the full moon in aquarius for writers

with writing prompt horoscopes

Aug 22, 2021

Hi everyone,

A few quick notes first!

First, I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be teaching a 4-week course with Catapult this fall on book proposals for nonfiction writers — to find out more, click here!

Second (CW): this newsletter contains mentions of pet death.

Xx,

Jeanna

A little more than a week ago, I turned in my final chapters to my editor. I posted about it on Twitter, mostly as a reminder to myself that yes, this was something I did. I wasn’t feeling particularly celebratory, but I was worried that if I didn’t write down that it had happened, I would forget the day altogether. I already knew that the following morning, I would be saying goodbye to my cat, Keats.

He had been in abject liver failure for several days, for the second time since I had adopted him six weeks prior. By the time we went into the vet’s office for a final goodbye, every person on staff knew him — it was our third visit that week alone. Even the receptionist came in to give him a kiss on the head before telling him to travel well.

What are you doing to celebrate? came the inevitable, lovely and well-meaning questions and texts from friends who knew I’d finished this round of the book, but didn’t yet know about my cat.

Mostly, I felt like curling up in a ball and crying.

One of the reasons I adopted a cat was to help with my anxiety, which had been spiking and not letting up as I neared the end of my book — “the edge” of my book, as my writing group had put it. The anxiety-and-depression cocktail that my brain serves up is one I’ve lived with for ages — it’s a feature of the “Hello, you are queer” welcome kit — but it hadn’t been debilitatingly bad in nearly a decade, since my mid-twenties when I was getting divorced and coming out and blowing up my life to start over and doing all the things the book is about.

This summer, I’ve ended up just laying on the couch, unable to function because my heart was racing so badly on more occasions than I’ve been comfortable with, which, for my generally high-functioning, highly productive self writing on a deadline, has been less than welcome. I think it’s about the book, I said over and over to my therapist, nervous as I stared down the inevitable next few years of my life in which book-things would only ramp up.

I made an appointment with my doctor and got a referral to a psychiatrist, but I also looked into lifestyle shifts that might help reset me in a more low-key, everyday way — in ways that weren’t just incumbent on me having the energy to do more yoga.

I love dogs but had grown up with cats (one who I adopted in my adolescence, Puck, is still alive and kicking with my mom at the ripe old age of 19). Once I got the idea of adopting a pet in my head, it stuck. An animal companion would be a great idea, wouldn’t it? The image of a cat curled up at my feet as I wrote was one I quickly became attached to.

Keats in his fluffy pink bed underneath my desk

For a time, it was also a reality.

The Full Moon in Aquarius arrived at 8:02a ET this morning. Full moons are often bringing something to completion, it’s true, but language around them often gets stuck in the language of productivity — of projects done and finished and out the door, the attitude of “what's next?” hanging in the air with no room for denouement. No room to unfurl. No room to be. (No room to grieve.)

The two weeks after a full moon are the come-down from that peak, after all: there are two weeks from every new moon to full moon — the build, the tension, the production — and then there's the release, the finishing touches, the balloon deflating, the break, the rest, before another new moon starts the cycle again.

Sometimes, it feels like we skip that part.

Long before Keats took another turn for the worse, it had become apparent that I was set to hit my September book deadline with several weeks to spare. I was going to have more of that most precious gift: time.

When I thought about how I wanted to use the extra weeks, the answer was obvious. Time off, away from the project that has consumed me for the last five years. I wanted to not look at it for as long as humanly possible. I wanted to not read, not research, not listen to my chapter playlists, not be in that headspace. To be able to come back to revisions with fresh eyes.

The week away has been sadder than I thought it would be — with everything that happened, of course it has been. But I also wonder if it would have been sad anyway: if this is one of the inevitable dips and crashes along the creative journey. If all that anxiety building up over the summer was hurtling toward this deadline, and that once it was done, it dissipated like a wave hitting the sand.

This kind of moment can be profoundly isolating. If all I’d been feeling was book exhaustion, I may well have withdrawn. But the combined factor of cat grief pushed me to reach out: to catch up with friends, to sit in friends’ backyards, to talk. To not self-isolate like a witch in the tower, but to let others into the process, to surf with me on the wave as it was happening. My friends wanted to support me: wanted me to come over to their houses, or to come to mine, to send me Venmo money for takeout and wine and coffee.

It turns out, I’m not the only one in this place at this particular moment — too many of my people have been sitting with this tension of big joy/big grief, too.

Community isn’t just celebrating the wins; it’s also sitting with folks in the loss.

This Full Moon happens to be in Aquarius, an air sign often associated with community and friendship and connection. Aquarius is often called a disrupter of systems, but it also stabilizes them: it’s the air sign that is Saturn-ruled, that is that shoulder to cry on, even if it might not prefer to do much public crying itself. Sitting with structured Saturn and offering up some of Jupiter’s medicine, this moon also has a fair bit to say about the responsibilities we have to ourselves and to others we are in relationship with.

When I think about Aquarius and community, I think about intention, about chosen family, about the process of choosing family — day in, day out. My dear friend Kendra Austin recently wrote a beautiful newsletter on the tiny rituals of big friendship and specifically called out bids for connection, something that Dr. John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute have called the singular “fundamental unit of emotional connection.”

In grief and in celebration, I shared what I was going through, and so many friends tossed out lifeline-like offers of support — “bids” — that I chose to catch, and then chose to send back in return. That’s how a relationship gets built, how a community gets built, bit by bit.

I do not believe that “everything happens for a reason.” I think that for as much as there are synchronicities, the universe is just as often random, and that life, as Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is “nasty, brutish, and short” — and that it’s for this reason that it is incumbent upon us to create as much joy and connection as we can.

I also know that life is never just one thing, that — astrologically speaking — we are never only in just one cycle, and that grief and joy co-exist as often as they are disparate, that they can serve as co-catalysts if we let them, that letting other people into our joy and into our sadness can allow a spaciousness to emerge such that we do not have to carry our burdens alone.

This has been a hard summer. But the tarot card that has been stalking me for the last few months — and whose energy I have felt so deeply, so profoundly this last week — is the 10 of Cups (specifically, the 10 of Emotions from the Muse Tarot): a card that is about finding joyful connection in the support of one’s beloveds.

Writing can be a solitary practice, friends, but it’s not one you have to do alone.

Writing Prompt Horoscopes for the Full Moon in Aquarius

What is your attitude toward asking for help? Where do you have a tendency to isolate? What areas of life could use support right now, and from who — friends, family, professionals, peers?
What is your attitude toward offering help? Who in your life do you support, and how do you feel about those relationships? How do you like to give to others (love languages might be a lens here)? What boundaries need to be enforced for you to feel safely in community with others?
How do the above questions/practices translate when it comes to creativity, to your writing life?

If you read this newsletter and want to help it grow (and support my work!), consider becoming a paid subscriber. The subscription includes a detailed guide to every month’s upcoming astrology and how it impacts writers. Best days to pitch or revise? It’s all in there. It also includes specialty newsletters on planetary events like major ingresses, Mercury Retrograde, and more.

If you’re trans, please email and you’ll get a free subscription, no questions asked. If you’d like to sponsor a subscription for a trans reader, you can donate one here.

You can also share the newsletter on social! Tag me on Twitter and Instagram — let’s connect.