Every tough guy has a story about loss that they are learning to tell.

Trigger warning: For December’s horoscopes, I chose to focus on Venus’s disappearance in Capricorn. This shift in Venus’s phase prepares us for its retrograde in Scorpio in the fall of 2026. I have decided to interpret this part of Venus’s synodic cycle as an opportunity to make room for grief. As always, my horoscopes are not a prediction or a diagnosis for anything happening in your life. They are a bit more melancholic than usual not because I am trying to predict Bad Things for anyone but because I think that the winter helps us make room for sadness. I am hoping that you are in a place where you can be gentle with yourself when you read December’s horoscopes.

Somewhere around mid December, Venus will disappear behind the Sun. Nothing to worry about. Venus does this a lot. It disappears whenever it is preparing to change its face. Right now, Venus is still a morning star but, after it disappears, it will re-emerge as an evening star. After it reappears as an evening star, Venus will remain one until it retrogrades in Scorpio in the fall of 2026. Even though Venus is in Sagittarius right now and moves into Capricorn in December, its disappearance is not really about its transit through the winter signs. This disappearance of Venus is really about its eventual re-emergence in Scorpio.

This part of Venus’s cycle from now until fall of 2026 will be about mourning the affection that you needed but did not get—the nutrition that you needed but were denied. Those of us who are still living will examine the brutal neglect that we have survived. This act of historical examination is painful but is also a way of learning how to love.

I’ll tell you a personal story. My grandma, a woman who everyone calls aggressive and boring because she comes from a region marked by war and famine, came from a family of beggars. Later in her life, after she survived her own history and after the revolution, she started to play basketball. She was so good at basketball that she played on the men’s teams. I have a photo of her playing basketball from when she was in her fifties. She looks super cool and super strong. To me, my grandma represents something about denied nutrition and tough love because she also never learned how to cook.

Those of us who survived, people may say that we are overly goal oriented because we learned to pay attention to survival only and call us boring because our culture was robbed from us and taken by someone. This is what it means to survive: you learn to divide the world by what will hurt you and what will benefit you. You become a little ruthless, not with other people but definitely with yourself. You forget about your innate playfulness and curiosity. The world is marked by difference—territories of safety or dominion. And yet, there is something—a history of circumvented needs—that you cover up with your toughness and your strength.

Every tough guy, every cool and strong looking person, has a story about loss that they are learning to tell. Venus in Capricorn is the tough Venus, the one who performs strength in order to please and benefit other people. What are you appeasing with your toughness?

In December, Mars will move super fast as the Sun approaches it in Capricorn. Jupiter is at its slowest because it opposes fast Mars. Mars and Jupiter approach an opposition with one another. Both are exalted.

My grandma taught me how to garden with her tattooed hands. She taught me how to approach animals with stealth. She taught me how to let things be, to never try to manage a living thing, and to wait for a better time. I think that waiting for the right time is the name of the game when it comes to Capricorn Mars. Capricorn Mars is great at enduring a tough situation because it will save its resources and wait for the right time to act. Jupiter in Cancer is in more of a hurry to share and to teach with its whole chest but Jupiter is held back by its own retrograde. Mars, patient and cold Mars in Capricorn, is the planet that receives the favor of the Sun. Saturn, the ruler of Mars, has also turned direct.

That’s the energy that I want you to use to nurture yourself in December. Approach yourself quietly. Sit somewhere with stillness. Be patient. Never try to manage yourself because you, too, are a living thing and living things can’t be controlled into prosperity.

Capricorn season is the season of enduring, of waiting for the right moment, of doing a little more work to make things easier in the long haul because it’s worth it. That’s what it means to live in a cold environment. And yet, Venus opens up the long mourning of 2025 to 2026. You were not born to be tough. You became it for a reason. You must find this reason because there is something that meant so much to you that you were willing to become tough.

Sagittarius December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the nutrition that you were denied. You’re not just mourning the amount of food but your access to food, how much it took for you to eat, what it was like to wait while hungry, and whether you had access to culturally relevant food. You’re mourning the stomach troubles, the indigestion, the way you had to swallow food that your body could not accept.

The stomach is the hardest thing to regulate because it is smack dab in the middle of the body. The top half and the bottom half of your body might be completely different temperatures. How do you regulate the organ that is supposed to regulate the rest of you?

