To be sure, the Internet has networked and expanded practically every subculture under the sun, and astrology is no exception. But it’s also offered a crucial democratizing element for astrology buffs: immediate access to astronomical data, past and present. Anyone can pull up their birth chart—a snapshot of the heavens at the time and place you were born—in just a few seconds, with the click of a button, at any number of online astrology hubs.

It is a confusing diagram, a wheel of wedges mapping the sky, with clusters of arcane symbols annotated with numbers. Sharp lines illustrate the angles between crucial points, and the circle is hashed with minute gradations, so every aspect of the sky at this moment can be carefully measured. Even at the point when the chart is gibberish, it’s still special: it’s a window into the moment of your origin, the map found at the entrance to your life. There is probably no greater manifestation of purported millennial penchant for navel-gazing than this construct, which asks the participant to dwell, over and over again, on the moment of their birth. But at the same time, trying to understand that moment links together two of the biggest mysteries of a person’s existence into one grand idea: Why am I the way I am? and, What is going to happen to me? They are both the same question: Am I going to be O.K.? The universe is pitiless and vast, but when all else fails, you can pore over a diagram to study your place in it.

II.

This summer, a familiar self-loathing roared back into my life. Depression is always useless, but it’s especially useless when everything else is going pretty well. Somehow, I got a job writing for this magazine, and convinced a nice man to marry me. But a residual feeling of failure remained; my world felt cloaked in a layer of unreality, as if this life, this happiness, wasn’t mine to keep. I couldn’t shake a sense of dread—a dread, it turns out, I’d been carrying my whole life. It feels like a dark, spreading stain at the center of my mind, one that I carefully keep at bay with my pill and my therapist and occasional, half-hearted jogging. But it doesn’t always work, and sometimes the stain bleeds out.

Everybody has a struggle like that, right? If it’s not dread, it’s despair; or self-loathing, or grief. The demon, the sinner, the mental illness, the internalized trauma. And there, on that liminal battlefield, where it’s going in the right direction but it feels really bad? That’s where astrology really works. It provides the aching moments of life with the building blocks of metaphor—metaphor that can eventually become story, for oneself or for others. Astrology gives us the tools to tell stories for ourselves—to rewrite the drama of our circle of friends as a struggle of planetary forces; to reinterpret trauma as one step on a journey towards peace. And it does feel magical when a story appears to know you intimately; when it reveals to you something you weren’t aware of, or something you had not yet said out loud. We are inclined to tell ourselves stories; our ancestors knew they were a tool for survival.

It’s a vision of the world that substitutes poetic license for accuracy, or tries to confer beauty onto chaos. But there’s an inherent connection between telling stories and healing; between self-expression and self-acceptance, in the midst of the known and unknown territories of life. Throughout my life, having a story, or an idea of a story, helped me get through the moment-to-moment of having to feel it all. It helped this summer. (Other things that helped: Fancy ice cream, vaping on the fire escape, listening to The Weeknd. I’m not proud.) I read the online posts from astrologer Chani Nicholas for guidance. She assured her readers that it was an intense time, especially for those of us with Capricorn in our chart. Capricorn being my rising sign, the stars indicated emotional turmoil over my very existence, my struggle with purpose and being and self. I keep returning to one question she posed, late in August, as I was trying to make this piece come together. “What does it mean to get to live, even a teeny-tiny part, of your dream?”