October Horoscopes for Queer Women: Inviting New Experiences

What October has in store for your zodiac sign.

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Experience is something you can never lose.

October is defined by a retrograding Venus square transiting north node, opposite a retrograding Uranus. All three planets are at the early degrees of fixed signs. On the 24th, we get a full moon in Taurus that’s also in the early degrees. If I were to summarize the month of October in an image, it’d be the World tarot card.

The fixed signs are about experience. There’s experience in having accomplished something—there’s power (Scorpio), ownership (Taurus), fame (Leo), and ingenuity (Aquarius). There’s also a naivety that we lose from gaining experience, which we can never remember in the original setting, once we have left it behind us. Experience makes us afraid of losing control because we have something to lose now. Our experienced selves, our numb selves, our learned selves are all survival skins that we have learned to put on. Now it’s time to learn to take them off, to refashion them, to loosen what needs loosening and to tighten what needs tightening.

There are times this month that will make us feel afraid of our own power. We will be afraid of losing things we never thought we deserved in the first place. We are afraid of losing attention or social capital.

You’ve learned that you can’t fall in love the way you did in your teens. You have to make sure the relationship makes you empowered, that the person deserves you, that there are real consequences to love. You had to give up on hundreds of dreams from being born to where you are now. You had to do it because, to build one thing up, you needed to focus your resources and prioritize your prior experience.

There’s a dull pride to these lessons. You’ve become a harder person because you wanted to teach the world that you didn’t need to be saved. On the New Moon in Libra on October 9th, really weigh your needs against your wants. Decide on what you need to do to keep moving forward. There’s a wonderful trap in having too much experience. You can get stuck in your ways very easily.

The night of the Full Moon in Taurus on the 24th can feel dramatic if that’s what you need to break down your need to control. The trick is prioritizing self-trust above all else. You learned that you need to feign unfeelingness to keep your emotional reactions from destroying everything. You learned that, to be trustworthy, you had to learn how to almost become a psychopath, to not lose yourself to your empathy. You’ll lose those constructions of control this month because what you need its trust in yourself. 

In the words of Edward Elric, “A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain anything without sacrificing something else in return, but once you have overcome it and made it your own… you will gain an irreplaceable fullmetal heart.”

You haven’t become too brittle for nothing. You’ve hardened yourself because you’re making yourself your own. Your heart doesn’t have to be as soft as glue to still beat. It’s titanium now, or automail, and nothing it’s felt is ever meaningless.

Read for your rising sign! If you don’t know your rising sign, read your Sun and Moon.

Aries:

Your struggle with and against money has given you tunnel vision. You’re so concerned with gaining the resources you need to sustain your work that you’ve forgotten that resources are just a means for something else. There’s no such thing as money for money’s sake. You’re jaded because you think that no one will give you what you deserve unless you demand it. Try making a larger and longer case for it instead.

Believe in what you want to materialize. Learn to use your money to create trust. Build alliances that work with your learned sense of practicality. Make work happen in which everyone gets paid. Truly believe that a dollar you earned isn’t a dollar taken from someone else, but a dollar that you reinvest into the things you want to grow. Wash your money from its karma.

Taurus:

Your own self-control is getting out of control. You think that you know yourself inside and out, what your habits and patterns are. You think that you have a great deal of experience being you. You let no one else tell you who you are or what you are because of this experience. The thing is, you’ve become a caricature of yourself. You’re now allowing your own growth because you think you know yourself so well.

There’s the intentional you and there’s the consequential you. You have no control over what sorts of consequences your own existence has on the world. Your experience of yourself has led to alienation. You have no experience of the person you will be tomorrow. Don’t let it be the same person you were yesterday.

Gemini:

The hardest thing to trust is your own subconscious. There’s a jaded quality to your very imagination that makes you feel like you’re living in a box. You’ve envisioned your dreams through the screen and assume that you’re a machine. You’ve made the error of assuming that all your fantasies are tropes that can be sold and bought through some medium of language.

What you need is self-awareness. Your dreams are your own, and they’re strange in a way that doesn’t follow some marketing formula because you’re living a life that no one else has ever lived before. Recognize what mythologies you’ve subscribed to without realizing. Your freedom depends on you realizing the limitations already in place, not pretending to exercise free will inside of them.

Cancer:

You have shunned your community because you assumed that there is no one there who is really for you. You assume that everyone will leave you sooner or later, and inside you is only a great gap of inevitable misunderstanding. You’ve isolated yourself from your peers because you’d rather be alone in your room than alone in a crowd.