My only suggestion is that you let yourself take as long as you need to eat whenever possible. If your lunch break is short, then take your time in the evening. There’s a lot going on whenever we eat. Will I have enough? How do I share? What do I like? When you eat, give yourself time. You can take as long as you need.

Sometimes, patience can settle your tummy. Time will help you figure out what is acceptable to you as a resource and to absorb what is nutritious into you.

Questions for Sagittarius for December 2025:
What gets in the way of you eating when you need to?
What gets in the way of you knowing what you are hungry for?
What gets in the way of you eating for as long as you need?

Capricorn December 2025 Horoscope

Jealousy in friendship is actually really normal. We get jealous of our friends for all kinds of reasons: they’re not spending as much time with us because they started dating someone new, they have a baby while we struggle to have one, or they get to see their mom on the weekends but we can’t. Jealousy is normal and does not necessarily mean that someone is mean hearted or that they are trying to take anything away from you.

Unnamed jealousy usually drives people apart but jealousy is really just another name for grief. Later, in 2026, you will have the opportunity to evaluate how jealousy sits in your friendship dynamics. Right now, in December, you have the opportunity to build a little space for grief in the structure of your life.

Make a little room for everything that you had to deny just to grow up tough. Make a little time to miss everything that you miss. Think about how making a little room or time for yourself will impact your actual schedule and the layout of your actual room. Actually plan for this, not just in hypotheticals.

Later in 2026, you will ask your friends to make room to hold your grief with you but, before you do that, you might get to know in privacy.

Questions for Capricorn for December 2025:
What is one place that you can go to mourn?
What is one day of the week that you can save for mourning?
What is one song that helps you start singing?

Aquarius December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the rest that you were denied. You are mourning the sleeps that you didn’t get to have because, for whatever reason, you had to work so hard. Yes, you love your work and you rely on it to some extent. But you, just like every other living thing, are also half fatigued.

To rest is to live for oneself. To work is to help other people out. To rest is to trust your environment, to lean on a piece of furniture without worrying that it will fall apart under your weariness, to nap on the train without worrying that some stranger is going to jump you. Resting is about learning how to trust and accepting the belonging that is available for you in whatever shape it looks like right now. You must fight for your right to trust other people.

You might be a little tired. Try to remember that being tired doesn’t mean that you have given up.

If you begin the month feeling sorrowful, remember that patience is something that you can use to fill your heart. You have to give yourself patience. That’s what it takes to rest. No amount of distraction, pleasure, or inspiration will ever solve your need for patience. When cows become best friends with other cows, they wait for them so that they can graze together. Be your own best friend—wait for yourself to arrive.

Questions for Aquarius for December 2025:
What gets in the way of you sleeping when you need to?
What gets in the way of you knowing when you are tired?
What gets in the way of you sleeping for as long as you need to?

Pisces December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the curiosity that organized religion tried so hard for so many years to take away from you. For so many years, you were told that goodness was something that you had to try and prove and that your goodness could only be validated by people who did not also try to know you.

You have the right to ask moral questions using your own words. Your moral questions are tenacious questions. They will interrupt the normative workings of relationships and expose the ones that you can’t quite rely on. Your questions about morality, about what it means to do the right thing or be a good person, will assist you in building trust with the people who are available for you.

For too long, your morality was speculative. The goodness that was taught to you was a fantasy—an idealization of humanity rather than an active curiosity about real people living in real places. As you grieve, you unravel your spirit and find a fierce hunger for actual knowledge.

Right before the most intellectually vibrant periods of our lives, we are usually humbled. We are brought to our knees by the idea that we don’t have to pretend to know what we don’t know. Later in 2026, you will thrive in knowledge but, first, you’re going to have to mourn everything that puritanism, that zionism, that humanism took from you.

Questions for Pisces for December 2025:
What happened when you tried to ask questions about morality when you were a kid?
What questions are you too embarrassed to ask around your friends?
What do your responses to the two above questions show you about how your morality has changed as you grew up?

Aries December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the authority that you were meant to hold that you have been denied because you were severed from knowing your lineage clearly as a result of colonialism. There’s cultural authority that you crave that you stumble around in because you speak a broken mother tongue. You crave this authority not because you like to hear yourself talk but because you have young people near you who you would like to be a reliable narrator for. You, too, would like to be the sort of pillar that others can lean on.

