November 22

Who you are

You cut off your own retreat. You quit before the next job exists, tell the truth before the exit is negotiated, move to a city you cannot yet afford. It is not bravado, it is arithmetic. You know that if the way back stays open you will drift down it on the first tired evening, so you take the option away from the version of you who arrives exhausted.

You are honest about your own weaknesses in a way most people never manage, and then you build around them instead of pretending they are not there. Jupiter keeps making the far side of things look better than wherever you are standing, and so far the nerve to go has paid you back more often than it has cost you. Not always, though.

Your gifts

• No bluff. When you commit, everybody including you can tell that it is real, because there is no way back.
• Clear about your own drift. You build defences against your weaker moods instead of pretending you do not have them.
• Appetite for new ground. New country, new field, new start: you begin again with less fear than most people feel about a new road.

Your shadow

The commitment becomes an appetite for the break itself. You end things that were not finished, because a dramatic departure spares you the slower work of staying put and being ordinary. The people you cut off at twenty look, at forty, like people who would have stayed. The honesty runs loose too, and you deliver a harsh verdict on the way out and call it integrity.

Your soul work

Aim it at the life you actually intend to live rather than at whatever has started to bore you. Then do the unheroic part and stay somewhere through a whole dull season, where nothing is beginning and nobody is impressed, and find out whether you can be happy without a departure to plan.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The ninth sign fires its arrow at the horizon and follows it. Sagittarius carries the gift of faith in the distance, and the lesson of being here.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

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