Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Early Monday morning, Mercury retrograde ends. After moving backward through proud Leo for most of the past month, the planet of communication is back on track again, making it easier to get along with others. The people around you will no longer be so quick to take offense, or so resistant to changing their minds. But it’ll take a bit more time for the retrograde confusion to fully wear off, so for now, try to keep your recklessness in check.
Sometimes, even when you’re full of great ideas, you struggle to actually implement any of them. You can envision with perfect clarity how things will work out, but when it comes time to take the first step, you freeze up. If you’ve felt trapped in the brainstorming stage lately, this week is an ideal opportunity to get the ball rolling. You’ve already done most of the hard mental work; all that’s left now is to finally make them a reality.
Lately, people have been turning to you for advice more than usual. You’ve started to suspect, though, that some of your friends don’t actually want advice, but someone who will run their lives for them, taking the stress of decision-making off their plates. If you feel like you’ve taken on more responsibility than you’re able or willing to deal with, don’t hesitate to take a step back this week. While you owe your kindness and support to the people you love, it isn’t your job to do all the hard work for them.
You’re probably someone who thrives with a busy schedule and plenty of mental stimulation. It’s not that you’re an overachiever, just that you need an outlet for all your thoughts. Lately, though, it’s possible that you’ve been struggling to keep everything straight; random tasks have fallen through the cracks and important pieces of information have slipped your mind. You might worry that you’re losing your competence or your intellectual spark — but that fear isn’t grounded in reality, and this week you’ll be reminded that you’re as capable as ever.
It’s incredibly easy to lose track of where your time goes. You might tell yourself that you just want to relax for a couple minutes, only to spend the whole day lounging around. Or you might insist that you’ll only complete one more task before taking a break, only to get so caught up in work that you never get to rest. Your focus is so variable that it can feel impossible to be intentional about how you spend your time. But this week, give it your best shot anyway. Even if you worry you’ve wasted too much time already, you still have a chance to try again.
Although you recognize that personal growth is a good thing, there’s a part of you that feels sheepish. Learning new skills makes you feel strangely ashamed that you were once so ignorant; broadening your perspective reinforces the fact that you were once narrowminded. But this week, try to let go of the shame. Nobody was born knowing everything — as long as you’re genuinely doing your best to grow, you can be proud of your progress independent of your past self.
While some people avoid lingering on complicated issues, you tend to do some of your best thinking when faced with a truly thorny question. You’re not afraid of complex problems without obvious solutions, and you have faith in your ability to remain clear-eyed in even the most chaotic situations. But you do occasionally get stuck, and part of you has been worrying that you’ll have to admit defeat this time. But don’t give up quite yet. This week, if you stop trying to force the issue, a solution might arrive on its own.
When you share your ideas with others, only to get harshly critical feedback, it’s enough to make you want to clam up forever. You’d rather keep your creativity to yourself than risk being mocked for it. This week, though, could be a good time to give it another shot. Maybe some people don’t quite get your unconventional approach, or maybe they even feel threatened by it — but if you’re brave and keep making the effort to connect, you’ll find plenty of others who welcome it.
There are times when it seems like nothing is going according to plan. Even if nothing particularly bad is happening to you, life appears to be unfolding haphazardly, and you struggle to make any headway toward your goals. This week, though, you might slowly discover that you’ve still been making progress — it just hasn’t been linear. All of your small victories and seemingly random life experiences are adding up to a bigger picture, even if you can’t appreciate it in the moment.
If you could have your way, you’d never have to waste any energy on life’s mundane tasks; you’d be able to spend all your time pondering big questions and focusing on major ambitions. Lately, though, it feels life has been nothing but the boring details — and part of you might even feel like you’ve been falling short on them. This week, you have a chance to catch up on some of the little things you’ve let slip, and once you do, you’ll feel better about returning your focus to what really matters to you.
For the most part, you have an excellent sense for nonverbal cues; if someone’s being a bit reticent, you’re good at reading the lines to figure out what’s really going on. Sometimes, though, your radar gets scrambled. Maybe you come to the wrong conclusions about someone, or maybe you just can’t read them at all. This week, you might find more clarity if you stopped trying to decipher hidden clues in people’s behavior, and simply asked them directly about what you want to know.
Disagreements with the people you love are inevitable, and sometimes they can even be helpful — but that doesn’t make them any easier in the moment. Lately, especially, you’ve probably been involved in more conflict than you’d like, and part of you has started to worry that it signals a fundamental incompatibility with the people in your life. Really, though, you probably have nothing to worry about. Sometimes, everyone is a bit more fussy and disagreeable than usual, but it doesn’t last forever, and this week, you’ll sense that you’re finally getting back to a more even footing.
The problem with learning from your mistakes is that it requires you to make mistakes in the first place. While you might not consider yourself a perfectionist, you tend to be inordinately hard on yourself; when you make a decision that goes badly, or accidentally hurt a friend’s feelings, you can easily start to spiral, imagining that you’ll never recover. So this week, try to remember that your occasional missteps are all part of the process, and if you can see them as learning opportunities, you’ll waste a lot less time on self-recrimination.
Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of August 3rd. The weekly horoscopes for the week of August 17th will be online next Sunday.
Buy Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, here.
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