The Sober Virgo

In September 2014, I was diagnosed with stage three cancer, and by the time I was done with two major surgeries and four rounds of intense chemo, my brain was fried. I couldn’t concentrate, and I was full of fog if I tried. I was starting to work part-time and couldn’t do much before feeling a lot of fatigue. There was one point where they thought the cancer had gotten into my liver, and if that was the case, I didn’t have long for this world. The good news was that it hadn’t gotten into my liver, so I was just done and now supposed to return to my old life.

In 2016 I decided I needed to get into a creative practice that would allow me to pull back the heavy drapes of fog that obscured my brain and do a humorous meditation every day for 365 days. I spent every day typing up a fake funny meditation in the form of the stereotypical meditation books published by Hasleden. I took my experience with self-help, recovery, and spirituality and created Cracked Pot Meditations. 

Many of these posts were done at three o’clock in the morning after coming home from a truck stop diner that was the home of the meeting after the late night meeting, and I was lying on my back typing it up and positions without any editing. Some of the posts are just poorly written. I give myself a break because I was recovering from a traumatic medical experience that robbed me of my cognitive thinking and creativity.

The Sober Horoscope has become one of my most popular posts ever. I made them based on people having a sign for what zodiac season they got sober and how that would rule their sobriety and recovery. Again, it was haphazardly and rushed, so that I could have done better work.

I am returning to the Sober Horoscope again but with more editing and more information. Since this is August 23rd, we enter the sign of the virgin maiden, the Virgo. Let’s make fun of Virgos since they hate laughter.

The Sober Virgo

(August 23rd – September 22nd)

Experience

The Virgin is the alcoholic that is obsessive-compulsive about drinking more than any other sign. They will be ritualistic about their booze. The bottles have to be set out a certain way. The ice cubes have to be the kind that has a hole through them. The Maiden will panic if anything interrupts a Virgo’s drinking ritual. Many Virgos come to AA through the therapy world. They believe and follow their therapist’s directions, and when they come clean about the amount of alcohol they are consuming, the therapist will be alarmed. 

The Sober Virgo will not have your exciting criminal story or the romantic alcoholism of a Bukowski or Hemingway; they will maintain a buzz all day just drinking enough and will be high functioning. They will need help listening to the more dramatic bottoms of AA and relating to the fast and the furious tellings. 

AA will seem like a step down for these dramaless alcoholics. They will struggle with being at the rest of AA’s level. They will look for other ways to find drama.

Strength

Once in AA, just doing AA will not be enough for them. They will be bored with the 12 steps before even doing them if they ever do them. These recovery warriors will join as many 12-step programs as possible while exploring new age and alternative medicine. One therapist will no longer be enough. 

While most of these Virgos come in while the summer is in its twilight, they are masochists for pain, even if they have to make it up. Just being okay one day is not acceptable to these Maidens. They will make up an issue to work on. Life is suffering to these Sober Virgos, so diving deep into their psyche for issues to be victimized by, and if that doesn’t work, they will look to others as the source of their psychological slog.

You will see these Sober Virgos always furiously scribbling in their notebooks. They will be doing two or three fourth steps at a time from different programs or for other challenges in their life. They will be so focused on their recovery that they will forget to live life.

Hope

The Virgo will always be about minor details instead of backing out and looking at the bigger picture. While this can cause them to be in perpetual trauma, they can also help others to see things that they have missed. They might have written about you and your inventory in one of their notebooks. They will pass this off as helping you understand yourself, but it is plain old looking down on you. They will say they took your inventory since you weren’t.

The Virgo will not be a massive part of the fellowship. They will find the fun part of life hard to grasp and feel it is unnecessary. Why have a little fun when you can analyze yourself more? The Virgo will even feel threatened by a meeting or group of people who are more into fellowshipping and letting loose instead of just internalizing all the trauma together. They will desperately try to interrupt laughter to bring everyone down with their self-imposed grief.

If a Virgo gets involved in a business meeting, prepare for some unfathomable organization. Very precise Excel treasurer reports, thirty-minute GSR reports, and rewritten formats with all the grammar mistakes fixed are all Virgo contributions. This organizational control will make them secretly think they are carrying the meeting on their shoulders, and if they leave, the meeting will fold.

Relationships

A Sober Virgo will be tough to woo. They will remain unimpressed by any chivalrous or grandiose gesture of love. If they are interested in you, they have used sabermetrics based on only statistics they know to determine if you are partner material. They are the most cautious about getting into a relationship of all the sober signs. You will never know they love their partner by how they act around them.

A Sober Virgo will keep many analytical notes on their partner and how the relationship goes. They will scrutinize many decisions and indecision, and there will be notebooks full of inventory of their partner’s grosser handicaps. This can be helpful, for it means a partner of a Virgo will always know exactly what they are doing wrong – it’s on paper.

The bad news is once you correct the number one problem on the Virgo’s list, there are plenty of more things on the list to take its place. A Virgo’s partner will be the new source for all the issues they must resolve. It will delight them if the relationship is going through some turmoil.

Careers

The Virgo is usually gainfully employed when coming into the rooms and, in some cases, are accomplished artists. While that might seem cool, they are career artists who do it without soul. If you have been in a Burger King bathroom and saw a framed picture on the wall, you have seen their art. 

The Maiden is very rationally and scientifically minded, so they will be thrilled in jobs where they can control facts. Medical specialists, like podiatrists, are an excellent match for the Sober Virgo. They like to have tiny detail to be completely focused on instead of the whole body or a large subject. 

Sometimes you will ask a Virgo three or four times what they do for a living, and it just won’t be remembered. It doesn’t seem that important to know what a Virgo does for a living. Either they are making shitty commercial art or are studying the tiniest detail and only that little detail.

Virgo Pitfall

The Virgo will fall due to their imperfections. They told their sponsor everything they could remember on their fifth step, but they think there is something they can’t remember that they need to remember. They take vitamins, but maybe one of the days, they forget they already took one and take a second one. Perhaps they were driving and got angry at another driver for not going safely around them. Maybe they even yelled something from within the safety of their car, but the damage has already been done, for anger is the dubious luxury of ordinary people. Whatever the reason, the Virgo will be fixated on this one possible error instead of all the successes, and it will eat at their brain until it becomes too much, and the achievements will not mean anything. A Virgo who is not convinced they are imperfect will just give up.