Edited by: Mohan Rajagopal
Do you ever feel like you’re screwing everything up?
You spilled your coffee into an open electrical outlet, dropped your doughnut on your brand-new block print skirt, cracked your phone screen, and lost a couple of friends on the way.
No matter what you say, or how many ways you say it, you just can’t seem to say the right thing.
Communication feels impossible, hand-eye coordination is a distant dream and all your relationships crumble at the seams.
Yet, you plow through impulse after impulse, making fiery decisions in haste, only to deal with the repercussions at 3 am, under fairy lights while your roommate hacks her way through her third viral of the semester.
Back to Mercury!
Planets spin: we know that.
Mercury is a bit of an odd (fire) ball.
It usually revolves around the Sun faster than the Earth does, but every couple of months it loses interest and goes into complete sloth mode.
It slowly edges its way around its own orbit, sluggishly rotating around a Sun it isn’t sure it feels like staring at anymore.
This profound, terrifying period is called Mercury in retrograde.
Cue the jazz hands.
Hippy-dippy-crystal-donning-evil-eye-toting-Costar-checking people like me religiously dread this. Retrograde fun times are usually characterized by miscommunication, confusion, misunderstanding, fights, and general disarray.
Mercury retrograded really hard this September. Life spun me on its rollercoaster axis, chewed me up, and puked me onto the asphalt, somehow shinier than before.
I wish I could say Mercury floated out of retrograde and the storm clouds of angst and chaos that loomed overhead dissipated almost instantly. But, Mercury’s been out of retrograde for a while now and I’m still spilling my coffee and making questionable-!- decisions.
Am I in retrograde?
My google Docs threaten to disconnect from the Internet and halt my clacking, a tiny flea enters my room and buzzes around my duvet. A reminder of the stale energy that I can’t quite shake off no matter how many times I do my laundry.
Taylor Swift croons through my blue JBL speakers, only to careen into a chaotic One Direction song, their horny protestations of love for pretty girls not really helping my tumultuous brain with all its overheated whirring.
Brian the brain is ready to whip out an “I’m sorry!” for taking you on this boring ass journey through my burning house mind but I stop me; lately, I’ve been apologizing for almost everything I do.
Sorry for liking! Sorry for not liking! Sorry for saying too much! Sorry for not saying enough! Sorry for going to the loo! Sorry for being too distant! Sorry for being hard to understand! Sorry for being too predictable! Sorry for— you get the gist.
I realized that all the sorry’s that I’d been giving out for free left absolutely none for me.
We all know what happens when Mercury retrogrades, but where is the astrological manual for when you retrograde within yourself?
What does it mean to retrograde and why is it such a terrible thing anyway?
In the conventional sense, the word retrograde means to move backward. It is a regression of sorts into a so-called inferior state of being.
If I’ve learned anything from my own self-diagnosed retrograde, it is, that moving backward is not always a bad thing.
There are all these parts of ourselves that we leave in the past, in order to fit into the newer, more filtered versions of ourselves that we so carefully craft for the public.
Sometimes we need to retrograde just a little bit to remember that we aren’t really just the people we pretend to be. This is a quick reminder to go back and revisit all our loud, giggly pigtailed versions that we shed along the way.
I began this article conflicted and dissonant, constantly apologizing for everything I was saying and doing.
I felt like myself at 10 again, standing behind my bright marzipan Smurf birthday cake, trying so hard to make sure everyone got a slice, I forgot to taste it myself. I’ve been struggling to reclaim my proverbial birthday cake for the past couple of weeks, trying to get a slice of myself while the world seems to come at me with manic smiles and plastic birthday knives.
It isn’t until you’re knee-deep in everyone else’s shit that you realize, maybe it’s time to sort your own.
So I straightened my back.
It’s easy to cower, and it’s natural to be afraid, but sometimes you just have to look the playground bullies in the eye and remind yourself of who you were and still are.
It’s okay to like yourself, it’s okay to put yourself first. I’m not saying this in the preachy Instagrammy-feel-good self-love way, I’m saying this in the most basic-human-decency way.
We spend so long trying to be liked by everyone else, that we sometimes forget to like ourselves, I’m not saying love, I’m saying like -it’s the bare minimum!
It’s okay to look back at baby pictures and find yourself really freaking cute, it’s okay to eat that extra lava cake, and it’s okay to look in the mirror and be cool with what you see.
You don’t have to wait for the world to tell you that you’re good enough to start liking yourself.
Stuff doesn’t magically get easier, and problems don’t disappear overnight, but when you bridge the dissonance of judgment and dislike within your own mind, nothing really matters anymore.
Other people’s opinions don’t get under your skin like thorny barbed wire, nothing seems that hard or that important, because in this crazy, weird lonely place, you have yourself, unconditionally.
So for everyone who feels crappy and apologetic and just generally retrograde-y, this long-ass, not very funny, oddly serious piece is a little reminder to give yourself a warm hug and treat yourself to a gooey lava cake.😋
You’ve come a long, long way.