Things are not as they appear.

American fascism has never needed censorship to assert power. While some empires rely on the removal of information to assert power, American empires have always created a chaos of information by staging public spectacles, contradicting itself, and enforcing paranoia through constant surveillance. You will never be able to make up your mind about who you are on Twitter. You will never find an authentic representation of yourself in English words.

Things are not as they appear. In October, both benefics and the Sun are in fall. Fallen planets are planets that hide themselves. The Sun, Venus, and Jupiter are assertions of power. Power hides itself in October.

Things are not as they appear. Both malefics are dignified in October. Dignified planets expand. Malefics are vulnerable planets that represent the things that cannot be integrated into empire.

Things are not as they appear. Mercury retrogrades in Scorpio.

Things are not as they appear. Stop trying to represent the entirety of your politics. Feed the care networks that keep you alive. Keep your real work off of social media. Revolution isn’t on social media. Revolution is in your intimate conversations, in your choice of life partners, and in the ways that you yearn to be touched.

Stop trying to change everyone’s minds. Revolution is about critical connection—not critical mass. Your propaganda is not revolution. Your capacity to buy groceries for an elderly neighbor who you don’t know is. Anything that is represented in this attention economy is not something that is on your side. Anything that is surveilled is also extracted. Your visibility is also your exploitation. The unmediated conversations that you have with your friends, your family, and your neighbors belong to you.

Know what strategic alliances are relations into which you can afford to cast empathy but cannot expect empathy back. Know which alliances feed you and expect you to sit in discomfort. Secrets are meant to be shared until they stop being secrets. When you share your secrets with those you empathize with but cannot expect empathy back from, you should camouflage your secrets so that you remain resilient.

Have hard conversations. Do harder things. Gather people. Never discuss your life where a corporate sponsor can see it.

Libra

Save something just for yourself. When you save something just for yourself, you’re transmuting that thing into an abundant resource. Your secrets make the best sense when they’re kept inside of your own head. Follow distorted story logic that you don’t need to explain to anyone else to its end.

When you do share what’s on your mind, make sure that you share it in a way that guarantees that your conspirators make you feel powerful. Not everyone will be able to understand you but you can make your own self understanding the most important thing in an exchange. Good boundaries come directly from self knowledge.

Scorpio

Turn the institutions in your life back into tools. These will never be places through which you can make yourself. Start with what you want and go from there. What does it actually take for you to humble a piece of technology? What economies are you giving up and what economies are you making room for?

You are not an avatar, a page, a resume, or a CV. The thing that is you will never be seen through these things but they are being watched through these things. As a Scorpio, you understand the value of a good sleight of hand trick. Now, teach yourself the power of living a life that can’t be surveilled.

Sagittarius

Get rid of all of the dreams of freedom brought to you by the great Hollywood blockbuster. There is no freedom in entrepreneurship, in individualism, or in heteronormal romance. These are other people’s freedoms. These dreams of freedom make you afraid of the things that hold you in this world.

Make sure that all of your knee jerk responses are your own. Because you grew up in someone else’s power complex, some of your reactions don’t belong to you. Doubt is the healthiest emotion. Before you’re able to own your emotions, you have to ask yourself whether they began with you.

Capricorn

All communities are imagined and, being imagined, are strategic alliances between people and power. You are not your community. You are not your queer community, your ethnic community, or your political community. You can work in these spaces but the nature of a compromise changes your own motivations.

Assert what is real to you without using the word community. Assert what is real to you without compromise. Do this in collaboration and always prepare yourself to change your mind when you fall in love. Don’t judge your own survival strategies but make sure that you know exactly who these strategies are for.

Aquarius

Your survival is not a joke. Jokes are reality plays that appeal to someone else’s shadow self. Your continued survival is a piece of steel that sits in fire. You’re strong because you’re forged by all the ways in which the world transmutes you and you transmute the world.

If you are actually able to change and shape your environment, what would you do? If you are actually able to release your shame into guilt, then what would you do? If you are actually able to forge an existence outside of an industrial complex, then what would you do? Turn these hypotheticals into action. Pretend that you have all the power you were promised when you felt loved for the very first time.

Pisces

The endgame of your politics should not be to make up your mind. Stop trying to identify yourself politically and analyze the material conditions of your life instead. Keep in mind that money is also an ideology. Figure out where you’re putting your time and energy. Sometimes, conflict is also an act of love that we are conditioned to give to those with power.

Make sure that you’re arguing with the people who you care about. The people you argue with will be the people who change your mind. Don’t explain yourself to anyone unless you want that person to play a role in shaping your sacred mind.

Aries

What do you actually want to share with other people? Not what you want to give or what you want from people but what can be taken and given in exchange until that thing itself becomes transformed? In other words, what do you hold to be so precious that you can’t resist but need to give it up so that it becomes more than your initial expectation?

Figure out what you actually mean when you say the word love. Or, better yet, figure out what questions you’re asking when you say the word love. They better be questions that you don’t have the answers to. When you ask questions that you don’t know the answers to, you’re doing the brave thing of letting someone change you.

Taurus

Make your pleasure sacred by making it apparent only to those who live it with you. You don’t need to make your joy public for it to be valid. The people you share your pleasure with will transmute you since it is impossible to appreciate pleasure unless you live in it together.

Give up some of your pleasure so that someone else can take it and return it to you in a different form. Stop assuming that you already know everything that you want when there’s worlds of appetites that you don’t even have the words for. Let other people change you. That’s the scariest thing and requires that you exercise agency over who you’re responsive to.

Gemini

Your body is no one’s business but yours. The things that you do with your body belong to no one but you. All the emotions in your body are no one’s but yours. The responsibility to take care of your body is no one’s but your own. No one can tell you how to feel.

No one can tell you what keeps you intact but you. Feeling whole is a pact that you make with yourself when you understand that you will keep choosing things that don’t compromise integral parts of you. Stop explaining your autonomy and start assuming it into being.

Cancer

Responsibility is the best antidote to harm. Learn the difference between shame and responsibility. Shame is an emotional response to wanting to hide a part of yourself so that no one else can see it. Responsibility is the enthusiasm of finding a piece of the world that you can and want to change.

You won’t be able to differentiate responsibility from shame if you don’t have power. Choosing to move through the parts of the world where you have power is scary when you are shame-saturated. Trusting that the people around you will hold you accountable without abandoning you gives you a chance for responsibility.

Leo

You’re not your trauma and you’re not the survival strategies that you used to survive your trauma. You are the ever shifting sense of creativity that flourishes when you continue to exist after your environment tries its best to stop you from existing. Your traumas don’t belong to you. They belong to the people who caused harm to you.

Give your fear and anger up by imagining that the people who harmed you are very ashamed of what they did to you. If you have to see these people again, treat them as if they should be ashamed to be in your very presence. Give up your shame by assuming that it belongs to those who harmed you.

Virgo

You don’t give a shit whether people like you or not. This gives you the space you need to say the important things and ask the challenging questions. Keep doing this but also remember that the purpose of a conversation disappears when anyone engaged in it wants to be right. You know that being right doesn’t give you any assurance.

Keep your right answers to yourself and focus on the conversations that give you the pleasure of not knowing what you know. Let your questions defamiliarize yourself with your surroundings. Only talk with people who you want to share space with—with people who celebrate your survival.