5/12/16

Today's Horoscope

All signs:

Today you will take a big hit to your ego. You will find out that someone is lying to you, or that you're not as far along as you thought, or that you indeed might be mortal or not always right. You might find that one of the things you always assumed was true about you is not true at all.

The reason our ego takes such big hits is because… well, because it's our ego. Our ego inflates our importance, we all know that. That doesn't just mean we think we know it all or that we're a great lover. It means that it skews so much of our reality simply because we need to have it skewed so we can survive.

Sooner or later you are going to come into contact with the truth, and it can sometimes rock you to your core. We all like to believe that there's a purpose, a reason for everything, and while many times we mistake that feeling for fate, the spirit world, or some celestial guiding hand, that is just our ego thinking that we are so important to the universe that some unseen force is guiding our every move. It's not.

We are all amazing and beautiful and important, but not in the way our brains try to convince us we are. We so desperately look for affirmation that we invent whole other worlds and phenomena to get it. The concept of luck, psychic abilities, feeling marked or guided by the gods, thinking someone can't live without you, even superstitions like knocking on wood, all things your ego strives to convince you are real so you have self worth.

Your brain needs to do it because there's the flip side of the tricks your ego plays. It goes the other way too, and while one half of your ego is building you up with false delusions of grandeur, the other half is comparing you to everything else and telling you that you're not good enough. So even those negative feelings you harbor about every aspect of yourself are your ego messing with you.

Ego loves to build you up and knock you down at the same time. It is singularly responsible for most of the wasted energy in your life. Feeling inadequate, like you don't matter, that you're ugly or stupid in the eyes of others, that's just your ego. It is so insidious that we feel insecure and scrutinized by others, but that is our ego simultaneously telling us we are inferior and inconsequential while also thinking that everyone is actually paying that much attention to our hair, weight, or how much our sneakers cost. We are trapped in a reality where most of the time we are the ones destroying our self image and relationships while others have no idea the battle is raging on without them.

They are usually too wrapped up in their own seesaw battles with their own egos to even notice you. We obsess over what they think because we believe that they spend untold hours everyday thinking of us, conniving and manipulating, looking to knock us down a peg, or judging us constantly. What makes you think you have that much sway over anyone's life? Your ego, of course.

Our ego drives us to do so many things to try to prove our self worth, from striving to make an abusive relationship work, to making us do dangerous things to show we fit in, to posting rambling pseudo horoscopes disguised as life lessons in the Internet. So many of our actions, based on false information and usually having the opposite effect we want it to.

Your ego is never really dead on. It can over inflate your self worth, but just as easily destroy it. Unfortunately, our egos are often the only thing that informs our perceptions and drives our actions. For something that has such a huge impact on our lives, it is surprisingly fragile. It is usually all over the place one way or the other, and like everything else going on in our minds, we need to exert an awful lot of time and focus to make sure it doesn't derail us.

And like everything else we will fail, over and over again. And we won't notice the failures most of the time because our egos won't let us, while other times we will feel like failures even though we are winning because our egos tell us we're bad and wrong and worthless.

The stars watch these constant struggles and sigh. They see us from a vantage point we will never have, and they see how much needless pain and heartache we cause ourselves and each other. They are unclouded by ego, and see our real worth and our true potential, and they are awed by it.

And it is awesome. We are all tiny miracles, all valid, all important in our own way, to the world and to those we love. We are most probably not as perfect or flawed as we think at any given time, but that does not make us bad people. It just makes us human. We owe it to ourselves to find the real us, the person we truly are, so we can put our egos aside and live a much happier and uncomplicated life, and bring light to the world.