Rebelling Toward

Why astrology? Why leave the container that has held me for so long? Why leap?

These are all questions that have been tumbling smooth, as they cycle through my heart and mind.

What I know is that I didn’t intend to love astrology. I came to it in defiance. I was tired of the stories gathered from fragments of horoscopes in day old newspapers that told of Capricorn’s avarice and ambition. I wanted to know enough to challenge it and to tell it that I would not be contained.

I chuckle to myself as I write this. I can see my determined mer-goat heart shining through as I set out to take on the whole mountain of astrology. I still don’t believe Capricorn embodies the coldness and greed that was reflected to me in those smudged paragraphs, but I did come to know that those paragraphs could not contain the whole of astrology.

I found my chart online. I was befuddled to find that I am not only a Capricorn sun, but I have four other planets in Capricorn (astrology refers to this as a stellium)! I am, in fact, the goat-est of cosmic goats. With the same grumpy tenacity, I began studying. I scoured libraries, listened to endless podcasts, took classes, and found a community of people to talk to about stars with me. In short, I rebelled my way right into being an astrologer and a lifelong love affair with the cosmos.

What is even more stunning to me is that I absorbed astrology like nothing else I had ever tried to learn before. It flowed into my neurons and sunk into my cells like it had always belonged. I don’t know how to describe it other than I felt like the stars loved me back. As I reached for the sky it enveloped me and declared me home.

There are still parts of me that can’t wrap rational wide enough to understand the depth of impact that astrology has had on my life, my sense of self, and my belief in my capacity to navigate the ocean of my becoming.

While all of this was happening I was still ascending another mountain, counseling.

I started grad school when I was twenty three, moved thousands of miles, and dove directly into a level of self-awareness that I feared would suffocate me. I read theory after theory finding something new that was wrong with me each class. I sat in the center of their diverging definitions of unhealthy, maladaptive, and pathological and felt utterly incapable of being anything but broken.

I didn’t want to be the source of this message in anyone else's life.

I spent my years in counseling rebelling against the notion that humans are best understood by our brokenness and the ways we fit into boxes and under labels. I so desperately wanted to be a buffer for the people that came to me. I wanted to place myself between them and the parts of the system that’s only intention is to serve insurance’s demands and forces you to prove that people are hurting enough to deserve care, time, and someone to walk beside them as they explore and grow.

I worked to create a container where people didn’t need to submit to assessment and diagnosis to receive support; a place where you got to choose the language that described your experience most faithfully. Sometimes that did include diagnostic words, but never with me as the authority dictating who someone is to them.

It is exhausting to live in constant conflict with the norms and agreements of the work you have chosen. Over time, I have less and less to give in the counseling space. I find it harder and harder to convince my nervous system that it is where I want to be. In short, I am rebelling myself out of the profession that I worked so hard to be part of.

I can feel in my body the difference between rebelling against and rebelling towards. When I rebel against, the thing I am trying to move away from fills my field of view and I grow more entangled in my relationship to it over time; it gains all my energy and focus. When I rebel towards something I am freeing myself from the confines of a relationship too small to hold my becoming; I take back my energy and focus.

So here I am rebelling toward a life where I am not at odds with the container meant to support and sustain me; rebelling towards a system and lens that makes room for people’s wholeness and says the most interesting part of you isn’t your conformity but your enormity. I rebel towards this system that celebrates the way that you are the whole sky wrapped around human bones and expanding with every second. I want to create a space for my bigness and yours. So that, that is why I leap.

Thank you for witnessing and catching these words. I hope to have the chance to catch you in turn; together growing free and twirling under the night sky.