They say that you shouldn’t let that which you hate define you, but you simply can’t bring yourself to heed this advice, Virgo. If you did, how would you craft your resolutions each Winter? Like many, the beginning of most of your years serves as a self-hating atonement for the way your previous year concluded. They say that the first day of the new year will define your year to come, but in your experience a new year is most clearly defined by a stark opposition to whatever ended the year prior. 

This Winter is no exception, Virgo. Alas, none of your resolutions are groundbreaking, you have all of the normal boring ones as everyone else. Fewer restaurants, more squats, fewer financial holes dug because you think you deserve every kind of boot to which you bear witness. 

When you’re towing the line with your goals, your resolutions, life can get pretty bleak. Winter is famously a pretty bleak time anyway (there isn’t a song called In the Bleak Mid-Fall Time). You possess a unique gift to convert any feeling into self pity, so it won’t take you long to transform your daily sameness of Doing Your Best into waves of emotion that have you performing all of the best known listless poses (staring out the window, staring down into the sink for too long, laying motionless in a surprising location). Your trusty self pity clouds your critical thinking skills—skills that have already suffered a dramatic dulling from infrequent use. 

Through the thick fog of misunderstanding how bad you have it, you set your sights on one clear enemy: well roundedness. Yes, this Winter, you believe that your pursuit of well roundedness is the enemy of specialized success. 

It feels great to lay the blame of your lack of personal and professional success on something, so you repeat this refrain to anyone who will listen to you. 

Who would I be if I weren’t trying to be well rounded?

I admit, I’ve often considered your squandered potential, Virgo. If you stopped rushing out of bed to apply sunscreen to avoid damage from the few rays that sneak past your bedroom curtains, would you dream a little longer? If you weren’t power walking on the treadmill and watching early seasons of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, would you complete a screenplay? If you weren’t organizing the preparation, construction, and storage of your 19 ingredient morning smoothie, would you get invited to the Met Gala? (No. You wouldn’t.)

You cite the success of chain smoking characters of bygone eras, who didn’t know about SPF, or retinol, and didn’t feel worried about their gut microbiome every time they took an ibuprofen. If they would’ve lived in constant fear of decay as you seem to, would they have ascended as high?

You examine the selfishness of these artists and creators, self-flagellating that you aren’t better able to ignore what is and is not a carcinogen long enough to ever lose yourself into an evening, or your work, or your imagination. 

In your frequent bandying about of this masturbatory train of thought, a friend will write down what you say in their notes app. This has the unintended consequence of making you feel like a genius—a philosopher of your time. You’ve figured it out! Cracked the code of modern middling misery! If you were more inconsiderate, less focused on burgeoning longevity sciences, then maybe you’d have a better go at greatness. 

Weeks later, in a rare quiet moment of reflection (you were out of free audiobook hours on Spotify) you’ll realize a fatal crack in your logic. You’ve positioned yourself in opposition to the deeply flawed and inconsiderate artists—inhabiting the role of someone burdened by balance and a dangerous even keel—when in fact, you couldn’t be less well rounded if you tried.

Sure, you don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but you spend more daily hours in bed than any person who could possibly be classified as well rounded. You work from bed for at least four hours per day, but often many many more. Yes, the woman walking around discussing the paralyzing burdens of well roundedness spends more than half of her days laying in bed. 

The same friend who wrote down your sage laments of well roundedness is the same friend who has joked that your husband needs to rotate your reclined body every few hours to ensure your blood still circulates. 

Your decision to live your life in bed is perhaps the quaintest of your flaws. You also have deep rage coursing through your veins, ready to unleash itself on anyone at any time. Rage isn’t the only emotion that guides you. Sadness orders you around like an unseen captain, demanding that for many weeks each year you make a daily slouch over to the neighborhood bakery (that you don’t even like that much, but hey—it’s there) to consume a piece of vanilla cake as big as your whole neck as a sacrament to your guiding life force: unchecked emotions.

It first seems shocking that you could be blind to your personal imbalances. However, perhaps everyone is blind to the traits that disqualify them from well roundedness. You reexamine the bygone era you’ve thoroughly romanticized. Maybe the chain smoking writer always completed their pelvic floor exercises. Perhaps the actor staying out all night got their 10,000 steps a day. Could it be that the singer in the tanning booth grew their own produce to avoid pesticides? 

Well roundedness is certainly an evolving set of modern cultural ideals. But the evolutions of these ideals can come at a mile a minute. You need a water filter because of poison in the pipes, but oops the filters you use are plastic, which are also poison—not to mention unsustainable, dumb ass. 

Is it possible that every person, across every era, is too dizzy with information about what they’re supposed to do, that they can only practically grab on to three or so tenets of well roundedness? This is the only explanation I can think of as to how you could have possibly considered yourself to be a balanced person, when you spend most of your life reclined on a heating pad and complaining.

There’s liberation in the discovery that you are as strange, unhealthy, and inconsiderate as all of your favorite creators. But it’s also sobering to realize your go to excuse for your lack of impressive success is moot. For if you cannot blame your middling achievements on your inactions, you’re forced to blame this lack on your actions. And even from up here in the skies I can see that’s significantly more terrifying. 

But isn’t that what the Winter is for, Virgo? Unrelenting personal horror? Simmering self-resentment? Hmmm, I just checked over in Leo and actually that isn’t what Winter is for them. Looks like it might just be a you thing. Good luck!