September 29

Who you are

You divide things carefully because you already know you will be handed the last portion. Time, credit, the good chair, the least convenient day. It has made you scrupulous and slightly resigned at the same time, and it started early enough that you long ago stopped noticing you are always last in a queue you organised yourself.

Groups relax around you because the sharing out will be honest. You can see what each person actually needs, which is rarely what each person asks for, and your arrangements come out better than most negotiated settlements. The difficulty is that generosity offered in the hope of being noticed is not quite generosity, and a fair amount of yours is a bid.

Your gifts

• Scrupulous division. You share things out so evenly that people stop feeling any need to compete.
• Quiet giving. You hand over the better half without comment and would be embarrassed to have it pointed out.
• Reading appetite. You see what somebody actually needs underneath what they said they wanted.

Your shadow

Going without stops being fairness and starts being a way of proving something. You give up your share, then keep a private tally of every time you did, and the tally never gets settled because you have never once said it aloud. Give enough, you think, and somebody will finally serve you first. They will not. They think you prefer it.

Your soul work

Keep cutting the shares, because few people can be trusted with that job and you can. But take a portion first sometimes, in front of everybody, without explaining yourself. Fairness that leaves you out of it is not fairness. It is a habit wearing fairness as a coat.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The seventh sign carries the scales: beauty, fairness, and the gift of the other side. Its lifelong lesson is finding the self that the balancing forgot.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

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