Man, let me tell you, I have a habit that is just terrible, but it also pays off sometimes. I keep everything. I mean everything. I’m like a digital and physical hoarder of my own mistakes. So when my landlord finally kicked me out of that cheap downtown apartment I’d been rotting in, I had to pack up and face the mountains of junk I had accumulated since 2016.
I was just shoving things into black trash bags, completely exhausted, when I hit the last box. It was a file box, the kind you buy at the office supply store. Inside, I found the official paperwork from that disaster of a business venture, the one I started and crashed out of back in late 2017. Just seeing the company letterhead still makes me feel sick to my stomach, I swear it does.
I tossed the contracts aside, ready to just dump the whole box, but then I saw a flimsy piece of printer paper tucked way inside the back flap. It wasn’t a contract. It was a printout, a terrible quality one, of the weekly horoscope for Pisces, the week of October 23, 2017. I remembered this thing instantly. It all came flooding back. I grabbed my phone and pulled up the old email archive—thank God I never delete those—just to verify the exact words I obsessed over back then.
I found the email, dated October 22nd. I read the darn thing again, five years later, sitting on a dirty floor. This is my whole practice run, laid out right there in black and white, showing me where I slipped up. And believe me, this wasn’t about the stars being wrong. This was about me being a total fool.
What I Actually Did: The Dumb-Dumb Process
I scrolled through my bank statements for 2017. I checked the timeline for the business registration. I aligned every stupid step I took with what that simple, stupid astrology reading said.
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The reading said: “A massive career door will open this week. Walk through it without hesitation. The time to take that big risk is now.”
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What I did: I had a perfectly stable marketing job, but I quit it on the Tuesday right after I read this, purely based on that sentence. I didn’t have a firm business plan, just an idea. I didn’t even tell my spouse until the papers were signed and I had cashed out my 401k.
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The reading also said: “However, be wary of overlooking crucial financial details, and avoid signing anything during the Mars retrograde, which begins on Thursday.”
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What I missed: That terrible business partnership I jumped into? I signed the documents on Friday. I didn’t even know what “Mars retrograde” meant, I just skipped that sentence like it was a disclaimer on a food package. I saw the green light and hit the gas. I completely ignored the stop sign.
The big mistake? The absolute worst one? It wasn’t the risk. I’m okay with taking a gamble. The mistake was that I used the horoscope as a cheap, lazy excuse to do what I already wanted to do, regardless of the facts. I focused on the one line that validated my inner impatience and threw out the one that demanded caution. I wasn’t looking for guidance; I was looking for permission.
I realized that I only ever checked my horoscope when I was already teetering on a dumb decision and needed the universe to push me. I wanted to quit my job. I wanted to play business owner. The horoscope just gave me the language to justify blowing up my life. The fact that I actually printed it out and kept it with the final failed paperwork just proves how much I wanted to pin the blame on the cosmos instead of my own bad brain.
The business collapsed in February 2018. It burned through all my cash and tanked my credit score. It led to the messy separation that forced me to take that awful downtown apartment in the first place, the one I just got kicked out of. I wasted years trying to recover from a decision I made out of arrogance, not astrological mandate. Now, whenever I feel that urge to look up my sign, I force myself to stare at that old printout first. It’s a reminder: the stars don’t make the mistake. You make the mistake when you only read what you want to hear.
