New Moon, new us. Each New Moon is an optimal time for setting intentions, clarifying how we choose to live our wild and precious lives — at least for the next lunation.
Wednesday’s new moon in Leo marked a particularly intense moment of the Venus retrograde cycle, bringing up ALL our frustrating relationship shit and forcing us to look squarely at what isn’t working anymore (shoutout to the absolute onslaught of celebrity breakups this Leo szn. #freebritney).
Don’t be surprised if an unexpected ex pops up like a jumpscare, but don’t be tempted by any misapprehensions about ‘fate’, either; you’re probably just supposed to remember what it was you needed to learn from all that jazz, anyway.
Hello lovers! How’s the second half of August feeling on your sunstained cheeks? Draining? Exhilarating? Burnt out? Burnt up? Sleeeeeepy? Me too, girl. God gives his toughest battles to his sleepiest soldiers and I am nodding off in my chainmail.
I’m trying something new around here with the Agony editions. I want to talk about pain; what causes it, what it feels like, generally exploring the many realms of its myriad expressions. Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
Since pain is an *almost* universal sensation, this historically advice-forward version of the newsletter is very much still open to group discussion. Send me a little something about pain, however personal or un-, and maybe I’ll jot some notes in the margins in future editions.
For now, it’s time to be a basic autumnal bitch and hate on summer. Seasonal sisters, assemble!!!
“These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.” Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Summer is a season of survival. Just as the cool clench of a wintry chill forces us to decelerate our activities and conserve our energies for when they’re most needed, the suffocating heat of summer presses us down into reclining positions hoping we don’t notice how much water we’re losing that we could’ve been storing for the coming Water Wars. Life slows down, because it has to.
Modern humans have operated like they’re above nature in recent decades/centuries, but the rapidly-worsening climate crisis is already showing us just how slow we’ll have to go in order to sustain ourselves through yet another cycle of increasingly-unbearable heat indexes. And good ole girl summer is leading the charge.
It’s hot out here, and I fucking hate it. I may have arisen from some forgotten colonial bog in the Deep South (#MontgomeryBrawl), but I do not appear to have acquired a single shred of heat tolerance in my 22 years living below the Mason-Dixon. Anything north of 80°F is considered a personal attack on my household. My skin fries to a painful crisp after twenty minutes of uninterrupted sun exposure. Beach days are spent under an umbrella reapplying sunscreen every two hours, wondering if I can just put my T-shirt back on already without accidentally dusting myself with a shower of sand. Even my favorite form of exercise (long, wistful walk in the park) is burdened by the additional water requirements of sister Earth’s warmer months. I know I’m being a bratty baby king with these complaints, but I am simply not built for the heat, even though I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the cool of a Real Winter until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!
It doesn’t help that New York smells like a rotting pile of swamp diapers all summer, an ideal backdrop to feeling too-warm from the inside and sweaty and sticky and itchy on the outside while still needing to expose a certain amount of skin to the filth of the city and 40-year-old subway seats just to maintain a safe level of hydration for three months of the year. City of dreams!
On every level other than lyrically, summer is my haterade season — nothing else cools me down about things I absolutely cannot change quite like complaining. Physically, she’s gross. Emotionally, she is a yawning cavern of confusion that leaves me wandering in a daze through everything I thought my life could be two months ago, when my girl Gemini was still in charge. Walking through August feels like stumbling through a dream, on my way to a party, and then when I arrive, I recognize all the faces but can’t remember anyone’s name, and I spend the whole event desperately stressing over my own incompetence, afraid of getting caught. I’m lost in the murk of my own memories.
Maybe it’s a side effect from the seasonality of our school years. The ghosts of anxieties past that provide the looming notion that I am supposed to be preparing for something, that the time for freedom is running out, and a whole new challenging chapter is just around the corner and I better GET READY! But everyone I want to get ready with is still on vacation or at camp or visiting their grandparents or working summer jobs and no one has time for all these feelings, girl! Get a grip! Get pencil grips, too, and don’t chew on them before your first math class.
Summer hurts. It’s lonely; people stretch themselves all over the map before real life begins again come autumn, lending a ghost town flavor to our favorite cities, even in peak tourist season. I tend to spend as much of summer as possible out on my own adventures so as to be less aware of all the fault lines in my social network and their widening cracks. The sunburns hurt. Summer flings hurt, too, because they always end in specifically sad ways, like Nicholas Sparks movies. Also all the fucking bugs.
The greatest pains of summer often arrive at its end, in the deadening heat of August’s last days. The brief glimpses of the other possible lives we could be living have begun to bruise, like the residual burn of rubbing all our taste buds off chasing the high of that first piece of sour candy. It is the sting of disappointment brought on by unmet expectations, our own or the thick layer of guilt that settles over us like a blanket when we realize we haven’t lived up to someone else’s.
Summer always seems to burn me up from the inside out. This year was low and slow, but I’m ready for some relief, even if my pathetic lil’ tank top tan is the price that must be paid. If we listen closely… we can just make out the bugle call of the pumpkin spice battalion bellowing just beyond the horizon…
I hope your summer has been painless, dears, and I hope you make it through the rest of Venus retrograde with your heart intact. If you do find yourself wandering New York streets in the dregs of this season, do your civic duty and do the spotted lanternfly stomp. Life is pain, remember?
Sweatily,
Agony Addison