A Fragment of Maastricht

During my last few hours in the southern Netherlandish city of Maastricht, I was tasked with acquiring coffee for the family. At first it looked like I might have to wait some time before the city woke up - a lone employee tinkering behind the glass of a bakery told me to come back in over an hour. But as I rounded on the main shopping street (or a very popular thoroughfare I’d noted the day before), to my delight, a youngish woman was going about the business of setting up her Dunkin Donuts shop for the day.

The night before had been a lavish spectacle of André Rieu’s making: mum and I found out he was conducting a concert 4 hours before it started. We enjoyed the soaring vocals as the sun set, and the performers shimmered in their formal wear. 

Back to 8:45am the next morning: the woman looked like a feminist, so I tried to dust off my impersonation of a northern European one with my order. Apparently I had missed the mark - she pointedly raised her head, demonstrating the kind of dignity and self-regard that came rushing back to some extent. Uncaffeinated and culture shocked, I watched her closely as she worked the coffee machine and wondered what uninspiring brews I’d be imbibing - this was an American fast food franchise, after all. We made a little more eye contact here and there as, one by one, five espressos made their way to me. (I had three of them right there, and it was the best coffee I’d had on this trip to Europe.) With each exchange a little bit of her mindset rubbed off on mine - by the time I collected the remaining two coffees, I felt reinvigorated. And it wasn’t just because of the flat whites. Something had been reawakened, which had been lying dormant. 

I fear I will go back to being a mere Australian feminist soon… but in the meantime that memory lingers on.

How Far I’ve Come

I received my first paycheque at the age of 19 or so, and the first thing I did was go into a bookstore and buy an astrology book. 

I have by now dismantled the emotional dependency on this belief system, which restricted the expansion of my worldview and put me in danger of reductive, black and white, and stereotypical thinking. When you organise people around 12 archetypes, there’s a lot of nuance that you neglect along the way. 

I came to a point where I joined a facebook group for Queer Atheists, and noticed a thread on astrology which recontextualised it in such a way as to make its lack of credibility impossible to ignore. I soon got onboard with defaulting to the things in life which were evidence-based, and found that my life improved.

I feel a greater sense of agency over my personality now. I have experimented, and continue to, with different personality traits, picking and choosing them based on what resonates with me and not what my astrological profile would indicate. I feel I’ve developed greater tolerance of personality complexity, and the way different aspects of it can be activated or deactivated based on the people I’m with, or the environment I’m in. 

Retiring my astrological imagination has also seen me improve my feminism, because astrology depends on the feminine-masculine binary, and I have found this to be a traditionalist way of approaching gender which is no longer relevant to me. I guess that’s what you can expect from an organising system which has such old roots. 

Looking back, I am proud of myself for recognising that this belief system was holding me back, holding space for uncertainty while I invented new ways of organising my thoughts, and gravitating towards people who also imagined the world without astrology. It’s been a journey, something wonderful that happened - because I cared enough about my wellbeing to reinvent myself.