I’ve done a lot of different jobs in my time: writer, group home worker, insurance adjuster, Internet system operator, letting people yell at me about their phone service, personal assistant… but of all the titles I’ve had, “astrologer” has stuck the longest.
I’ve been a professional astrologer for over twenty years, but the story really begins back when I was six years old, when I was handed a book (The Compleat Astrologer, which is still in print and is still great, by the way) by my mother. “There’s too much math for me,” she said. Besides, the book’s original owner — my then-twenty-year-old sister — had been hauled away by the cops for what everyone assumed would be the last time, and wouldn’t be needing reading material, it seems.
(That’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years: astrologers usually come from screwy family backgrounds. We all come to the job via different paths, but usually it’s the need to make sense of Existence that we have in common.)
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I had gone to college to learn psychology and counseling. I was dissatisfied with it. Helping people is what I wanted to do, but traditional techniques always seemed to result in scatter-shot results. For a while I secretly integrated astrology into more mainstream techniques, and I started to get results. It’s one thing to come to the conclusion that a client is having a bad time with their children, but it’s quite another to be able to tell that client that these problems (which started about ten months ago) are a result of Transit X, and should be wrapped up in another four months.
The more I did this, the more there was no looking back. I had become an astrologer, and could only bill myself as such. I had traded in prestige for results.
Frankly, I am a HUGE fan of “results.”
The more I understood astrology, the more I could see the actual mechanics of why this person gets along with that person, but trouble always flares up over scheduling or sexual mismatches or communication styles, or what have you. If psychology is like decoding the plot of a movie you’re watching, then astrology is like decoding the plot of that movie with a copy of the script in hand, and an interview with the director and writer as to what their thoughts were during filming. It’s simply more comprehensive and easier to make sense of the movie with all that additional background material at hand. And of course, seeing the source of an issue means you’re at least halfway to finding the solution.
Oh, and also: astrology can predict the future. How can you say no to something that both tells you why your mate is acting up AND how long it’s going to last?
That’s why I’m an astrologer. I like helping people, and I like seeing how the individual parts add up to a Whole Person, and how those parts interact with other Whole Person’s parts, and with the world around them.
And yeah… predicting the future accurately is pretty cool too.
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