aries (march 21st-april 19th): that man that you think is going to save you is absolutely not going to save you. take one of the art classes you’ve been (loudly) claiming to be interested in taking for years but you’ve never even been arsed enough to look up whether it’s offered at your local community center or not. that might save you. practicing your rusty, decaying second language might save you. volunteering at the library on the weekends instead of binge drinking your weight in espresso martinis at an overpriced bar you become categorically uncool simply by professing genuine desire to be inside of, let alone spending a quarter of your life thinking about, might save you. but that man - that wretched, miserable little man, who has already made you cry more times than anyone else currently in good standing in your entire social network, who took months to even pretend to care about learning to actually and properly make you cum, who told you all sorts of stories about what he wanted to do with you when you started dating and has yet to actually do a single one of these things - that man will not save you. get a hobby. i beg of you.
taurus (april 20th-may 20th): a useful exercise and meditation this week might be considering how many people you have objectively screwed over out of your complete and total unwillingness to budge on your unfounded desire to be a miserly old spendthrift. you know that you can just learn to budget and then spend your money where your money should actually go, instead of locking yourself in your room and demanding everybody encircle around your yard while you gaze wistfully out the window and the people cry mournfully for you to come out and play? you are not powerless, you are irresponsible. you are not specifically called to suffer, or withstand hard times. you aren’t even especially downtrodden, which you’d know if you could just pull your head out of your ass long enough to look around and take stock. you are just caught in a narrative. and like any other narrative, repeating it over and over to yourself 24/7 just tends to make it stick more heavily to the inside of your skull. consider that you will yourself be depleted by time & terror & torrential downpour into nothing more than a decrepit skull one day (and some other bones, too, if the bone scavengers haven’t carried them off). would you like to be put into the ground as someone who padded themselves in a cushion of stubborn denial and obstinance? no! or at least, i hope not. i say this will nothing but the utmost love, but, taurus: grow the fuck up.
gemini (may 21st-june 20th): everybody, look! gemini is caught in a cycle of torment of their own making! they relish in locking the door against their imminent happiness and then throwing away the key! they want to suffer, and they want to suffer loudly! and most importantly, they want an audience! — before you decide to comment about how this is mean, gemini, consider when was the last time you experienced an emotional or interpersonal problem that wasn’t entirely of your own making and failure to communicate. you think just because you’re quick and witty and have had english teachers telling you since you were in the third grade that you could be brilliant (“if only you would just apply yourself…”) … that this means you are so quick and witty and brilliant as to not need to explain the inner workings of your mind to anyone else. and by all means, continue to fail at communicating what you want and think, if that’s what gets you off. just don’t presuppose your thoughts are the default which everyone else should aspire to match to. and if you can’t communicate what it is you expect from everybody else, then you don’t really have the right to be mad at them for failing to do what you asked of them, right? and isn’t the opportunity to be justifiably mad at everybody else what you really want?
cancer (june 21st-july 22nd): little miss crabby pants, throwing a tantrum and desperately hoping the whole time someone will notice and care enough to come and save you. your entire life is like a bad b-movie produced by someone with one shot and an unwavering commitment to those mitski lyrics — “and i know no one will save me / but i’m just asking for a kiss / give me one good movie kiss / and i’ll be alright.” well, nobody is actually coming to kiss you. nobody actually even wants to be around you at this point, but also everybody is avoidant of people with Big Emotional Reactions and therefore no one will come and say that to you outright. instead of worrying how you’re going to live the rest of your life without the romantic love you have so desperately craved and tried to codify into being since the time you can first remember making conscious thought, clean your apartment. do the dishes. block everyone’s number who, by continuing to associate with, you diminish your own sense of self worth and love. i mean really. we’re getting a little old to still be playing (and emphatically, relentlessly losing) at the same games, no? (i mean, really, just a historically unrivaled, unprecedented streak of absolute romantic failure. like, just a gobsmacking amount. you will be like an urban legend some day, the totality of all your romantic failures are that unbelievable and inconceivable to the average human mind. like we’ve literally never seen anyone with such bad romantic luck. like we’re actually starting to feel bad for you, but also we’re both still laughing hysterically every time we think about the hope on your face with the last one. god, that was so funny. you should really be an actress. pretty! big round eyes! clearly desperate. and just totally delusional enough to immerse yourself believably in just about any scene or scheme anyone presents.)
leo (july 23rd-august 22nd): this week you will be forced to confront the terrifying, earth-shattering, decidedly un-leo-like possibility — what would i do if nothing started going my way? what would i do if i couldn’t just bat my eyes and get what i wanted? in short, what would i do if nobody wanted to fuck me? don’t worry, i’ll answer that hypothetical for you: you would crumble. your entire worldview and social currency has been built on the fact that, as the sign ruled by the sun, you can (and will) always shine brightly. but maybe you can and should confront the reality that, just like how one day the sun will explode and we will get to experience the heat death of the universe (yay!), one day you, too, will get old. perhaps you can and should develop something more substantial to use in the hard, near-apocalyptic times ahead other than your usual protective plan of a lil bit of shine and sparkle. don’t get me wrong - a little glimmer will always go a comparatively long way. but as etheridge knight wrote, you’ve got to swim, not fuck, to stay alive. the ability to tread water does not a skilled swimmer make. but it can be a starting place. maybe. if you’re willing to let it be one.
