Astrology is often synonymous with mystery and fate. But popular astrologer Chani Nicholas uses words like “access” and “agency” to describe her approach, which is more akin to that of an activist organizing for social change than a clairvoyant inviting you into a curtained room. 

Nicholas, whose first book, You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance, was released on January 7, has been working in astrology for over 20 years, amassing over 300,000 followers on Instagram, including superstars like Lizzo and Me Too founder Tarana Burke. Last year, she was commissioned by Spotify to create monthly astrology playlists, and she’s currently the head astrologer at O Magazine. 

You Were Born for This, now a New York Times bestseller, functions as a sort of toolkit for self-discovery. Nicholas explains what she calls the “three keys” of your birth chart: your sun, your moon, and your ascendant or rising sign. At the end of various sections, she prompts you to “choose your own adventure,” and many of her descriptions of the planets, the signs, and their significance end with prompts for deeper self-reflection. 

As Nicholas sees it, the more we accept ourselves for who we are, the more we can show up and effect positive social change, both in our immediate relationships and our communities. Astrology is one tool, she argues, for getting to know ourselves, what drives us, and how we can be of use in the world. In her book, she draws on the rich lives of Frida Kahlo and Maya Angelou, and it’s exciting to see how such remarkable women’s stories line up with their birth charts. It’s also comforting to know that they, too, faced obstacles that, while unpleasant, shaped them into the unique women we now admire.

Astrology has seen renewed interest in recent years, thanks in no small part to clever astrology memes and witty tweets. But Nicholas’s popularity points to how contemporary astrology connects with our larger need for meaning and hope while living in very uncertain times.

I sat down with Nicholas during a lunar eclipse to discuss her beliefs about healing, why we’re so drawn to astrology, and why we also need therapy. Our interview has been condensed and edited.

Nayomi Reghay

I enjoyed reading about your childhood encounters with astrology. You talk about “being witnessed” and astrology helping you to feel seen. Is that why people are so drawn to astrology? Why do people find so much comfort in astrology?

Chani Nicholas

I think we’re dying to be seen. Every selfie is us being like, “Do I see myself? Am I here? Where am I? Who am I?” We’re obsessed with ourselves. We’re completely narcissistic. 

But also, there’s a deep need for self-actualization, and a deep need to know that we’re worthy of that. When we self-actualize, we’re much less interested in all the outer things and we’re much more interested in the quality of the moments of our life. That’s actually where the soul is yearning to go. 

I think we’re really lonely. I think we are really afraid. I think that we live in a world that feels increasingly less stable and less known. And I think we need to know ourselves as a counter to being in this place. We need to deepen our relationship to knowing who we are, and astrology is one way to do that.

Nayomi Reghay

In your book you disclose that you’ve had a lot of therapy. How does that influence your approach to astrology?

Chani Nicholas

Astrology and therapy can intersect in ways that can be really supportive. Astrology has helped me to accept some of the most challenging parts of myself. I can bring them into therapy and be like, “This is how my bitchy self showed up this week! This is where I really messed up and I can see it in my chart.” But now, I need to talk about it with a professional who is going to hold me accountable in a really loving and compassionate way, but not let me off the hook. Astrology doesn’t hold me accountable in the same way. If I’m working with an astrologer, they might be able to reflect. But if they’re not also a trained therapist, then it’s not the same work. 

Nayomi Reghay

It does seem like a lot of people assume there’s this false binary where if you’re really into astrology, you must be substituting it for other things that are scientific.

Chani Nicholas

The line that is given is, “Well, it’s a pseudoscience. Anybody that believes it is completely untethered from reality.” Astrologers are humans so we run the gamut. But, in my experience, astrologers are super nerdy, deeply into science, and probably going to be much more loud about the climate crisis and everything that we face that is scientific in nature than an average group of humans. 

Science and astrology don’t cancel each other out. We can believe that nature is speaking to us in some kind of way — which is what astrology is — and we can also believe in ice caps melting and needing to work out our greed, our consumption, and our severe imbalance with nature.

Nayomi Reghay

Right now, in the mainstream, people appear to be more open to things like astrology that are traditionally considered more feminine and kind of taboo. Why do you think that is?

Chani Nicholas

I think what’s happening is everything that the patriarchy has tried to kill and withhold from us, we are reclaiming. White supremacist colonial patriarchy says that there’s only two genders and there’s only one science. There’s only one way to have sex and there’s only one way to be in a relationship. It’s stripped us all culturally and personally of the richness and the diversity of life. And I think we’re just sick and tired of it. We know it’s a lie, and the devastation that those systems have caused is showing its ass.

Because who the hell fits into those fake, made-up systems? Nobody. They don’t represent us. Everything that the white supremacist patriarchy has tried to hold back is now coming forward and being like, “I don’t think so. I get to dig up my own space.” And astrology is part of that. All liberation movements are parts of that. From everything like being able to see body hair and stretch marks and acne — these very simple things are just so human.  

