My Horoscope Ran My Hobby Life for a Month and Honestly, Mercury Retrograde Owes Me an Apology

I want to be upfront about something: I am not an astrology person. I don't know my rising sign. I've never once thought about whether Saturn is in retrograde before making a major life decision. I barely know what a birth chart is, and I'm okay with that.

But here's the thing about being a dabbler — sometimes the whole point is to hand control over to something completely random and just go with it. I've let a grocery list pick my hobbies. I've let my kids critique my projects like tiny, ruthless gallery curators. So when a friend casually said, "You should let your horoscope tell you what to do for a month," I figured: why not? What's the worst that could happen?

Spoiler: Mercury retrograde happened. But we'll get there.

The Rules I Made Up (And Mostly Followed)

I kept it simple. Every Sunday night, I'd pull up my horoscope for the week — I used a couple of different apps, because apparently the stars give slightly different advice depending on which algorithm is interpreting them — and I'd find whatever creative or energetic theme was being emphasized. Then I'd translate that theme into a hobby for the week and commit to spending at least three sessions on it.

No cherry-picking. No skipping weeks because the stars said something inconvenient. If the cosmos spoke, I listened. That was the deal.

I also decided not to tell my kids what I was doing, because I knew my eight-year-old would immediately start requesting that the horoscope say "video games" and my eleven-year-old would ask me why I was "being weird about space."

Week One: Venus Said Paint Something Beautiful. Venus Lied.

The first week's horoscope leaned hard into Venus energy — beauty, creativity, sensory pleasure, artistic expression. The universe was basically handing me a permission slip to make something pretty.

I bought a watercolor set. A real one, not the little kids' palette I'd been eyeing at the dollar store, but an actual grown-up set with a wooden case and little half-pans of pigment that felt very Official Artist.

The first painting looked like a bruise. The second looked like a bruise with ambition. By the third session I had produced something that my youngest described as "a sunset if the sunset was also sick," which I chose to interpret as abstract expressionism.

Here's the thing though — I kept going back to it. Even after the week was technically over, I'd sneak in fifteen minutes before the kids woke up, just messing around with color and water. The results were still objectively bad. But Venus was onto something. There was something in the slow, wet, unpredictable nature of watercolor that I genuinely didn't want to put down.

Week Two: Mars Energy Sent Me to a Kickboxing Class

Oh, this one. This one.

My week two horoscope was practically vibrating off the screen. Mars dominant. High action energy. Channel aggression into physical movement. Release what no longer serves you through force.

I googled "beginner fitness class near me" and found a Groupon for a kickboxing studio offering a three-class intro package. I bought it before I could talk myself out of it, which is a strategy I highly recommend for anyone with a habit of over-thinking.

I will not pretend I was graceful. I will not pretend I didn't accidentally kick the air bag sideways off its stand during class two. But I will tell you that there is something genuinely cathartic about punching things in a room full of strangers while someone yells encouragement at you. Mars knew what Mars was doing.

I've actually gone back twice since the month ended. My arms are still mad at me about it.

Week Three: Mercury Went Retrograde and Everything Got Weird

This is where I have to pause and acknowledge that I did not fully understand what "Mercury retrograde" meant before this experiment. I knew it was something people blamed things on. I did not know that it specifically governs communication, technology, and — apparently — creative plans.

My week three horoscope was a wall of warnings. Avoid starting new projects. Revisit unfinished work. Don't sign contracts. Expect confusion.

I took this as a sign to go back to the watercolors, since I'd left that technically unfinished. But I also, somewhat accidentally, started trying to learn basic bookbinding after watching a YouTube video that autoplayed while I was looking up watercolor techniques. My phone glitched and lost the video halfway through. I printed out instructions and the printer jammed. I went to buy supplies and the craft store was out of bone folders.

Mercury retrograde, it turns out, is an extremely convincing bit.

I ended up with a lopsided little handmade journal that I now use to write down hobby ideas, which feels like the most chaotically appropriate outcome possible.

Week Four: The Moon Told Me to Rest. I Did Not Rest.

The final week's theme was lunar — intuition, rest, emotional processing, turning inward. My horoscope specifically said to honor my need for stillness.

Reader, I tried to learn embroidery.

In my defense, embroidery feels restful. It's quiet. You sit down. You make small, careful movements. It seemed like a reasonable interpretation of "stillness." What I did not anticipate was that I would find it so immediately absorbing that I stayed up until midnight three nights in a row trying to finish a small floral hoop I'd started, and by "finish" I mean "get to a point where the back didn't look like a crime scene."

The moon probably did not intend for me to sacrifice sleep. But the embroidery is genuinely lovely, and I've already ordered more thread.

What the Stars Actually Taught Me

Here's what I didn't expect: I went into this as a joke, and I came out of it having tried four genuinely different things, two of which I'm still actively doing.

There's something that happens when you remove the pressure of choosing. When you don't have to justify why you're trying something, when the answer to "why kickboxing?" is simply "Mars said so" — it short-circuits the self-consciousness. You stop auditing the decision and just show up.

A carefully curated hobby quiz would have matched me to watercolor, maybe. It would never in a million years have sent me to a kickboxing class. The absurdity of the prompt was exactly what made it work.

I'm not about to overhaul my life around my birth chart. But I do think there's something to be said for letting something genuinely random crack the door open on things you'd never have walked through on your own.

Also, Mercury retrograde is absolutely real and I will not be taking questions.

Want to try this yourself? Grab any horoscope app, pick a theme from your weekly reading, and just... go. The worse the translation, the better the story.