Find your comrades again. You don’t understand where everyone is the room is coming from. You don’t really know their emotional patterns to a tee. There are things that friendship offers you when it’s with people your own age. Have some fun with people who you enjoy. Trust that there are people who are there for you when you’re down or up.

Leo:

You think that you’re so experienced in the world, that there’s nothing you want anymore. You’ve done it all, proved it all, to everyone who underestimated you in the past. You’ve met all your old goals, or found that they weren’t worth having, so what’s the point of having new ones? You’ve been a rock star, an artist, and the lived all your best lives already.

That’s not true, Leo, and you know it isn’t. There is so much power within you that you haven’t used yet. You’ve allowed yourself to become jaded in your visions because you haven’t learned to use disappointment in the right way. Laugh at your own disappointment with a tongue in each cheek. Allow yourself to trust what you really want again.

Virgo:

You’re too invested in the details, too busy talking to yourself in your own head. You’ll never be perfect and that’s the truth. Stop worrying over and weighing every detail to make sure that it’s the perfect move, that it’s right for you. You will never know until you give something a try. It’s through your mistakes and feeling discomfort that you really understand what you need, that you learn to trust yourself.

Speak up. Say the wrong thing, the impolite thing, the politically incorrect thing, the problematic thing. Be the bigot in the room. Let yourself voice where you’re at right now so that you can hear it and feel the consequences. Don’t be afraid of your own, imperfect position. Let yourself be wrong for once.

Libra:

You don’t trust someone else to make you feel good. Sexual experience has taught you a few things and made you forget how to relax. You’ve learned to recognize real dangers, how to recognize abusers and predators. Remember how to play and open yourself when you’ve found someone to build intimacy with.

Your partner is just as scarred as you are. Together, both your desires and fears are created through trauma. You may share some traumas while remaining different people. Learn how to recognize another person’s pain through your own. Empathy will build a place inside yourself that you didn’t realize was feeling weak.

Scorpio:

You can’t control other people. if you think that you know where someone is coming from, because you’ve been there before, you’ll just find yourself talking with other versions of yourself over and over again. You think you know how other people see you, but you have no idea. 

You’ve learned that it’s impossible to trust someone when you assume that they’re another version of yourself. Now, see what happens when you trust that there are unknowns in another soul that you will never comprehend. You will never know something truly, and it’s within that acceptance that trust begins to happen. Trust happen despite, not because of.

Sagittarius:

The one thing you do not have control over is your own body. You will never control your body. It follows the rules of the universe, which existed before your time, and will keep existing after your time. The stuff that you are made out of is the karmic remains of the stuff of life.

Never assume that you understand more than your body understands. You’ve only been alive for the few short years of your lifetime. Your body has inside of it countless cycles of life and death. It understands what it’s like to be a tree, a mouse, and a star. Listen to it when it tells you stories when you’re sleeping. Listen to it when it asks you for something when you’re awake. You’ll find truth only when you listen to your DNA.

Capricorn:

Every failed love affair in your life has taught you to distrust your own feelings. You’ve become so good at putting things away to appear a fully rational and sane person that you’ve accidentally put yourself away on some shelf and locked it away. You forgot the most important magic available to you. You forgot how to fall in love.

Fall hard for something. Get carried away. You have no control in this situation. Real love means that you amazed at your own generosity, that you find out you have so much inside you in a place you thought had already become sparse. The best thing you can do for yourself right now is to give without expectation. It will make you realize that you have so much more than what you assumed.

Aquarius:

You think you know what it means to accomplish something, but you don’t have any idea simply because you’ve never learned to enjoy your accomplishments. You’ve never learned how to take a compliment or feel private abundance without the need to impress other people. You’ve never learned what it means for you to feel safe. You feel profoundly disillusioned by anything you accomplish because you never learned to relax.

You need some privacy this month. Accomplish something on your own that you can never show off to anyone, something that only means something to you that doesn’t get you any likes on social media. Take pride and pleasure in something that only you can enjoy. Speak of this to no one. Feel happy by yourself.

Pisces:

When you think that you know everything there is to know, you only make a fool out of yourself. Embrace that potential to be the fool. Remember what it was like before you developed your grand narrative of how the world works and what it means to live in it. You don’t know everything because you can’t possibly understand everything there is to understand. There are still, luckily, signs that you’re wrong about the process of your own demise.

You think that you’ve experienced enough of this world, but you really haven’t. You still have a part of you that gladly understands nothing. Seek out situations that confuse you. It’s when you’re confused that you’re really learning. Resist situations where old tropes, of saviorism or victimhood, get you what you already think you want. You need curiosity above all else, and you’ll never get it if you feed your need to be pitied above all else.


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