I consider myself a halfway decent astrologer. I’m by no means an expert in astrology, and I’m certainly not a professional, but I know more astrology than most people in a given room, I have a preferred house system (Placidus, and yes, I have heard of whole sign houses, but thank you for asking), and when someone hands me a chart I can usually find a handful of interesting things to say about it. I’m not great at general chart delineation, but if I have a specific area to focus on, I can identify the most relevant areas of a chart and string them together in a way that feels meaningful and appropriate to the question at hand.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about astrology in the context of my own natal chart, specifically with regard to my career. I submitted my dissertation in August and am in the final stages of my Ph.D, and I’m in the process of figuring out what comes next for me. I’ve been applying for non-academic jobs left and right, and so far I’ve had no takers, but that’s largely because applying for jobs is a skill and it’s one I’ve never had the need (or opportunity) to acquire. I have no experience in writing cover letters or compiling a polished resume; barring summer jobs in college, this is the first time I’ve really been looking for a full-time job outside of the ivory tower. As such, I’m still figuring out how to do this whole process, and I’m making a lot of mistakes along the way. That’s frustrating and stressful, but it’s also a learning process, and I like to hope that each application I send out is a little bit better than the last. As I continue to think seriously about the next stage of my career, I’ve been looking a lot at my natal chart and thinking about what it has to say.

I have the chart of someone who loves being a student. I’m generally cagey about sharing too many details of my natal chart publicly, so I won’t get too much into the specifics, but there are interesting interactions between things happening in the first, fifth, and ninth houses of my chart. These things, together with some more specific placements, paint a picture of someone for whom school is exciting and engaging, and for whom academic success is closely tied to my sense of self. If we’re really following the astrology, I probably should have gone to school for something creative rather than the polisci/philosophy combo that I did, but hey, there was no way I was ever going to convince my parents to pay for a degree in the arts.

Importantly, though, I don’t have the chart of someone for whom academia is a long-term career. My tenth house is doing something else altogether, and it tells a different story. As I come to the end of my time as a student, the role of that tenth house is becoming more and more noteworthy to me.

The ruler of my tenth house is in the sixth house.* The sixth is a rather unfortunate house; it’s in aversion to the Ascendant, and classically is the house of illness and servants. (And livestock, but that seems less relevant here.) My second house placements are comfortably white-collar—not dignified enough to signify abundant wealth, but there’s no real indication of poverty or deep financial struggle in my chart—so some of the worst possible implications of having my L10 in the sixth house are kept at bay. But even so, this placement carries with it an indication that career is not going to be a source of great personal satisfaction and meaning in my life. Not the way school has been, at least. As I step out of academia and into a different professional sphere, I think that’ll be a big adjustment.

There are a couple of other relevant things about my tenth house placements (again, being deliberately vague here) that indicate what kind of career I might flourish in. I have a chart that speaks to a career of analysis, fact-checking, editing, or other careful intellectual pursuits (no surprises there), and that also indicates relatively unglamorous work. It’s work that I’d be good at, and that would provide me with stability, but it’s not work that will win me any accolades or get a middle school named after me. It’s just a living. More than anything, my chart suggests that career is just not the most important area of my life. There are other pursuits—creative and social pursuits, for the most part—that are untouched by my career and serve to define much more of who I am and what my life looks like as a whole.

It will be interesting to see where the job hunt leads me, and what the next phase of my life looks like. I won’t lie, I’m stressed to bits; since I started applying for jobs in earnest, I can’t sleep all the way through the night, and every night I’m woken by nightmares about being some combination of unemployable, lazy, unskilled, unintelligent, etc., etc. But that’s just the stress concomitant with an objectively unpleasant process—and, as I said above, a process that’s new to me and that I’m still figuring out how to navigate. I’ll get through it eventually, and someone, somewhere, will get me a job.

Besides, as my chart so eloquently points out, a job is ultimately just a way to keep a roof over my head. There’s much more to life than how I earn my bread.

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*All of my descriptions of house placements are using Placidus, because it’s my preferred house system, but using other house systems produces a similar narrative about key aspects of my life even where the details differ.