Nayomi Reghay

You share an anecdote where an astrologer you respected looked at your chart and said, “I don’t know how you’re ever going to let anyone love you.” You say you chose to believe that you could heal. Do you have a philosophy of healing or growth that guides you when you are trying to teach people to use astrology to help themselves, rather than to create more fear?

Chani Nicholas

I know through my own experience that healing is possible. Given the right circumstances, given the right environment, humans can do incredible things. So I think we need to ask, “What is healing justice? What does it look like for us all to have access to spaces where we can heal?” 

Because the human capacity to heal is limitless, really. But that doesn’t mean that we have to get over anything. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t forever scarred by something. But it does mean that we can learn how to work with and hold those scars or those broken places in new ways, and that is echoed throughout every great text and every great poem and every great religion or spiritual tradition, the world over. 

I believe it’s really important that as we each individually get the possibility to heal, that we then turn around and say, “Well, how can we create more of these spaces? How can more people have access to what they need — not just what I needed, but what they need?” Because we desperately need more healing on the planet right now. We need to be able to show up as grown-up people that are able to hold our own anxiety, hold our own feelings, and say, “What is the creative solution to these incredible problems that we are all too familiar with? And how can I do that in very little ways and maybe even in big ways?” We desperately need each other to be modeling what maturity looks like. 

Nayomi Reghay

You’ve said in previous interviews that astrology isn’t having a “moment,” it’s having an “internet.” The internet shares information so rapidly. Are there any misconceptions about astrology that are currently flourishing?

Chani Nicholas

Yeah. I hear people blaming everything on a sign. I wrote the book because I want to shift the focus. Astrology is actually about planets. It’s about how the sky looks when you were born. It’s about the quality of the light that each planet had or didn’t have. It was visible or invisible. All those things mean something. 

So I hear people say, “Well, it’s because I’m a Taurus.” But that thing they said has nothing to do with the sign Taurus! We start to use the signs as this repository to put everything in, and then it becomes a mishmash, and then there’s no clarity and then there’s no specificity and then the real art of the craft is lost. 

Nayomi Reghay

I want to ask you about skeptics.

Chani Nicholas

I don’t care! 

Nayomi Reghay

You don’t care about skeptics?

Chani Nicholas

I don’t — I love them! I don’t think everyone should believe in astrology. I don’t think everyone should use astrology. I think humans are diverse and we should have diverse ways of seeing ourselves and knowing ourselves. And God forbid everyone’s on one thing!

I don’t want everybody. I just want the people that want to be here and let’s go. And if you don’t, great! I want to know what works for you. Tell me something new, like how are you healing? How are you feeling good in the world? Where are you getting that rich, deep connection? Tell me about it. I’m so interested. Why would I want us all to do the same thing?

Nayomi Reghay is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers women, wellness, and technology. She writes about how social media impacts our relationships in her advice column, Swipe This! You can follow her on Twitter.

When I was in eighth grade, a friend of my best friend tore the heads off of her old Barbie dolls. She gave the severed heads punk makeovers — cut their hair at lopsided angles, drew on their faces. And then, with the confident grace of a fly fisherman, she threw them into oncoming traffic. My best friend and I watched from the sidewalk, where we were killing time. It was exhilarating. When the tires of a passing car made contact with one of the heads, we cheered.

The memory of the thrill I experienced as a 13-year-old, ready to shed the hyper-feminized ideals of her old playthings, eager to revel in their demise, came to me as I scrolled through Natalie Beach’s account on The Cut of her complicated friendship with Caroline Calloway. I read the piece urgently, hungry for evidence of this picture-perfect influencer’s no-doubt-monstrous acts. What could be more satisfying than watching this living, breathing flower-crown of a woman be deconstructed until all that was left was a thorny, hideous wireframe? 

And yet, I finished the piece unsated. Is that all? I thought. While Calloway may have danced dangerously close to fraud a handful of times, she can hardly be called a true scammer. Her biggest crime, depending on where your sympathies lie, is either botching a six-figure book deal, canceling an ill-planned speaking tour, or sleeping too soundly while her best friend was locked out of their Amsterdam rental for the night.

But none of this has stopped Calloway from becoming a media event. On Wednesday, her name was trending at No. 3 on Twitter, and the story was reported on nationwide. Since The Cut published Beach’s piece, Calloway’s follower count has only gone up. And yes, she’s aware that some of her new followers are hate-following her. In a caption posted to her Instagram Wednesday morning, she likened herself to Meghan Markle’s “toxic sociopathic father.” “Is this what you came here for, new followers?” she asked. In the accompanying image, Calloway turns away from a computer screen where she has presumably been reading her own takedown piece. It resembles a Glossier ad, her hair pulled back, face dewy, the faintest hint of a natural hue painted across her sealed lips.

In part, the frenzy that has ensued could be thanks to Calloway herself, who promoted the story even before it had been released. But if we look at other women at the center of stories of fraud and deception in the recent past such as Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes, a pattern emerges. We, the reading public, love to hate these women who embody feminine ideals of wealth and whiteness — the art world heiress, the female inventor and CEO, or in Calloway’s case, the Instagram influencer who is forever on a jet-setting adventure. We love when they are revealed to be inauthentic. When these stories arrive, we devour them as though we have been craving these unmaskings before we even knew a single detail.

