Common App Essay Breakdown Essay (Astrology & Psychology)

In elementary school, when my friends and I played Greek gods and goddesses, I was assigned Aphrodite. Instantly, I embraced the ultra-feminine, bratty persona. In middle school, when I learned from an all-knowing Buzzfeed quiz that my Harry Potter house was Slytherin, I then tried to embody that morally gray, self-serving attitude. Finally, in high school, upon the revelation that I was a Scorpio sun, I became the epitome of Scorpio: mysterious, opinionated, and perhaps a little too blunt.

However, astrology became more than a hobby for me. I transitioned from watching videos of “manifest under the new moon for money, growth, and love” to reading Chris Brennan’s Hellenistic Astrology. I studied the divinatory language characterizing people through an intricate system, like a warped clock with a hand for each celestial body orbiting Earth. I reveled in these games of association, recognizing art in the symbolism while allowing fragments of my identity to shift as frequently as the moon waxes and wanes. There is a universe of ever-changing yet patterned movement in everyone, and astrology provides a language to interpret it.

Although often dismissed as pseudoscience, astrology can uncover new facets of identity. For example, when I complimented my friend Jenny and praised the way her attention felt like a warm spotlight, she found pride in identifying with her Leo sun.

Then, during my sophomore trip to the Yucatan, I met Lucia, a British tour guide in training. As we marveled at an intricate astrological clock outside the Mexican National Museum of History, recognizing her astrological expertise, I asked her for a birth chart reading and was shocked to hear her say I was a Libra sun, not Scorpio. My whole life, I’d identified with the assertive conviction of a Scorpio sun, but in Lucia’s Vedic interpretation, this placement is Libra: group-oriented and balanced. Instead of renouncing my belief in astrology, though, I took it as proof of human behavior’s contradictory nature. I call it Schrödinger’s astrology: everyone has potential to actualize different yet simultaneous versions of themselves.

What started as a passion for astrology soon evolved into a deeper quest to understand people. Last year, in my AP research project on the effect of religiosity on social conformity, I traversed psychological concepts like mental conviction, discovering that extremist opinions originate from a need to soothe the mental distress of uncertainty. I could finally explain my childhood tendency to caricaturize myself.

Growing up, all children wrestle with varying degrees of identity crisis, and I was no exception. My solution was to align myself with familiar character tropes. If I was Miss Aphrodite, then I couldn’t run around playing kickball. If I was Miss Scorpio, I had to be callous, or else I wouldn’t know who I was. Though I didn’t realize it then, treating myself like an archetype as opposed to a complex, multifaceted person stunted my growth.

By the time I wrote my 20-page paper, I’d read Pyszczynski and Rothschild’s Psychological Features of Extreme Political Ideology so many times and studied confirmation bias, conformity, and cognitive dissonance so much that I could no longer see the world in binaries. Instead, I attempt to refine my patterns of behavior and thought by accepting potential incongruencies between my mind and reality. I think with logic, but not to invalidate emotion. I act with conviction, but not with blind certainty. It was astrology that taught me this balancing act was possible, introducing me to the essence of psychology: the recognition of beautiful paradoxes and complexities in myself and others.

My practice of astrology opened a new lens of interpreting a universe of perpetual change. Human nature cannot be limited to a Myers-Briggs personality or Enneagram number. So when I strive to understand others, I will keep in perspective their whole chart, not only one planet.