So Yr Born on the Cusp

"So you're born on the cusp / or it's a run of bad luck / yeah it's bigger than us / it's bigger than love / it's underhanded / and you never feel it... so you never look back / yeah you never look back."

The American Analog Set's Born on the Cusp, a breathy song about love lost to bad stars, has stuck with me for years. I always want to put it on mixtapes for people to remind them of me, but then quickly remember that the song is actually about walking away from a cusp-born sweetheart who is just too confused and fucked to get their shit together and pick a self--or a someone--to stick with. It's sad, but I could listen forever.

As a tween and a teenager my confusion about being born on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius was much sharper than the ambivalence expressed by AAS' drizzly aesthetic. My feelings about astrology were marked by perpetual crisis best characterized by the question: "am I or aren't I?", and much of my life being a "scorpittarius" -- born on the cusp of revolution -- was a turbulent experience. It was scary to feel like I wasn't placed in any order; like I could swing both ways but never come to rest in either.

I would tell people that I was technically a Sagittarius, but that it was close enough to be a coin toss as to what I really was. This flexibility provided a mutable security for me for a while, but as soon as I hit puberty I longed to be secure in the knowledge of myself as being only, purely, and truly a Scorpio.

The sexual politics of middle school were definitely where my obsession with the "status" of my sign began. Now that I know more about astrology feeling secure as a Scorpio sounds like an oxymoron, but as a naive kiddo the Scorpio ethos oozed cool. I resented my four-hours-shy birthtime (yes, I looked it up) almost as much as the dowdy sportswear and precautions against gossiping too loudly that were leveled weekly at Saggitarians who read Teen Vogue in the early 00's.
I wanted to be sexy!

By 12 I recognized (like many of my peers) that sex appeal is power. I pined for the watery mystery and turgid hotness of the Scorpio thing. I wanted that vibe, really badly. So I just told everybody I was one. After all, a couple of magazines did say that I squeaked in on the last day. It was weird to realize that I could lie about something so (seemingly)significant to my identity and get away with it. Trying to suss out the cusp thing was probably one of my earliest attempts at both drag and self-deception.

While I did care about astrology in middle school, I was more interested in it for fashion than philosophy; my either/or anxiety surrounding astrology-as-ontology really ramped up in high school. I became best friends with a really intense Scorpio I from Upstate New York and the Lower East Side, and a lot of our relationship was based on what she and I saw as our shared Scorpio pathos and displacement. Of course half the time I was freaking out about being an impostor, but for a while I managed to channel this anxiety by learning as much as I could about Scorpio and scorpions in order to effectively cross over to the water side of my hybrid existence. Did you know that scorpions fuck for 24 hours, glow under UV radiation, and taste and smell with six nerve bundles that grow out of their stomachs? Or that Scorpio actually has three manifestations--scorpion, serpent, and eagle--that represent the sign's often ignored narrative of transcendence?

More than anything Scorpio seemed to be an almost Nietzschean sign: dark as fuck but hell-bent on self-improvement no matter (and here's the unfortunate Scorpio cross to bear) how self-destructive the means might be. As someone who was pretty much obsessed with the idea of the übermensch in high school, it's not surprising that this sign was my golden ideal. So I worked really hard (no matter the means) at perfecting what I saw as the perfect Scorpio persona: critical, dramatic, scathing, Machiavellian, and uncompromising. Fortunately I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand yet.
For the most part my hardball Scorpio self was sustainable, except that I noticed myself becoming less and less happy the more I tried to avoid what I characterized as, well, happiness; without totally realizing it, I had linked feeling satisfied firmly with a Sagittarius point of view. So, for a couple years at least, I stuck with the hard road of the Scorpio process. I made and lost a lot of friends.

Looking back, I think my troubled experience with cuspiness acted as a placeholder for deeper anxieties and questions I had about how the outer world shaped and marked me as a human being. My concern about which sign I was mirrored questions I was starting to ask concerning deeper facets of my identity. As I grew I started to wonder: had something really bad happened to me in childhood or not? If so, what the f was it? Did I have depression or anxiety? Could I have both? Was I gay or straight; what even the fuck was up with bisexuality? At the time of my preoccupation, the answers to these questions (that I liked) all seemed to be given explanation with a Scorpio personality. As a Scorpio I could be unhappy, but ok. It seemed like a Sagittarius identity came with the necessary caveat of total(ly embarrassing) self-confidence.

Being a cusp sign is something that only began to sit well with me once I learned more about how brains--and mine in particular--grow and develop. In college I learned that trauma can cause brains to literally split into two--albeit very differently sized--areas of function: one where trauma is stored on ice, and one where normal brain function still occurs. It's like staying in a hotel that you realize, after one too many wrong turns late at night, has a huge secret meatlocker full of creepy stuff that might not be as frozen--or trapped--as you think. In other words, when something really bad happens to you it's pretty normal to feel like you're constantly trying to solve a huge and high-stakes mystery about what's actually inside you. For me, trying to understand my sign often pointed to this process.

However, I don't want to reduce the essence of my feelings and attitudes towards astrology to surviving trauma. Getting over the Scorpio thing definitely did engage and involve something beyond how coming to know and accept that experience changed me. Returning to my fire roots was as much a choice as alienating myself from them. As I grew up, I came to see tremendous value in the flames that used to just turn my murky waters into steam. Instead of ruthlessly discomforting myself in a patriarchal and masochistic attempt at personal growth, these days I put a lot more stock in sticking my nose in the wind and running with the things that excite me. I like striving to meet the goal of being embarrassingly self-confident. I like knowing that being all brash and Jovian and loud has helped tremendously my ability to advocate for myself. I did this work on my own, but it's cool to be able to accept and identify with a sign that advocates for the outward, enthusiastic, unselfconscious and unfettered devotion to the things we love.

Plus, it's nice to just be half-something and not have to change or worry about it. I'm part beast, and it feels good to have heat under my hooves again.