One Year, Ten Chapters...and Yes, You’re a Main Character in This One
I see you. You’ve been there too. Some other pretending-to-be-an-adult asked you the kind of question pretending adults ask each other at the end of the year, and you did the whole ritual - rolled your eyes, sighed, and said, “My New Year’s resolution? Honestly? Just to survive.”
Okay. We need to shut the fuck up.
What we’ve just been through wasn’t survival. 2025 was a headfirst tumble into a deep well where every time you thought you’d hit bottom, the floor split open like some infernal mouth and politely informed you there was still further to fall.
We are crawling in, teeth clenched to not betray unhealed fractures. Old bruises we stopped explaining. A constant, low-grade hum of disbelief at how much happened and how little of it felt like something we actively chose.
Instead of promised lessons of resilience and growth through bravely facing up to adversities, 2025 threw chairs. Hard. Globally, it split open fault lines we’d been carefully stepping over for years.. Manic political reality TV show that perfectly mirrors the collective mania fed by a total erosion of truth and bots that give validity to our worst human impulses, economic anxiety fueled by institutional collapse and a fast and furious dissolution of democracies, revealing just how hollowed out they’ve become.
Personally, 2025 wore us down. Relationships fell away. Illusions collapsed before we could finish defending them. Plans we were convinced would work turned out to be fucking ambitious, if not delusional, in retrospect.
Astrologically, none of this came out of nowhere. 2025 was a year of endings, truths dressed up in confusion, final bosses jumping out of left field before we managed to equip our healing potions. 2025 was always meant as a deeply undiplomatic bratty launchpad to the big shifts of 2026. Neptune dragging its feet on the way out of Pisces, Saturn doing its fucking thing with them reality checks no one ever asked for, with zero interest in your feelings, Pluto in Aquarius continuing its slow, surgical demolition job…none of this was ever meant to feel good.
So when we talk about 2026, we’re not talking about a clean slate or a fresh start or some delusional “new chapter” energy. We’re talking about what happens next. After the fantasies burned down, after the scaffolding collapsed, after we finally admitted how exhausted we actually are.
No year exists in a vacuum. 2026 doesn’t wipe the board clean. It spins the wheel (guess what, the tarot card of 2026 is The Wheel of Fortune, more on that below) on a game already in progress, with pieces still on the table & rules only half-remembered.
So let’s crack open the manual again.
The Numerology of 2026
Add it all up and you get ten.
Ten is a tricky number. It gets marketed as completion, but that’s lazy numerology. Ten is not the end, even in the tarot suits - ten catapults you back to the aces on a forever revolving storyline of your life.
Sometimes through brutal endings.
But guess what - you’ve heard it before - the grief or the triumph of ending does not dissipate into the void. Instead, this energy transmutes to give spark to a new beginning. So, 10 is the moment where an ending tips into motion. One folded back into zero. Identity dissolving into momentum. The number 1 represents the spark, the pioneer, the raw impulse to act before one is “ready.”
Years ruled by 10 pose a crucial question: “What are you ready to move with?”
After the challenges of 2025, this matters. Ten doesn’t reward careful planning, decision paralysis, instead it punishes it. It favors players who can read a room, sense a shift and adapt without narrating every step or clinging to how things “should have gone.”
If 2025 was about seeing clearly (often against our will), 2026 is about responding intelligently. Timing becomes more important than force. Positioning matters more than effort. Knowing when to step in and when to step back becomes a survival skill.
The Tarot Medicine of the Year: The Wheel of Fortune
The Wheel of Fortune is often misunderstood as chaos. It isn’t. Chaos implies randomness. The Wheel is patterned. Cyclical. Relentless, yes - but not cruel. There is peace in assuming the wisdom of perpetual movements. We, as well as nature, as well as everything that is (one and the same thing all of the above) is light in motion. It goes through birth to death to rebirth and yes, The Alan Parson’s Project fans know already that: What goes up must come down. What must rise must fall.
The problem isn’t that the wheel turns. The problem is how desperately we cling to one spoke and call it security.
After the emotional devastation of 2025, the Wheel’s medicine is devastatingly simple: movement will happen whether you consent or not. The question is whether you exhaust yourself fighting it or learn how to ride.
To know this deeply & fully, to receive with gratitude the gifts of upward turn on the great wheel, knowing fully well nothing we hold in our hands (both literally and metaphorically) truly belongs to us with any permanence - and in turn (ha!) to realise that any adversity is only a necessary preclusion to wheel turning in our favor again soon, means to move yourself in the eye of the storm - in the middle of the wheel where it’s perpetual motion affects you the least.
One Year, One Story, Ten Chapters
This year behaves like a novel, not a calendar. Ten chapters. One arc. Each major transit responds to something already in motion, something initiated, strained or exposed in 2024–2025..and as the Wheel turns, it carries it forward.
