First of all, astrology is not going to be a major that you stumble into choosing when you are eighteen and someone has told you that the best way to move forward is to go to a certain college. Astrology isn’t going to be something that you get into lifelong debt just to study. There is no global astrology mafia that makes sure that astrology exists only in a standardized form. The certifications that are available are options but they may not include the type of astrology that you want to practice.

When you decide to become an astrologer, you’re probably making this decision because you went through some harrowing crisis.

In many contexts, this is true of shamans and other people who practice magic. People who have gone through traumatic events, events that rupture the narration of a life, start to practice magic. Much of the time, this is because other people don’t really know what to do with these people. We might say that people who practice magic are mentally or emotionally disturbed if we were to look at the phenomenon from a modern perspective. We might tell people who practice magic to consult a professional or try to incarcerate them.

If we were to look at it from another perspective, we might say that the veil between the mystical and the real shifted and we found access to something powerful that we needed to remain alive. We might understand that the skills acquired by surviving something traumatic are necessary and that they can live alongside orderly society.

Anyway—back to you. You’ve survived something and are possibly still in mourning. In an act of will, you decide that you want to commit to a magical practice.

In the same way that astrology isn’t a major that you can choose in college, it’s also not a profession that you can apply for. You can’t look for astrologer jobs on LinkedIn or Indeed. How you practice will be up to your powers of self creation.

An astrologer can really do anything. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it. A lot of us consult. This usually means working with people on a one to one basis. Some of us teach. Some of us write. A lot of astrologers do music and performance.

You will have to decide what form your magic best lives in. Your best bet, when making this decision, will be to do something that you did when you were playing as a child.

Did you like to play pretend with people? Play pretend in a workshop or with consultations. Did you like to sing? Maybe your magic has to do with performance rituals. Did you like to sit quietly and read? This might mean that you’re an astrologer who will enjoy researching the hell out of old texts and reinterpreting them.

At many points in your becoming an astrologer, you will deal with professionalization. This means that you will have to contend with your own ideas of what it means to be professionalized and what other people you work with think it means to be professionalized. You will have to remind yourself that astrology doesn’t really exist as a profession because it’s not something that you can apply for, because it’s not really an industry in the industrial way, and that this will only work when you are willing to make things up.

You will find your teachers. You will learn how to build respectful, supportive relationships from doing. You’ll recycle a bit of knowledge from every field of study because astrology has to be syncretistic. You’ll meet other astrologers who do things completely differently from you and you’ll question why we call all of this diverse work by the same name when it’s really not together and laugh.

You’ll also have to contend with the business aspect of making an income if you want to do this full time. This will be very freaky at first and it will continue to be freaky. Sometimes, asking to be resourced by people will make you fear that you have become a small child and have lost your power. You will try to figure out how much monthly income you need to keep yourself housed and fed and when you’re faced with the rate you need to charge to achieve this you’ll wonder whether you deserve stability, feeling like a small child.

Then, you’ll remember that your clients and students can’t tell you what you deserve or not. This would be asking too much from them. This would be asking them to parent you.

Now and again, you’ll have an encounter when you do your work that will remind you that what you’re doing is real, that the magic you practice is real. These encounters are astounding. You’ll never want to do anything else.

Later, you’ll question your craft again. Your cynicism will get the best of you and you’ll wonder if you are real, whether you can really help anyone because you start to doubt whether people can ever really support other people, or you’ll fear that you won’t be about to adequately disidentify with the business side of things that always makes you feel so icky.

But, often, you enjoy what you do. You enjoy your personality when you practice. You find that you are more available for a client’s magic than you previously thought you were and you grow because of that. Eventually, you look back and realize that you’ve been doing what you do for years and that you’ve built something simply by fucking around with your own magic alongside and in relationship with other people’s magic. This place you’ve built will be completely unique. It will be your place in the world.

Astrologer is not a job title. You can’t apply for it and you can’t get hired for it. This means that it doesn’t happen immediately. There isn’t a start date creating a sharp distinction between before and after. This is something that you build and you build things at your own pace. This also isn’t something that you leave. Whether you build halfheartedly or fullheartedly, you will keep building and this means that eventually you will have something that you didn’t start out with.