I was born in Zhengzhou, China, and moved to Iowa when I was 5 years old. When I first got into astrology in 2014, I was recovering from twelve long years in predominantly white institutions and going through a Uranus-Sun conjunction as well as a tenth house Saturn transit. It was intense. In school, in my relationships, in my sexuality, in the jobs that I worked when I was in school and just finishing school, I felt as though I had no claim to reality. I was always in the position of feeling as if someone else’s feelings dictated my reality, that the attachments or desires I experienced were wrong (too clingy, too opportunistic, too gluttonous), and that my job was to trim myself down to adulthood. Today, I’m able to call what was happening to me for what it is—gas lighting. Gas lighting is the action of overwriting another person’s reality and making them feel as if their reactions, their framework, and their experience is somehow less real than everyone else’s. What gaslit me was a mixture of racial bias, patriarchal socialization, and economic precarity. Gas lighting works like this: you feel as if you are not allowed to express love unless someone else defines the relationship that exists between the two of you on their terms and you make your love small in order to fit their box. You suffer at work because you are getting paid less than your white coworkers and, when you call out the race problem, they make you suffer because they see you as the race problem. Becoming an astrologer didn’t solve all these problems for me but it did give me a language. It also made me confront the issue of how I was allowing belief to operate within my own life. Astrology doesn’t give you a self but, because it is a language, it gives you a means to make yourself up. I believe in making yourself up. However, I know that we are unable to convince ourselves that the self we make up is realer than the self other imagine of us unless we own our language. Because astrology is so much about the audacity of believing in the wrong things, of spiritualizing with humor, and magicking politically—it is a worthy antidote to the everyday gas lighting that race, gender, and class violence use to warp us psychically. My mission with astrology is this: to take back the language of the cosmos from capitalism and supremacy and to use it for the creation of communities of care.