virgo (august 23rd-september 22nd): oh, virgo. i’m so mean to you every week and every week you still come back and read this. why do you do this to yourself? just the poor, sick, abused chihuahua of the zodiac, in love with anyone who has their foot out and is ready to kick you. here’s a boot for you: just because you intellectualize all your suffering instead of actually feeling it doesn’t make you an intellectual. it makes you an emotionally resistant, pathologically avoidant control freak. kidding!!! you are so so so so normal and totally relatable and cool in every way. i think it’s really cool how instead of setting or verbalizing your boundaries and expectations with others, you just turn them over in your head for forty days straight and silently seethe with an all-consuming, nearly incapacitating resentment, and then still show up to your planned quarterly coffee date and say “hi!” with a bright-faced smile as if you haven’t been repeatedly fantasizing about bashing their head in with a baseball b at. i think it’s definitely admirable and healthy that you have compartmentalized your emotions and somatic experiences so extensively that you have now begun to fracture your very sense of identity and neatly put away and label all the fragments. i definitely don’t think you need therapy, and in fact i think you should probably be a therapist to teach the rest of us how to be more like you.
libra (september 23rd-ocobter 22nd): ah, libra — like a virgo but without any clue how to style an outfit, or even a lick of good taste. see above.
scorpio (october 23rd-november 21st): youre so so so so so so different than everyone else. you’re not like other girls. you’re like, real goth. real emo. real punk. so cool. so chic. so different. what, did you expect me to actually tell you anything real? you don’t listen to anyone or anything but the victim complex loudly blaring resistance and self pity at all times inside your head. why should i waste my good time and energy trying to articulate something to someone who would never listen? i have better things to do. i wish you did, too.
sagittarius (november 22nd-december 21st): another week of blithely ignoring all reality to continue dancing out in the sun without a lick of spf in sight! here’s a small dose of reality for you: the planet is not just dying, but being killed by people and corporations, and these people have names and addresses. taylor swift is one of them. so is jeff bezos. so is kylie jenner. so is joe biden! so is kamala harris. so is donald trump. so is boris johnson. so is texas governor greg abbott. so is the entire israeli occupation forces. so is the entire churning genocidal capitalist machine. all this untold death and suffering has two effects: one, we are all being called to look around us and see what needs to be done, and to then go and do that thing. two: the ozone layer is basically gone. you need to wear sunscreen for real.
capricorn (december 22nd-january 20th): you are not actually responsible for how everyone else conducts and manages their lives, you know. you just have assigned yourself undue (and frankly, unearned) responsibility over everyone else’s relatively autonomous domains because the other option is to reckon with how utterly insignificant and completely unimportant you, and by extension, your opinions are. i understand the world is a very scary place to live in, and imminent death and decay both very scary things to reckon with. i really, really do. but why on god’s green earth would you rather experience your one fleeting, random stab at consciousness as a miserable old controlling bureaucrat instead of feeling the sun on your skin? i mean, wear sunscreen, unlike sagittarius, but also you’re way smarter than sag, i don’t even have to say that. capricorn, nobody is going to listen to you just because you keep inserting yourself into everybody else’s personal lives and demanding people give you a podium and a private audience. in fact, everybody is less likely to listen to you because you insist so heavily on being listened to. no amount of playing stern headmistress or morality police to your beleaguered work colleagues or family members is going to make the reality of your eventual nothingness any less real.
aquarius (january 21st-february 18th): if anyone reads this i’m locked in a basement by jeff bezos and elon musk and they won’t let me out until i write enough sufficiently bitchy horoscope material for each sign so they can train their next model of generative AI on them. please help me my cats are being held hostage and i am so so so so scared.
pisces (february 19th-march 20th): ahh, pisces. the fish. the fishy little slimy lil guy. the slimeball. pisces, your problem is that you have absolutely zero sense of anyone else’s interiority or emotional lives. when you know the thing you want to do is going to cause immense pain and suffering (or even just mild annoyance) in another person’s life, and then you do it anyways, you just sink even deeper into the habit of being unable to sense or imagine another person’s inner world. all day long you run around causing problems for other people — being rude, demanding a stranger’s time to listen to your latest whimsy-filled half-baked delusion, refusing to teach others who are relying on you to teach them these things even the flimsiest definition of boundaries — and all day long you deny the rest of the world’s innate humanity because there is a voice in your head screaming relentlessly, “ME! ME! ME!” you have sold off your ability to meaningfully and deeply connect with others in exchange for the opportunity to essentially run through adult life LARPing as an indie game character, but what nobody has told you is that nobody else sees you as the whimsical, dream-drenched, suncatcher-esque light you see yourself in. literally not one of us. please do better. please grow up. please even just consider that it’s really not your right to just impose your will on everyone else all the time. i’m tired. you’re tired. isn’t it time to drop the act?
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this one made me giggle