What the heck is going on with my Co-Star?
Being a basic astrology hoe, I’ve had the Co-Star app downloaded to my phone for years. Even though I know that as far as astrology apps go, this one is a hot bin of trash, I’m still excited to get my dose of cryptic non-astrology notifications every day like a fool. Around noon, Monday through Sunday, my phone lights up with “You day at a glance” and a strange little message underneath.
The strangeness of Co-Star daily notifications isn’t a new thing, but I’ve noticed something weird with some of my notifications and daily writeups from the app. While they’ve always been a bit negative and strange, some of these new messages seem to hit a little too on the nose with me dealing with my…current situation (that I’ve never once talked about in this newsletter or on social media or while hanging out. My life is completely normal and fun not mostly centered around caregiving). For starters, look at this one:
It says, “This month, you are ready to pay attention to whether your sense of guilt and indebtedness is causing you to sacrifice your own well being for the sake of someone else.” From an app that’s based on algorithms, this feels way too on the nose. I’m not shy of speaking on this subject, but taking care of my parents is definitely something that I do out of guilt and indebtedness and I am 100 percent sacrificing my own well being, health, and pretty much every aspect of my life in order to care for other people. “Notice opportunities,” it says? I would love to, and I try to take them, but sometimes crisis happens so frequently and yet so unpredictably it’s really difficult to plan my future around all the other stuff.
This one popped up on a day that I was stuck at my parents’ house for a week, following yet another bout of pneumonia that my dad had (this happens about once a month now) meaning I spent not only the whole weekend, but most of the week hanging out and sleeping at their place on a pull-out couch. While the general feeling of being a caregiver is pretty lonely and isolating, these periods are that but much worse. Similar to the feeling of a goldfish having to chill in a bowl way too small for them (a single goldfish needs a tank larger than you’d think to be happy in it, it turns out).
Similarly to the last post, this one showed up a few weeks later. Yes, my body does reject this situation wholeheartedly. I am craving rest at this point.
As someone who has needed—and still desperately needs—an ungodly amount of help all the time in order to take care of myself on top of two other people, I know this. I also know that a lot of the time while people are willing to help you do kind of have to take the initiative to ask for help (and be specific about it!), which feels humiliating and bad until you’ve done it so much you truly feel nothing inside. That’s where I’m at.
Please!! I am doing ENOUGH already!
Yes, we call this a nightmare actually.
Thanks.
Being ominous aside, what does this all exactly mean? Is this bad astrology app actually really good and has figured out the ins and outs of my personal life? Or are these messages pretty general and I’d feel them relate to me in a similar way if my life was on a completely different track? Would I relate to these notifications if they popped up on my phone a year and a half ago? This app feels like a hack psychic, being specific enough to resonate but also vague enough to never be wrong, so yeah, probably.
Now that I’m in the second quarter of my 28th year of living, I’m fully in deep with what astrology people call my Saturn return. It happens to everyone, believing in astrology or not, because it just means that’s the time that Saturn ends up in the same position in the sky as it did on the day you were born, which takes about 28-29 years for Saturn to do. For those who believe that has any kind of meaning, this is kind of your first official “coming of age” where you go through some tough shit and come out a stronger, more mature person. For the people who already went through some tough shit before the age of 28 (I thought I was in that camp already), sometimes the Saturn return is like, “You’ve been through enough. Here’s a little break from all that.” I thought I qualified but it turns out I am getting no such thing as a break. The opposite of a break, if you will.
I got into astrology during another time of hardship when I spent years living with my parents after college (if you know, you know). It was a way to cope with things—maybe I can process my situation better if I knew that things are off because Pluto is doing this thing with Neptune or whatever, I am the way I am because the sun was in Cancer when I was born, etc. When things are good I tend to forget about my astrology app altogether. If I’m starting to date someone, I will consult my horoscopes and if I get dumped I am living as if they are gospel.
Presently, though? I’m not much of a believer as I thought I would be in such hard times. Things like heartbreak and failing a job interview suck, but those are hardships that, in the grand scheme of things, pass and I find that astrology can be good to process emotions through those. But something like a terminal illness and a parent’s young death on the horizon are a lot bigger, a lot heavier, and it just feels a bit wrong to consult a bunch of planet positions to figure out what force is causing this. Sometimes there is no reason—bad things just happen and nobody asks for them to happen. There is no divine reason that anyone gets brain cancer. There is no planetary explanation for why your father’s poor life choices have to affect your own well-being. Things just happen, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a Libra or a Sagittarius, you have to make a choice on how to get through the bad things.
Maybe a Saturn return is real and this is the heavens testing me, but more likely this has just come as really bad timing. This shit could’ve happened to me when I was 25 or 68. Who fucking knows, right?
Co-Star isn’t sending cryptic messages just to me, a person going through a major prolonged tragedy. Co-Star is sending cryptic messages to literally everyone, no matter what their natal chart looks like—making anything become their own major tragedy if they try hard enough. An app isn’t going to predict your future and an algorithm is not going to give you sound advice. That being said, I’m still going to look forward to seeing my day at a glance.
Some Things I’m Enjoying This Week
I thought it might be fun to share some things that I’ve been enjoying this week, so here we go!
Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery by Defunctland
The 1973 classic Scorsese film, Goncharov
I downloaded a weird app on my computer to play the Gaia Online mmorpg, zOMG! and I’m so bad at it