I almost became a flat earther, you don't want my opinion.
On changing your opinions and the secret I've been keeping all month.
As a firstborn daughter, born to a firstborn daughter, I grew up regularly being told I was wise and mature. My mother was divorced with two kids by the age of twenty-seven, and my sister was considered the “problem child,” so I wasn’t just wise and mature, I was also always a little bit anxious.
My mom would lovingly refer to me as a little old lady and a worrywart from before I was old enough to remember her doing so. When you grow up with a sibling who gets a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons, you start doing everything in your power to manage the emotions of everyone around you in any given room. And part of that micromanaging involves being the family therapist. By middle school, I graduated from “little old lady” to my mother’s “consigliere,” which she still calls me today.
As I grew up, I became the shoulder to cry on. Friends and family come to me with their problems and for advice, and I take a lot of pride in this role. I’m weirdly level-headed and incredibly diplomatic for a Sagittarius. Maybe it’s all the Capricorn in my chart. Whenever someone comes to me asking to vent or for advice, I begin to tingle. It’s what I live for. It’s an ego boost. And honestly, it’s given me a complex. For a while, I thought I was supposed to know everything. I figured if everyone around me leans on me for emotional support and advice, that must mean I have all the answers, and that my opinions can’t budge.
That’s when the more obvious Sagittarius traits start to show. The deep, longing desire to find the truth at all costs. And my journey towards finding the truth and living a deep and meaningful life means changing my mind. And I’ve changed my mind a lot. It’s the thing I’m most insecure about while simultaneously being the thing I love most about myself.
I went from being very New York or Nowhere to living in Central Florida to missing New York and kind of hating Central Florida to wanting to pack it all up and move abroad. If only my husband would get on board!
Becoming vegan was my weird 2020 hobby. Some people baked banana bread, and I learned 6,000 ways to use nutritional yeast. But by 2024, I was eating carnivore/animal-based and cooking almost everything in butter.
I went from being a makeup artist to a dating coach to a business coach to a Human Design reader to a Disney content creator to a social media consultant… all in the last six years.
I went from being a very vocal liberal to getting so deep into conspiracy theories during COVID that I was two steps away from joining Q-Anon and becoming a flat-earther. Now I consider myself left-leaning while simultaneously low-key, high-key not trusting the government at all and identifying as politically homeless. Don’t hate me. Or do, I don’t know what to tell you!
This is why you won’t catch me sharing opinions on politics or true crime, no matter how large my platform gets. You’re allowed to not like me for that. But as someone who at one point thought there might actually be a reptilian cabal running the earth, believe me, you don’t want me sharing my opinions.
It’s funny that at some point I was trying to be a life coach.
I believe that many people, honestly most people, are not meant to have fixed opinions, and I’m one of those people. The ability to swing so far one way and then the other, no matter how unhinged and irresponsible, has given me the gift of range, empathy, and perspective. I’m not just the advice girl or the consigliere, but an accidental mediator who’s facilitated open dialogue between family members and friends who don’t see eye-to-eye. And believe me, when you can get a Catholic boomer to agree with their poly non-binary godchild, that’s no small feat!
That being said, I’ve changed my mind about something recently, and I’ve been keeping it a secret for three weeks. I’m still deconditioning from the egoic shackles of fixed opinions. I’ve been slow to learn that even my seemingly harmless opinions might be better off kept to myself. It’s still embarrassing to change your mind, especially when doing it so publicly.