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An Open Letter to My Friends Who Don’t Believe in Astrology

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Mass Amherst chapter.

To my so-called “friends” who don’t believe in astrology:

Hi! How are you? Just kidding. I already know, because I just checked your horoscope while you sat there rolling your eyes at me like the Capricorn you are. 

Look, I get it. I’m a Virgo. I’m one of those people who can’t stop thinking and tends to overanalyze every single thing I’ve ever done or every potential thing that could ever happen. And from a logical, analytical standpoint, astrology makes no sense. How can the alignment of the planets tell us fundamental characteristics of our personalities? And how can it accurately predict the way our lives are going in this moment, and the direction they are headed?

To be honest, I don’t know. All I know is that it can’t be a coincidence that my horoscope told me I was going to have a great stroke of luck and then someone offered me discounted concert tickets that very same day. It can’t be a coincidence that the weeks when Mercury was in retrograde were some of the worst weeks of my entire life. And it can’t be a coincidence that some of my favorite people have birthdays that fall within the same months of the year.

I’ve heard all your excuses before. “I’m nothing like my sign” is one of your go-tos. News flash: it’s not all about your Sun sign! Your Moon sign is just as important. And let’s not forget your rising sign, or the fact that you might be on the cusp of another zodiac sign and therefore share qualities with it.

“Some things are true and some things aren’t,” you counter. “People just listen to what resonates with them and ignore everything that doesn’t.” Well, have you ever considered that everything about astrology is true, and we simply ignore what we don’t want to believe about ourselves? The Universe is so large — and I’m sorry, but I simply refuse to believe that the grocery store running out of my favorite brand of shaving cream for the third time in a row is not due to some omnipotent cosmic force testing my patience as a consumer. I refuse to believe that seeing extremely attractive people in the dining hall while scarfing down a large plate of fries by myself is not because some all-powerful divinity needs something to laugh at up there in the sky.

Life is hard, and I need something to believe in that doesn’t make me beg for forgiveness for everything I’ve ever done wrong (which is probably quite a lot). So if you want to sit there rolling your eyes and silently judging me while I check your daily horoscope, you’re entitled to do that. Also, if you want to continue to roll your eyes while I announce my daily horoscope to the room and candidly overshare about how it relates to my pitiful sex life, you’re entitled to do that, too. And if you keep your eyes rolled while I show everyone the birth chart I have bookmarked on my phone, it’s fine because my moon sign is Aries and I can handle that. But the second you open your mouth and explicitly state that astrology is fake as I’m calculating the birth chart of the person next to me, that’s where I draw the line. No need to kill my vibe.  

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Olivia Banks

U Mass Amherst

Olivia is a freshman undergraduate student at UMass Amherst. She is an English major, runner, gluten enthusiast, Virgo, animal lover and habitual SNL watcher. She also loves to read, write, and tell terrible jokes.
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