Weekly Horoscopes for the Week of January 3 by the Cut

Michelle Obama, a Capricorn.
Photo: Photo Illustration by Preeti Kinha/ Photos: Getty

In the early morning hours of Sunday, January 2nd, communication planet Mercury entered imaginative Aquarius. While there, Mercury offers you the opportunity to think in new ways, to reject outdated rules and assert the rebellious freedom of knowing your own mind. If the community or job or future you want for yourself doesn’t exist yet, here is your chance to invent it. Later the same day, a new moon in Capricorn offers the opportunity to begin the year with what is as close to a clean slate as life offers. You can choose which long-term goals you’re pursuing, which people and projects are worth committing to in the year ahead.

It isn’t your fault that your life has become smaller than it once was, that your dreams seem, somehow, to have shrunk. There’s less space to be truly open-hearted and free during a global pandemic, after all. Your joy now is contained, no matter how hard you’ve pushed back against despair or how bravely you’ve tried to keep hope alive. This week, though, you can regain some ground. You won’t work miracles, or become the same wild person you once were overnight, but you can remember that you still are a person, that your ambitions are still alive, that there’s plenty of fire left in you.

Other people — the ones in power, and the ones in your everyday life — always imagine that they know what’s best for you. Not just how you should behave, but also how and what you should feel, dream, desire. Nevertheless, you don’t have to bow to their wishes, or bend your own feelings until they fit inside someone else’s ideas. Your stubbornness is a tremendous gift right now, because it allows you to refuse to be pressured into wanting only what others want for you. This week, it’s okay to be difficult if that’s what lets you remain free.

While some are forever striving toward unattainable perfection, you’re confident navigating uncertainty, comfortable in the knowledge that you’ll always adapt, that there’s more than just one way to live. The challenge, for you, isn’t to remember that you don’t need to be perfect. Rather, it’s in figuring out how to direct your energies in this great sea of possibilities. Life isn’t long enough to explore every potential choice, to set out on every adventure. But this week, you don’t have to worry about choosing “wrong.” If you gravitate toward what calls you, what interests you, what feels good, you’ll find your way.

It can be maddening, for you, acknowledging that you can’t run anyone else’s life for them. You can’t force your friends to make wiser choices, or to love themselves more, or to set better boundaries for themselves. You can’t compel strangers to be less selfish, or to adopt better manners, or to understand the world in the same way that you do. There are times when accepting this feels like defeat, but this week,…