How reading my birth chart helped me forgive the past
I spent most of my twenties carrying a small but stubborn list of regrets, the kind that followed me into new cities and crowded out the good days. It wasn't dramatic stuff — no single catastrophe to point to, just the slow accumulation of choices I wished I'd made differently. Somewhere around a wet winter in Melbourne, half a flat white between meetings and therapy, I started reading astrology not to predict my future but to understand who I'd been. That reframe quietly changed everything about how I related to my own history.
Astrology isn't a substitute for therapy, accountability, or repair. What it did for me was offer a symbolic language for the parts of myself I'd been treating as permanent failures. Instead of seeing "bad decisions" as proof of being a bad person, I started seeing them as expressions of specific energies playing out the only way they knew how. The shift was small at first and then enormous.
The mistake I couldn't stop rehearsing
There's one particular thing I keep returning to — a friendship I let slip because I was too proud to make the first call after a fight. We were both twenty-two, both broke, living off Mi Goreng noodles in a share house in Newtown. I'd convinced myself that reaching out would mean admitting I was wrong. I didn't reach out, she moved to Brisbane, and I sat with that silence for nearly a decade. Every time I tried to apologise to myself about anything else, this one came up first.
The thing about a long-held regret is that it stops feeling like a memory and starts feeling like a verdict. I'd tell the story in my head so many times that it lost its detail and became a flat pronouncement: you are the person who let this happen. Astrology gave me a different framework. Instead of the story, I started looking at the chart placement behind it. What house was activated? What planet was transiting? What kind of wound was being repeated? The moment I could name the pattern, I could finally stop confusing the pattern with my identity.
How I started reading my chart
The first astrology book I ever finished was a battered paperback from a second-hand shop in Fitzroy. I read it on the train from Melbourne to Ballarat and back. By the time I got home I'd drawn up my first birth chart on the back of a Westfield parking ticket and was already arguing with myself about whether my moon sign description was flattering. It wasn't. I bought a second book the next week.
I learned slowly, the way most people do — through podcasts, through a few too many Instagram accounts, through a friend in Adelaide who insisted on explaining her progressed moon to me at every dinner party. None of it clicked as a forgiveness tool until I started treating the chart as a map of tendencies rather than a personality quiz. The moon didn't describe who I was; it described what I needed. Saturn didn't describe my failures; it described the work. Pluto didn't describe my wounds; it described where I was being asked to surrender. The language shifted from fixed identity to active lesson, and old regrets started to sound like old homework.
Saturn, the north node, and the lessons I'd been dreading
I won't bury the lede here: my Saturn return was brutal. Saturn transits the place in your chart where you've been avoiding adulthood and sits there until you face it. Mine fell right across my friendships and my sense of belonging, which is a polite way of saying that for about two years I lost almost everyone I was close to and had to learn how to show up again.
What helped was reading about Saturn as a stern, exhausted teacher rather than a punishment. The idea that Saturn returns so we can take ownership of the life we've actually been handed reframed every friendship loss as a curriculum. Some lessons were about boundaries I'd never set. Some were about people I'd held onto past their use-by date. A few were about the apology I owed my younger self for being so unforgiving of her mistakes. Once I could see the curriculum, I could start the homework.
| Chart placement |
The fear it stirs |
The lesson it offers |
| Saturn return |
I'm failing at adulthood |
I'm learning to own my actual life |
| North node |
I'm not on the right path |
I'm becoming who I could be |
| Chiron |
I'm permanently wounded |
My wound is where my wisdom begins |
| South node |
I'm reverting because I'm broken |
I already carry what I need |
I started keeping a small list of "Saturn words" in the back of my diary — commitment, follow-through, repair — and let them replace the old list of things I'd done wrong. For a while, my word of the year was simply the reminder to be kinder to the human I'd been. There's a longer reflection on choosing humankind is my word for 2019 and heres why that I'd written before I had any idea how much I'd need it.
The practices that actually moved the needle
I tried a lot of approaches and most of them didn't stick. The ones that did were surprisingly mundane. I started checking the moon phase before any emotionally loaded conversation, which sounds woo-woo until you've watched your own reactive patterns repeat at full moon three cycles in a row. I read my north node description once a week and let it sit next to my to-do list like a quiet compass. I let myself off the hook during Mercury retrograde, because of course I was going to miscommunicate. The rest I dropped.
Habits that genuinely helped me approach past mistakes with a little more grace
- Tracking new and full moons in a notebook and writing one sentence about whatever came up
- Reading my progressed chart once a season instead of doom-scrolling daily horoscopes
- Naming the planet or sign I was "acting from" when I noticed myself spiralling
- Treating retrograde seasons as built-in review periods, not personal failures
- Letting my rising sign describe how I wanted to be seen, not who I was pretending to be
It wasn't a system exactly. It was more like learning a new vocabulary for things I'd already been feeling.
What changed in the everyday
The changes showed up in very Australian ways. I stopped apologising to my barista at a Brunswick café when I was two minutes late, because I'd internalised that my rising-sign self could simply say "thanks for making it" and walk on. I started setting boundaries at my old job in Sydney without the dramatic speech I'd rehearsed for years. I went to a sound bath in Byron Bay during a full moon and cried for an hour, which is, technically, also astrology.
More quietly, I stopped telling the story of the friendship I lost as the central myth of my twenties. I still think of her, but the story now includes a Saturn transit and mutual immaturity and a long bus ride and the slow recognition that some endings aren't verdicts. They're weather. I started saying yes to things I'd usually talk myself out of — a women's circle in Fitzroy, a writing workshop at the local library, a slow walk along the Yarra at dusk — because my chart said this was a year for soft expansion, and I'd decided to believe it.
There's something specific about being in Australia during an astrological reckoning. The light is so absurdly honest here that you can't really hide from yourself. Summer arrives in December, the sun doesn't apologise, and the country seems to be doing some version of group inner work. Whether that's the planets or just a country shaped by long drives and longer silences, I genuinely can't say. These days I'm more often the girl that goes to concerts — buying the ticket before finishing the conversation about whether I deserve the night out.
What astrology can't do, and what it can
Astrology won't return the years I spent rehearsing apologies to people who would never hear them. It won't undo the friends I lost or the money I spent on therapy I didn't yet trust. It isn't a substitute for the actual work of repair, the long conversations, the boring amends.
Things no birth chart will ever replace
- The slow, unglamorous work of making actual amends to actual people
- Therapy, especially the kind that holds you accountable to your own patterns
- Friends who will gently refuse to let you keep telling the worst version of yourself
- The willingness to sit with a feeling without immediately reframing it into a lesson
What astrology gave me was a way to stop pathologising myself for being a person in process. The chart is a snapshot of a single moment in time. The person who made those mistakes is not the person reading the chart now. That distance is the gift. I started seeing my past as a story with characters, weather, and lessons rather than a verdict about who I was. Forgiving myself didn't happen all at once, but it happened, and it keeps happening, in the small and unremarkable way that most real changes do.
