Three or four times a year, Mercury appears to loop back on itself for a period of about three weeks before continuing on its journey. The smaller planet doesn't actually go backward. It just looks that way because we're orbiting the Sun at a far slower pace. All the planets can appear to us to be traveling in reverse. Mars, for example, was retrograde this summer, in a gorgeous transit that made the planet glow like a portentous red eye, low on the twilight horizon. To the ancients, the bright, mysterious, meandering planets told a story. Mercury's has endured into the present to become the kooky spiritualist's go-to excuse. If the Roman god of communication, tricksters, and travelers is caught in a loop, heaven help us mere mortals.

On a humid summer Friday in Park Slope, I stopped in front of a twee shop window with a poster-size decal on it. YOUR 2018 MERCURY IN RETROGRADE PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, it declared, ticking off advisements: don't close the deal, don't initiate new projects, don't schedule meetings, don't travel (a lot), and don't repair your car, purchase technology, make agreements, or accept or start a job. I had my reservations, grammatically and otherwise. Mercury is never "in" retrograde. It is retrograde. And I'd love to meet the wafflers who won't finish anything for three weeks at a time. Yet I had, at that point, been weighed down in a cloud of faulty communication: an editor rescheduled the same interview four times; for some reason, none of my texts would send. Maybe I should have been following the rules.

The language of astrology, in our millennial moment, has emerged from the dusty corners of hippie bookstores to permeate the mainstream with chic vigor. It's popular, progressive, and often quite stylish. Yoga teachers, massage therapists, and acupuncturists have dished their horoscopic concerns to me; academics and poets are conversant. At a wedding in 2017, the sister of the groom told me she'd keep an eye on my transits with the help of an app. A co-worker informed me, sotto voce, that no one on our team was a Cancer. And then there's me: reminding people to keep the faith during the storms of eclipse season or at the threshold of a new moon.

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How did this happen to us? To me? I don't do healing crystals; I have a healthy skepticism of miracle cures and nutritional fads. So why does this web of astral significance speak to me? At least part of the answer is that I live on the Internet, where automated Twitter accounts give updates on planetary transits, apps offer minute details about the heavens, and, crucially, anyone can access their birth chart. There may be no greater manifestation of the purported millennial penchant for navel-gazing than obsessing over a snapshot of the heavens at the time and place of one's arrival. And yet astrology links that moment to two of the biggest mysteries of a person's existence: Why am I the way I am? And what is going to happen to me? The universe is pitiless and vast, but when all else fails, you can pore over a diagram to study your place in it.

This summer, a familiar self-loathing roared back into my life. Depression is always useless, but it's especially useless when everything else is going pretty well. Somehow, I got a job writing for this magazine, and convinced a nice man to marry me. Still, I couldn't shake a sense of dread I'd been carrying my whole life. It feels like a dark, spreading stain at the center of my mind, one that I carefully keep at bay with my pill and my therapist and occasional, half-hearted jogging. But these don't always work, and sometimes the stain bleeds out.

Everybody has a struggle like that, right? If it's not dread, it's despair, or grief. And there, on that liminal battlefield, where it's going in the right direction but it feels really bad? That's where astrology really works. It gives us the tools to tell stories for ourselves—to re-write personal drama as a clash of planetary forces, to re-interpret trauma as one step on a journey toward peace. And it does feel magical when a reading appears to know you intimately—when it reveals to you something you weren't aware of, or something you had not yet said out loud.

Why does this web of astral significance speak to me?

So this summer, I read posts from astrologer Chani Nicholas for guidance. (Other things that helped: fancy ice cream, vaping, listening to the Weeknd. I'm not proud.) She assured her readers that it was an intense time, especially for those of us with Capricorn, my rising sign, in our chart. I keep returning to one question she posed, late in August. "What does it mean to get to live, even a teeny-tiny part of, your dream?" Later, when I spoke to Nicholas for this piece, I found myself telling her about a moment I'd had recently: Sitting on the fire escape, looking at the sky, and trying not to cry. A star was directly overhead, and my phone told me it was Vega, Capricorn's next-door neighbor. Gradually we both realized the same thing: I had been staring at the astrological upheaval of the summer, retrograde Mars in my rising sign. The red planet was slowly drawing a bright path over the exact point in the sky that was dawning, in the east, the morning I was born.

My whole life my mother has handed me bizarre, charmed objects— rocks with fossils in them, dried seeds, semi-precious stones on a chain— with instructions to wear them, wield them, or keep them on a shelf. This is all strange, sure. But given that she was raising us to be Hindu in central Florida, everything my mother asked us to do was strange. For much of my family, momentous decisions like choosing a wedding date or naming a child would not go forward without first consulting an astrologer. I remember my mom reading Linda Goodman's Love Signs before bed, the big volume propped up on the comforter. I also remember an impersonal printout, bound in a red-and-yellow paper folder, from an astrologer in India; she'd sent away for my natal chart. My mother allowed me to consult it as a teenager, but then locked it away, cautioning that too much future-gazing is unhealthy.

Before I started teasing her for it, my mother would call me at each anniversary of the start of her 36-hour labor, or when she had her last meal (Big Macs) before arriving at the hospital. But I discovered only recently that the time she gave the astrologer— the time she's told me; the time I've used to calculate my birth charts— is wrong. My dad sent me my legal birth certificate. There's a discrepancy of nine minutes. Learning this sent me into a tailspin. If it were just eight minutes off, I'd still be a Capricorn rising. At the ninth minute, though, Aquarius began to dawn on the horizon. This didn't bother my mother in the slightest, "just chuck it," she advised—she who gave me the printout, the wrong time, and the tentative belief in magic.

I think—I believe—that Mars, tracing the path along my ascendant this summer, brought me back to the beginning of my story for a reason. There is a lot to fear in this life. Climate change, the G.O.P., turning into one's mother. But it is crippling to check one's every movement against the stars, to live in so much fear of the universe.

I am terrified of the world, but I cannot deny how much it has given me, too. Maybe I don't know the exact moment of my birth, but I do know that my mother labored in those minutes, and so did I. Every now and then, it's good to be reminded that the first thing you did on this earth was fight to survive— to take up space, to scream, to thrive. And if the movement of planets is telling a story, then I want to be a part of it. Once in a while, in the moments when I think I might be O.K., I feel like I am just one tiny piece of the universe, engaged in a cosmic dance without end. The cosmos is unfolding to unheard music and the planets are keeping time, and for what it's worth, I knew I loved my fiancé when I first saw him dance.

So I asked Chani Nicholas for one single piece of personal guidance: when to get hitched. She came back to me with a time in December— super-early, like 8:30-A.M. early. (That's what I get for asking the universe for help.) I don't know if we'll make it to city hall in time. But I'm glad to know we can try.