July 6

Who you are

You grew up being told you had your grandmother's hands or your uncle's temper, and some part of you believed it. Being compared to the dead is a strange inheritance. You have spent years working out which of those traits are actually yours and which were handed to you with the name, and you are more honest about the answer than most people would be.

You are also generous about who counts as family. Step-parents, in-laws, the friend who has been at every Christmas for twelve years: you fold them in without ceremony and defend them like blood. Cancer is loyal to belonging rather than to bloodlines, and you decided early that the list is something you write yourself rather than something you were handed.

Your gifts

• Living register. You know who is connected to whom, and you keep the connections warm without being asked.
• Honest inheritance. You can name what you were given, the good and the difficult, without flinching from either.
• Includer. You bring the outsider into the family properly, and you never make them earn their place.

Your shadow

A name can become a debt. You take on somebody else's unfinished business, their reputation, their ambition, their old regrets, and you call it duty. Meanwhile the things you actually want get postponed to a year that never arrives. You are also slow to admit when an inherited loyalty has expired, and you will keep paying into a relationship that stopped returning anything long ago.

Your soul work

You are here to keep what was worth keeping and put down the rest without apology. Decide, deliberately, which parts of the inheritance you are carrying forward. A name is not a sentence. It is a starting point, and you were always allowed to add your own life to it.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The fourth sign carries the gift of deep feeling and fierce care, and the lifelong lesson of the shell: protection that must not become a prison.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

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