What is “Mercury in retrograde”?
You know how, when you’re stopped at a traffic light, next to a big truck, you sometimes think you’re rolling forward, and go to check the hand brake, but actually the truck’s backing up? Mercury in retrograde is like that, only it’s a planet forty-eight million miles away moving backward, and there’s no stoplight, per se, at least until the sun explodes and we all combust into cosmic glitter (which, thankfully, is still several Mercury-in-retrogrades away).
What does it look like?
Just as the moon gets fat and full, and then wanes, Mercury goes from being round to being gibbous and then even more gibbous, gibbous enough that everything in your life maybe turns to shit—there’s an oat-milk shortage, Amazon packages go missing, people won’t stop talking about “Lincoln in the Bardo,” everything just seems very alkali, suddenly. And then it dawns on you, Mercury, you son of a—
How often does this happen?
According to Business Insider, the astrological authority most trusted by M.B.A.s, Mercury goes into retrograde three or four times a year, lasting about three weeks each time. And, even when Mercury isn’t in retrograde, it is often thinking retrograde thoughts, listening to too much Band of Horses, and just generally being a celestial drag. In its defense, if you spent your life essentially on fire, you’d be prone to cranky periods, too.
Is this something a Himalayan salt lamp can fix?
That’s a good question. A good. Question.
How should I prepare?
As Mercury governs communication, you might work on your interactions with others: make sure you’re not ending texts with a period, keep that ironic LinkedIn endorsement on ice, over-enunciate your name to the Starbucks barista. You should definitely back up your cell-phone data, unless your iCloud filled up in 2016, in which case you should e-mail yourself all of the photos you don’t want to lose, with the subject line “ME.” Mercury in retrograde often brings with it an urge to reconnect with exes, so let me remind you, and I’m only going to say this once: Chad Kroeger has moved on, honey.
What happens in the lead-up to retrograde?
The “shadow” of retrograde starts before true Mercury in retrograde and continues for a while after. The idea is that the planets and stars are giving you time to process and prepare. Basically, you only have two to three good days a year to get stuff done without calling your boss “mom,” or unknowingly giving a keynote with your pencil skirt twisted a hundred and twenty-five degrees around your torso. If you map it all out, the astrological calendar resembles a giant game of snakes and ladders, but it’s all snakes and no one ever wins. Except that one girl from your M.F.A. program who somehow wrote two critically acclaimed novels while raising triplets.
Has Mercury in retrograde gotten worse?
Today’s Mercury in retrograde isn’t a patch on the old Mercury in retrograde. That Mercury in retrograde was famous for its kind of low-key dysfunctional charm—maybe you couldn’t find your glasses because they were on your head, or you drove away from the gas station with the fuel pump still clipped to your tank. Funny, goofy stuff. Today’s Mercury in retrograde is more chaotic, more macro, more like an old man yelling at a boy pushing a lawnmower. It’s not what it used to be is what I’m saying. But fear not: it inevitably will come to an end, leaving you with your regular constant feeling of doom.
Until then, is there anything I can do about it?
Vitamin D.
