The person who decides all of those things is you. The chart is not you. Your responses and your responsibilities are you.