So I choose ten not because nothing else matters, but because these are the hinges. The moments where the year visibly turns.
Chapter One: The Collective Mind Sparks
Late January 2026 / Aquarius Stellium
Late January opens the year with a jolt. Aquarius energy clusters the sky, and with it comes a surge of ideas, movements, and conversations that feel electric and destabilizing at the same time.
Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Mars all dog-piling Pluto. This is the mask-off moment for the global power structure. It’s palace intrigue on a global scale, revealing the “gross subterranean corruption” of big tech and the cold, rational distance of the oligarch class. Like anyone’s shocked. Insert puke emoji.
The personal becomes political immediately. The story starts with a choice: do we surrender to automated systems or do we use this Aquarian lightning to decentralize power? Expect rapid discourse shifts, technological or social developments that feel both exciting and unsettling, and a renewed obsession with “the future”, even as no one agrees what that means anymore.
This sets the tone: 2026 thinks fast, but not always wisely.
(Scroll below to see how this transit plays out in your own personal story - read for a Rising Sign, but take a peak at your Sun Sign too)
Chapter Two: The Dream Enters the Fire
Neptune enters Aries / January 26, 2026 (through 2038)
Neptune leaves its cozy swamp in Pisces and enters Aries (for good this time) for the first time since the Civil War era. This is the end of “emotional exhaustion” and the birth of “inspired action”. Also, fingers crossed a beginning of the well-overdue death of antisocial media aka the assassin of what’s true and humane in favor of a Neptunean dream of making a living as a travel influencer. Aries will shake us up from this delulu conspiracy theory nightmare.
This is one of the defining shifts of the decade. Ideals stop being abstract. Dreams demand action. Bad news for spiritual frauds and cult leaders with thirteen sports cars in the garage. Rage, inspiration, faith, disillusionment all come closer to the surface.
What 2025 exposed as illusory, 2026 asks us to do something about. This is inspiring. It is also volatile.
Chapter Three: Responsibility Follows the Dream
Saturn enters Aries / February 14, 2026 (through 2028)
Saturn follows Neptune into Aries on Valentine’s Day. Saturn is “debilitated” here; it’s like sending a toddler to an executive board meeting. Aka Trump’s presidency. Give him the nuke codes when you’re at it.
This chapter is about accountability. For leaders. For movements. For personal initiatives launched on passion alone. It signals a 36-year cycle reset where empty promises and “pajama-clad” excuses are no longer tolerated.
2025 showed us what doesn’t work. 2026 demands structure, stamina and follow-through.
(Scroll down to see how this transit writes itself into your Rising Sign storyline.)
Chapter Four: When Reality and Myth Collide
Saturn–Neptune Conjunction / February 20, 2026
This is a rare and sobering alignment. Ideals meet limits. Dreams meet gravity. Beliefs meet lived reality. Some see this as the main event of the decade (but honestly, within the current messy point in human history, every day is the main event).
Saturn and Neptune meet at 0 degrees of Aries aka the “World Point”. This hasn’t happened at the very first degree of the zodiac in over 2000 years. It is the Big Bang of a new era. Aliens? Hello?
Some illusions collapse here. Some visions solidify.
We are being asked: “What are you willing to fight for and are you building something real from that wreckage?”
Chapter Five: A Sudden Course Correction
Aquarius Solar Eclipse / February 17, 2026
Virgo Lunar Eclipse / March 3, 2026
Oh look, halfway through our main storyline points and we’re still only in Feb. Well, fuck me. But perhaps better to get this shit out of the way right at the start? Eclipse season early in the year violently edit the storyline. They remove what’s inefficient, unsustainable or falsely “useful.”
They do this through lightning strikes that start forest fires. But guess what - there are certain types of pyrophitic plants that can only sprout to life when exposed to an intense heat of wild fires.
There’s still a rest of the year to build something on that eclipse-scorched land.
Virgo, especially, demands discernment. Not everything deserves your energy. 2025 drained us because we were spending life force on the wrong things. This chapter begins the correction.
(Scroll below to see how the eclipses loudly & with fireworks rearrange things for your Rising Sign)
Before We Go Further
We’re still in the first months of the year, but the story continues in five more momentous astrological chapters.
What you’ve just read is the skeleton of the year. The plot without the interior monologue.
Behind the threshold, we slow down. There’s a juicy Venus Retrograde through the signs of Libra & Scorpio, my favorite treat of 2026 Jupiter entering Leo in the summer, Uranus final ingress into Gemini and some delicious and challenging conjunctions to round up the year.
We trace how each chapter lands differently depending on where YOU begin (read for your Rising sign first, but have a peak at your Sun sign too), what you’re carrying forward from 2025 and where the Wheel meets your personal terrain.
And once you learn how to move with it..instead of bracing against it, the year becomes something else entirely.
