Returning to Yourself in Leo Season
Lately I’ve been inhabiting someone else’s life. Like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, I suddenly find myself in someone else’s body, feeling strange in a familiar place and performing a role I don’t identify with.
I move through obligations that belong to someone I barely recognize, wondering when exactly I agreed to all of this. Commitments accumulated while I wasn’t paying attention. All the while, my own desires get pushed to the back burner because it’s the right thing to do—or so I tell myself.
So that’s what self-abandonment feels like: waking up one day inside a life assembled around everyone else’s priorities.
Mercury’s retrograde through Cancer made these patterns impossible to ignore. Again and again, I found myself confronted with the unconscious ways I traded my own desires for the comfort of familiarity, obligation, or the illusion of security.
Recently I had to complete a job application for a position I had already worked. The paperwork needed urgent attention, otherwise I wouldn’t get paid in a timely manner. Never mind that the check itself is already six months overdue—let me repeat the work I’ve already done so I can finally collect what I’m owed.
As the Moon reached its first quarter square, I stood in line at the post office holding my father’s birthday gift. His wife had commissioned a family portrait because she knew he was nostalgic for his younger years in New York, when he was raising two daughters with my mother in a small two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I called my stepmother and my sister, and we searched through old photographs until we settled on a rare one with my father in it. He was a photographer and usually behind the camera, so it was difficult to find one with him and the whole family together.
We agreed on one where my father stood in the center holding me while my sister leaned against him. I recreated the photograph in black ink on paper using the few art supplies I’ve kept since leaving my painting studio. The drawing was more intimate than the larger paintings I once made, but its modest scale invited a different kind of attention. I sat at my kitchen table, absorbed in the tiny decisions of reconstructing faces I had once known so well.
The portrait would make my father happy, I thought while waiting in line. It made me unexpectedly sad. In such a short time, I’d drifted so far from painting—the practice I once believed defined me.
An old acquaintance sent me a vague message.
Want to hang out?
My stomach tightened, and I sighed. Do I want to hang out? What does that even mean?
The answer was no, because saying yes would have required abandoning what I actually wanted. I’ve become fiercely protective of my creative time, and the thought of sacrificing it irritated me. In the past, I might have begrudgingly accepted simply because it was someone I once knew who asked. Nostalgia was enough to convince me that maintaining connection was more important than honoring my own time. Mercury had been teaching me that this reflex deserved scrutiny.
What surprised me most was the fear that followed when I imagined saying no. Somewhere deep in my nervous system lives the conviction that a crisis waits on the other side of choosing myself.
Mercury’s retrograde in Cancer traced that fear back to its roots. My self-abandonment began inside family systems where my needs felt secondary to maintaining emotional cohesion, where belonging sometimes depended on accommodating everyone else before listening to myself.
Family once meant my mother, my father, and my sister. After my sister moved away and my mother died, it became just my father and me. These days, family is something I’ve built from chosen friends and lovers—the people listed as my “Emergency Contact.”
My father’s birthday fell on July 22, right in the heart of this season’s intense astrology. His Sun sits on the threshold between Cancer and Leo, which somehow feels fitting. Leo is ruled by the Sun, the celestial body traditionally associated with the father. The Sun illuminates everything within its sphere, including its children.
My father embodied that symbolism in many ways. He organized family outings, coached neighborhood sports, and was a steady presence in a community where many fathers were absent. He loved to tell people what I could do, proudly highlighting my accomplishments as though they were the most important parts of me. It was how he celebrated me.
Looking back, I wonder whether I learned that being impressive was safer than simply being myself. My worth became entangled with my intelligence, my accomplishments, and my artistic abilities. The weirder, softer parts of me—the quirks, contradictions, and desires that didn’t earn praise—gradually receded into the background.
When I called him on his birthday, he looked older than I remembered. His face carried the distortions promised by age, but there was still a brightness in his eyes. We talked for twenty minutes before my Chinese food arrived, ending the conversation as casually as it had begun. I hung up grateful for the call, but aware that I had heard these stories before.
As a Leo rising, I’ve always imagined myself as someone who lived freely, someone who followed curiosity wherever it led. But trauma has a way of quietly directing your choices until survival begins masquerading as authenticity. You become so practiced at adapting that you mistake accommodation for identity.
Perhaps that’s why this season feels less like becoming someone new and more like remembering someone I misplaced. The astrology of the coming weeks asks a deceptively simple question: What do you want?
Not what earns approval, preserves the peace, or promises recognition and material success. What do you want?
I want to make space to create again. I want to become obsessed with myself again, fully absorbed in my ideas without needing to justify them. I want to build a life organized around curiosity rather than obligation.
After the flooded landscape of Cancer season, I can feel a steady flame returning—the inner fire that animates my creative self. The outlines of my own life are becoming visible again. The water is finally receding.
Perhaps that is Leo’s real gift.
As we collectively step into a new chapter, the future asks something different of us. Maybe the quantum leap isn’t into someone else’s life—the life we were taught to want. Maybe it when we find the courage to wake up inside our own and begin making futures that reflect what we truly desire.
Leave a Reply