Relax. You will find consistency through patience. When you wait for yourself, you find that you have a lot of consistency that you have counted on and can continue to reliably count on.

You don’t have to be an expert on something just to engage. When you don’t know something about your own culture or history, you can always use your curiosity. It’s not about knowing stuff and sharing it in the same way to every person out there. It’s about connecting. Trust. Play is the place where true trust is made.

If you don’t always feel curious, then wait for yourself to come into a place where you can be. You can take as long as you need. You have no desire to replace the authority that you lost with social status, titles, or credentials. That’s probably why younger people seek you out. They know that you are also trying to find the rhythm of trust.

Questions for Aries for December 2025:
WWhat is one personality trait or behavior that you do that you can usually rely on?
What is one relationship that time has changed?
What do your responses to the two above questions show you about what you trust?

Taurus December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the education that you thought that you needed to acquire in order to be relatable or interesting enough for your relationships. So much of school has been turned into a commodity and way too many people go to school not even to learn. But, still, there’s something about going to school that makes us feel like a future is possible for us. Who doesn’t want to provide a future for the people who they love?

You see, you make aspirations because we want a future and the only way that we will build a future is by cooperating with other people. It’s really hard to imagine a future when alone because human beings literally just weren’t built for it. We make our futures together with people in community.

You are waiting for your relationships to challenge you again. You’re waiting for the people in your life to prove that they will stay for the hard shit, that you won’t be forgotten the moment you speak up on a need or name something that needed to be named.

Figure out every single resource and opportunity that you hoped to earn through school and figure out a way to build all of that in the streets. It’s not about how hard you work. It’s about how you invite other people in.

Questions for Taurus for December 2025:
What are the resources that you are seeking from school?
What are the opportunities that you are seeking from school?
How do you build that on the streets?

Gemini December 2025 Horoscope

Right now, you might be waiting for work. As you navigate all of the existential questions that looking for employment tends to bring up in all of us (What work is right for me? What am I not willing to compromise about how I live? What am I willing to do with my body and what am I not willing to do?), you are also waiting for some truth about relational security to show itself to you.

Financial security in your partnerships: There are people who you provide for and who provide for you. There are people who you plan for and who plan for you. There are promises that you have made that you are waiting to deliver and promises that other people made to you and that you are still waiting on.

There is something about what you thought that you needed to provide for other people before you allowed yourself to ask for help that you are mourning in December. That thing that you are mourning has a bit of ego, a lot of self protection, and so much history.

Be patient with yourself. You can’t just will yourself to trust a relationship dynamic using pure force no matter how much you need the people in your life. You have to wait for people to keep showing up for you until you realize that some of them will. Everything that you teach yourself about interdependency will assist you as you re-evaluate the way you work.

Questions for Gemini for December 2025:
What is one promise that you made that you delivered on?
What does this experience show you about what you can reasonably provide?
What does this experience show you about the people who choose to trust you?

Cancer December 2025 Horoscope

When you mourn another person, you’re not mourning that person. You’re mourning your memories of them and the person who you were when you knew them. With that person, you developed particular ways of ritualizing connection and checking in on one another that kept you secure. Mourning means that you pick up all of the fragments of what used to keep you secure and figure out what to do now that you’re already someone else.

As you mourn a particular someone or a style of relationship, you’re also waiting for your own desire.

In my personal philosophy, I don’t think that desire comes before relationship building. I think that we tend to feel close with people who we see consistently and that desire arrives at the most random times. We feel desire suddenly, randomly, when we already got to know a person simply because they showed up at the right time. We feel desire when we miss people, when we realize that you and they have both changed. Relationships are consistent but desire is simply not.

Later in 2026, you will engage with the question of what it is that you want more closely. However, the thing that you want is not always encapsulated fully in another person. Desire is not totally external. You want something and half of your desire is found within you. First, you will mourn the person who you thought that you needed to be in order to be socially acceptable.

Questions for Cancer for December 2025:
What is a style of relationship that you are starting to grow out of?
What did those relationship patterns protect you from?
What has become more apparent in your grief?

Leo December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning all of the skills that you’re trying to learn right now because you somehow didn’t get to learn them early on. Our society teaches us to feel so much shame about not knowing how to Do Things as though everyone is born knowing how to do shit! We’re not. We need guidance and mentors and good teachers who work for us. We need people who ask us to do things that matter and more time off from working for industries that don’t really benefit anyone.