When white men commit fraud, it only confirms what we already know to be true: that capitalism and the patriarchy are built on principles of dishonesty, and that cheaters are often rewarded, and generously. These moments are greeted with collective dread. We quietly mutter that their deeds are awful but unsurprising. If they are shocking or entertaining, it is only because of the scale of the scam. The absurdity of the Fyre Festival’s promise of an unparalleled luxury music festival when compared to the sad cheese sandwiches it delivered, for example, is what made it entertainment fodder.

But when a white woman commits fraud, it excites us before we even know the story. We lick our lips and sharpen the digital guillotine. We cannot wait for these public beheadings. This could be, in part, due to the pervasive nature of misogyny. A man committing fraud proves that he knows how to work the system. Men like Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarlan, Bernie Madoff, and even Donald Trump may be seen as having moral failings, but they are also often seen as shrewd go-getters who took an opportunity when they saw it. A woman who commits fraud is rarely commended for her wits. At best, she is someone who made a series of foolish choices, and at worst she is evidence that women as a whole are duplicitous and untrustworthy. 

The trope of the untrustworthy woman pervades entertainment media as much as it does real life. In pulp detective fiction and films, the men on the case often turn the phrase “cherchez la femme,” a French phrase coined in the late 1800s which literally means, “Look for the woman.” The implication is, at the root of any crime, you’ll find a woman. And in real life you need look no further than the 2016 election to see how this core belief that women cannot be trusted has played out. It’s no surprise that Republican candidates and the right wanted to paint Hillary Clinton as a crook, but even well-respected, traditionally left-leaning outlets like the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times posed the same question over and over again: “Can this woman be trusted?” The pattern points to how deep our internalized misogyny runs. We ask whether women are trustworthy in the name of “fairness,” all the while concealing a thinly veiled truth: Our core belief is that they are not.

In fact, the odds of a woman committing large-scale deception are spectacularly rare. According to Forbes, the 10 biggest acts of fraud in recent history were committed by men. A 2013 study found that women are rarely involved in corporate conspiracies, and when they are involved they tend to “play minor roles” and “profit less” than their male counterparts. Another study, published in 2017 found that having at least one female leader on a staff “decreases the likelihood that the company will be involved in litigation for financial reporting fraud.”

You could argue that these stories spread like wildfire because they are an anomaly. Perhaps we are so hungry for female representation that these stories excite us simply because they are so hard to come by.

But I suspect that the real reason we love to read about and then crucify these women hinges on a more specific urge, one more akin to what I felt as a 13-year-old girl. Women are sick of being held to unrealistic standards of beauty, wealth, and success. We are thrilled when we get to see these unattainable images of wealth and femininity torn down. At the same time, we smash other women to do it because we’ve been taught that it’s the women themselves who are the problem. Rather than zooming out to the big picture, we are taught to hone in on each individual woman’s perceived flaws, as if by extracting their moral failings we’ll somehow escape the bigger structure that imprisons us. But we won’t.

I can count one historic case of a woman committing fraud that failed to make any splashy headlines in its day. In the early ’90s, writer Lee Israel’s career had taken a turn for the worse. Desperate and out of work, Israel realized she could forge letters by literary greats such as Dorothy Parker and sell them for a pretty penny. She even went on to steal authentic letters from literary archives and replace them with forged copies. The 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? starring Melissa McCarthy portrayed Israel’s crimes. In spite of its juicy, inspired-by-a-true-story plot and its powerhouse lead, the film earned a paltry $11.7 million against its $10 million budget.

Is it any surprise that a story of a woman committing fraud who wasn’t beautiful, who lived in a bigger body, who was poor without creating the illusion of wealth, did not succeed at the box office? Oh, did I mention she was queer? The story of Lee Israel is easily forgotten because it reminds us too much of the ugly truth: that women who are deemed unpretty or who live life in bigger bodies are often passed over, their talent and ideas ignored unless they are costumed in a glamorous alternative narrative.

When we vilify women like Delvey, Holmes, or Calloway for lacking authenticity, perhaps what we are really raging about is the desire for a world where women have permission to live more authentically. Wouldn’t it be wild if we were suddenly allowed to be unpretty, unglamorous, not-rich — in short, imperfect — and still be deemed interesting enough to read about?

As much as I enjoyed watching those severed Barbie heads roll into the street, I walked away that day with a creeping shame. Why had it felt so good to watch another girl destroy dolls so similar to the ones I’d cherished only a year or two earlier? Emotionally, of course, it gave me a brief release from the tension and terror of my impending womanhood. But today, as an adult, I’m left wondering how to fill the empty space those ruined dolls left. After the slaughter, how do we move past our obsession with artificial displays of feminine beauty and success? Perhaps it begins with lifting up ones that leave room for imperfection and that ultimately help us feel whole.

Nayomi Reghay is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers women, wellness, and technology. She writes about how social media impacts our relationships in her advice column, Swipe This! You can follow her on Twitter.

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