Mercury: A Week in Retrograde and the Power of Negative Thinking

How’s it going?  How are you feeling?  Has it been a rough couple of weeks?  Have you been moody?  Irritable?  Have the days just seemed off?  Well, depending on your interest or belief in astrology, you may or may not be aware that little old Mercury has been causing some celestial turbulence (literally).

I’m sure you have seen on any and all social media that Mercury is in retrograde, giving birth to not only a slew of hilarious content, but also an onslaught of personal and emotional upset (theoretically).

Now, astrology is not always highly regarding in the way of accurately describing or accounting for…anything really—but skepticism aside, there is actual science that goes into the belief that these periods of retrograde cause a universal disruption.

Mercury really does go into “retrograde”!   Though it doesn’t actually reverse it’s path in space, as is implicated.  Being closest to the sun, Mercury has a much smaller orbit than Earth.  That said, a few times a year, Earth’s slow orbit brings it past Mercury’s fast one, giving the impression that Mercury is going backwards.  When Mercury inevitably catches up to, and passes, Earth, it kicks up a galactic gust of wind (think about what it feels like when a big truck speeds past you…only its a planet).  

Here is where is gets less scientific—it is widely believed that this “gust” makes a real and noticeable difference in how we feel down here on Earth.  There is no real way to prove this, but the planets are real, the “retrograde” is real, and the spatial displacement caused by the movement of the planets is real.

On a more personal note, I can attest to the fact that much of these past two weeks has been off.  Not necessarily bad, but unsettled.  As for the the alignment of the planets and the position of the stars, if they can move the tides, they can certainly move me—I am changeable AF.  HOWEVER, as powerful as gravity and lunar pull can be, there is another powerful force in this world: the power of speech.

That sounds incredibly hokey, but I’m not wrong.  Have you ever maybe, sort-of thought you might like someone, then, as soon as you confide in your friend, it turns into a full-force, kiss-your-pillow, take-their-last-name infatuation?  Or maybe you embellished a story, and after recounting your tall a few social gatherings, you started to actually remember experiencing your little white lie?

The longer you dwell on feeling bad, the worse you are going to feel.  Not only are we dwelling on the gloom that Mercury’s retrograde can bring, we are magnifying this gloom by creating a pseudo-holiday out of our brief passing of universe’s smallest planet.  Furthermore, the more we talk about it, the more power we are giving our cosmic circumstance.  The moment you articulate a thought, you further cement it in your brain.  As soon as someone else articulates their thoughts, poof there they are in your brain.  I probably brought up the fact that Mercury was in retrograde a dozen times in as many days.  And sure, it is a comfort to explain away unexpected anxiety, but I can’t help but wonder how much better I would have felt had I not talked about it so goddamn much.

Everyone, though I can really only speak for myself, feels “off”  from time to time.  Mercury’s current period of retrograde is March 22 – April 15.  Of those days, only a handful were really rough; but were they any different than the rough days when Mercury was going the right fucking direction?  Did I create more rough days for myself by expecting them to be rough?  One of my go-to quips is “fake it ‘til you make it!”, and I think in this case I may have been better off—I’d posit we’d ALL be better off—if I’d faked it ‘til I made it.  Instead of really thinking about why a day seemed hard or why I felt sad or frustrated, I immediately blamed it on the alignment of the stars.  

My point is not that astrology holds no authority for me (it does), or that Mercury, headed in any direction, is powerless over my strong-willed, stubborn, feminist self—because honestly, it probably is.   My point is that astrology should not be our first and last stop on the road to explaining our emotions.  Ever.  Even just for a few two-week periods over the course of the year—because if it is, it’s a slippery slope to making excuses to poor behavior and deflecting real issues lurking within ourselves.  I think we should be as active as possible in trying to identify our internal goings-on so that we, much like Mercury, can send our own cosmic waves into the world, shake things up, and move the world.