You’re a Virgo but you’re not nitpicky, not perfectionistic, and you’re overall not concerned with cleaning products or small arguments or whether or not a coworker is on time for work. You’re a Virgo and you’re chronically late. You don’t always do the dishes and you have a bed full of cat hair.

The stereotype of a Virgo is that a Virgo, to be a good Virgo or at least a correct Virgo, must be a clean Virgo. That sucks because most Virgos are not clean. Most Virgos are messy, chaotic, and just trying to figure out how to live life like the rest of us.

There is something gendered about the stereotype that Virgos must be clean and neat. As a high school teacher once lamented to me about her students, young girls often try too hard to come up with neat and pretty answers because they understand that they cannot be brilliant. They try too hard to say the right thing and to keep their equations and essays clean and this keeps them from crossing things out, from adding in furious notes, and from interjecting. It keeps them from changing their minds.

If Virgo is anything, it is the furious attempt to keep genius in check. All Virgos are tormented by this. They are furious but excited when they change their minds, when they discard ideas, and when their citations lead them down rabbit holes. Virgo is not the ability to keep things neat and pretty. Virgo is the inability to be neat and pretty because there are too many things to consider at once.

Consider some famous Virgos. Beyonce laments against perfection while adrianne maree brown details strategies for movement building that really come down to describing hopeful chaos.

If you don’t feel like a stereotypical Virgo, you’re probably just like any Virgo. You’re a genius who is expected to speak in complete sentences except that the things that you are attempting to describe don’t speak in words at all. Virgo isn’t about clean kitchens and scrubbed floors. Virgo is a will to describe the world, all of it, at once. This is because Virgos are instantly curious creatures. They are able to hold curiosity on two opposing things at once while looking for the gaps and the overlaps.

Many of the stereotypes of Virgos describe a Virgo as a servant. That is why there are so many calls for cleaning your room, tending to the field, and reorganizing the pantry during Virgo season. But there is a difference between servitude and service. Servitude is about doing the things that men aren’t paid to do. Service can be almost anything. Service is infinity expressed through the rhythm of a single day. Service is response. It requires listening but it also requires agency.

If you’re a Virgo and you don’t spend your days criticizing everyone and everything around you until you’ve taken them all down, you’re still a Virgo. Virgo is about the art of critical connection. Critical connections are connections that hold you accountable. Virgos spend a lot of them talking back to themselves in their heads but this is not always about self critique. Oftentimes, curiosity, which is the art of finding questions, takes the form of back and forth self-talk. Remember, Virgos are trying to describe everything at once. It takes a lot of back and forth to see all the angles of a single object.

There is something birdlike about Virgos. Birds, even when they are miles and miles up in the sky, are able to look down and see a single worm crawling out of the earth. Sometimes we say bird’s eye view to mean someone who only sees the horizon. But birds see the horizon and they can also count the leaves on a bush.

If you’re not a stereotypical Virgo because you are messy, because you are hopeful, and because you care far more about whether everything in the room is heard over efficiency, you’re not alone. You’re a Virgo because you seek to see everything, to live in perpetual disagreement and wonder with yourself, and because you’re not satisfied with the tools that you have for representing reality. You’re a Virgo not when you are neat and pretty and when you do your chores. You’re a Virgo when you stop denying your own very real and very raw genius.