Try to discern between the people who ask you for your time because they want you to do something for them and the people who ask you for your time because they just want you. There’s actually nothing wrong with either but these are two different kinds of relationships here. One is about home and acceptance. The other is about cooperation and working together.

Right now, you are waiting for your own needs to become more apparent to you. That’s why it’s actually so hard to show up and do things for other people. The most sincere way to give is to cooperate in ways that align with your own needs.

Try learning something that you’ve always wanted to know how to do. Find the errand that you have put off because you were afraid and approach that task as gently as possible. As you learn, be aware that you really are learning. Be kind to yourself. Tell yourself that it’s okay, that you’re doing a great job, and that you’re figuring it out.

Questions for Leo for December 2025:
What is one task that you put off because you were scared?
Can you break this task down into smaller parts?
Can you do one brave thing a day?

Virgo December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning something that you thought that you wanted that you realized that you don’t really need. Isn’t it wonderful? To be able to choose to not fulfill a personal ambition or desire because you realized that you have conflicting desires and that your choice is more important to you than all of the things that you were told to want? By choosing to depart from one ambition for another, you made a decision about the person who you are.

Also in December, you are waiting for closeness. You’re waiting for that sharp intuition when you can predict what your best friend will say next, the inside jokes that you share with your brother, and for your neighbors to text you back about whether they still need to borrow your car.

Isn’t it wonderful to be in the rhythm of offering and waiting for people who you can reasonably predict while letting go of the urgency of What Will I Do Next?

You’re going to learn so much about give and take, about how to identify your needs and ask for help, in 2026. This year will teach you about receiving nurture. The first thing that you are doing is grieving everything that you thought that you needed to want but actually just don’t.

Questions for Virgo for December 2025:
What makes it hard to ask for help when you don’t have a Big Goal?
What helps you ask for help when you don’t have a Big Goal?
Who shows up when you ask for nothing but presence?

Libra December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning your access to safe and comfortable housing. You are mourning all of the places that you grew up in, worked to build up, or just lived in that you were then priced out of. You are mourning the intimacy and culture that you lost and the life that was interrupted. You had to learn how to rewrite the story of who you are from scratch. Yes, you did it and you did it well. But you can still mourn what you lost.

You are not less than or less welcome in your home just because housing is a commodity and capitalism accelerated in your lifetime. The people who you grew up with still remember you. They want to see you and to visit you, for you to visit them. They have made a bed for you and the bed is comfortable and safe.

The reason why you left is because you needed to heal some part of you that your old housing arrangement just could not hold. You moved but your dignity remained intact. You protected it with all that you have because, to put it bluntly, you care about yourself. You know that you’re pretty cool and that you are good at making home possible.

Here’s to going back home and missing the hell out of it. Here’s to visiting again and barely just remembering that you are still allowed to walk around alone here in this place that you used to just live, a place where you have become a visitor but are still not a guest.

Questions for Libra for December 2025:
What do you allow yourself to miss about your home?
What did this home teach you to survive?
What have you been able to heal since moving?

Scorpio December 2025 Horoscope

In December, you are mourning the community that you need to feel excited about the future that our infrastructure so stubbornly cuts you off from. You are mourning the proximity and the connection that you crave, the context that you seek when you go on the internet. You are mourning the sense of being part of something greater than yourself that you got to experience, just sometimes, at a protest or an action.

And you’re waiting for yourself. You’re learning so much about your own habits and all of the little things that you used to do because someone once told you that you had to change in order to measure up. Your body has changed. You feel the aching bones that have plagued you since forever that you have ignored until now. Weirdly enough, your loneliness is the very thing that makes you less alone.

You are not less interesting or relevant just because you have trouble accessing a lot of people at once. Making friends is not a popularity contest. Popularity or having a lot of friends will also not solve the problem of infrastructure cutting across your community. You will feel together with people when you come to terms with what is missing and acknowledge the loss that you are trying to confront.

You never have to pretend to be popular or not-lonely just to make friends. There’s just way too many lonely people trying to figure this friendship thing out right there with you. You gotta meet all these people.

Questions for Scorpio for December 2025:
What did the old you think that you needed to deserve friendship?
What does the current you know about closeness and intimacy?
What helps you accept that the future you will be different from the you that exists today