April 4

Who you are

You go toward the problem while other people describe it. There is a particular silence you fall into when something is wrong, half concentration and half stubbornness, and it lasts until you have found the cause. Friends bring you their broken arrangements, their arguments with siblings, their bad contracts, because you treat a mess as a thing with a reason rather than a tragedy.

Nothing about this is sentimental. You are not trying to rescue anybody. You just cannot leave a fault alone once you have noticed it, and you would rather spend a whole Sunday on the real cause than a month on the symptom. Mars gives you the appetite for the ugly first hour, when everything looks worse than before you started.

Your gifts

• You look for causes. Symptoms bore you, so you keep going until you find the thing underneath.
• Steady in a mess. Chaos that panics other people makes you methodical.
• Useful rather than comforting. People come to you when they want the problem gone, not when they want agreement.

Your shadow

Some things are not yours to fix, and you struggle to tell the difference. You will take apart a friend's relationship in your head, offer the diagnosis unasked, and be genuinely surprised when it lands badly. Meanwhile the fault in your own week goes untouched, because a person who repairs is not supposed to be the one leaking.

Your soul work

Your soul work is knowing when to leave it. Ask before you begin, accept that some people want company rather than a solution, and turn the same honest attention on your own life that you have been giving to everybody else's.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The zodiac begins with fire. Aries carries the gift of the start, the courage to go first, and the lifelong lesson of learning to finish.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

Check a friend's day, or your partner's, and send it to them.