astrology

Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of May 16

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, twins in both the biological and astrological sense. Photo-Illustration: by: Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty Images

Late on Sunday night, a lunar eclipse in Scorpio pulls hidden emotions and latent drama out in the open. Whatever negativity you’ve been doing your best to ignore — inconvenient feelings, painful truths, repressed sorrow or rage — will be illuminated. You may feel unprepared for this or imagine you’re too weak or scared to take action. But this eclipse gives you the opportunity to prove to yourself that you have the guts and the energy to rise up and meet whatever the world throws at you. On Friday night, the sun enters smart, adaptable, occasionally disorganized Gemini. Some fear Gemini season’s potential for chaos … maybe rightly so! Nevertheless, it can offer confirmation that no misfortune — whether personal, like stress, or shared, like systems of injustice — lasts forever. The world changes quickly, at times in dark ways but in joyful ones, too, and there’s nothing for us to do except keep going.

Weekly Horoscope Aries

Aries Weekly Horoscope

This week, you’re going to receive all kinds of advice from those around you. Some of it will be meant for you specifically, the rest delivered more as a general pronouncement on how a person should behave. Parts of it will be well considered and helpful, and much of it will be useless or worse. Whether it’s proffered out of cluelessness or malice or a tangled combination of the two hardly matters. It’s your unpleasant task to filter through all this unsolicited guidance, but it’s also your joyful, inherent right to reject any judgment and meddling that doesn’t fit.

Weekly Horoscope Taurus

Taurus Weekly Horoscope

In your low moments, you imagine you’re doomed to isolation or invisibility, to a lonely struggle with no one to rely on but yourself. And it’s true that there have been plenty of occasions when you had to fight for fairness or happiness or freedom without the support you needed. Enough experiences like this can make you forget — or keep you from ever realizing at all — how much others admire you, how much they care. This week, don’t assume that aid, solidarity, and love aren’t out there. They do exist for you. It’s just that you have to seek them out.

Weekly Horoscope Gemini

Gemini Weekly Horoscope

You worry sometimes that you’ll forever be misunderstood, that others will mistake your friendliness for frivolity, your curiosity for ineptitude. You fear that if your depth goes unrecognized, you’ll miss out on thoughtful conversations and challenging opportunities, all because it’s assumed you aren’t interested. If you’re feeling underestimated this week, make a point of surprising people. You don’t have to do anything dramatic, though: When others have the wrong idea about you, set them straight simply by stating your intentions directly and asking for what you want.

Weekly Horoscope Cancer

Cancer Weekly Horoscope

It can be difficult for you, given your great capacity for empathy, not to make excuses for those who let you down. You understand that life is complicated and that even the deepest love is imperfect. Most people deserve the benefit of the doubt, so you give it to them. But that doesn’t mean everyone does. Certain relationships will never give you what you need, and you’ll be surprised how clarifying it is to finally admit it. This week, you can quit being trapped waiting for love or support that will never materialize and instead go out and spend your time and energy in ways that genuinely make you happy.

Weekly Horoscope Leo

Leo Weekly Horoscope

Everywhere you look lately you find evidence of your inability to make the world as beautiful as you want it to be. All the stories you read in the news and the accounts you hear about other people’s lives only remind you how small your sphere of influence is. This week, be sure to fight against your suspicion that powerlessness is inevitable — because it’s not. You have so many skills and ideas and so much love for others. All along, you have been developing the talents and the community you need to meet this moment. If you keep paying attention, you’ll figure out how to use them.

Weekly Horoscope Virgo

Virgo Weekly Horoscope

A certain amount of pessimism can be healthy. It prevents you from being naive about how the world works and helps you to be honest about what you see happening around you. But recently, it has been challenging to find the hope or resolve or stubborn defiance required to balance out the darkness, to keep you going. If your perspective on the big picture is one of overwhelming despair, then focus on your immediate surroundings. In your city, in your neighborhood, people are reaching out to one another, supporting one another, and doing their best. You can make another person’s life better in your community right now, which may not feel like enough to you, but it’s not nothing, either.

Weekly Horoscope Libra

Libra Weekly Horoscope

You hold out hope that, deep down, everybody possesses the same generosity of spirit that you do, that everyone is fundamentally on the same side and that we all look for the best in one another and desire one another’s well-being. But this week, it’s impossible to deny that some people — often those with the most power — do not. They will never extend to you the same consideration you give to them. This isn’t to say you should suppress your instinct toward kindness, only that your emotional resources are limited, and you’re allowed to save the best of yourself for the ones who love you back.

Weekly Horoscope Scorpio

Scorpio Weekly Horoscope

It’s easy for you to assume that any end — of a relationship, a phase in your life, a specific cherished hope — is the end of the world. Really, though, the conclusion of one cycle is the start of a new one. This doesn’t mean you must greet every change with blind optimism, only that you shouldn’t imagine your disappointment will remain or that all doors are now closed to you. From the ruins of your old expectations, new possibilities are quietly emerging. Keep your eyes and your heart open to them.

Weekly Horoscope Sagittarius

Sagittarius Weekly Horoscope

You’re generally a laid-back person. Many of the mundane details of daily life — what to have for dinner, where to meet up after work — just don’t matter that much to you; you’re willing to let others take the lead. Because you’re so easygoing, others may wrongly conclude they can boss you around, and not just about small matters — even major life decisions. Still, when it comes to the big picture, to your fundamental values, you are unwilling to compromise. Maybe you will end up changing your mind or altering your course this week, but you’ll be doing so on your own terms, nobody else’s.

Weekly Horoscope Capricorn

Capricorn Weekly Horoscope

You may find this week that your normal rules and routines aren’t working as well for you as they used to. If your usual sources of information or guidance aren’t providing the clarity you need, then it’s time to seek it elsewhere. If the tactics you’ve depended on no longer produce the results you want, then it’s time to try a new strategy. You may fear that this means you’ve failed, that you have to give up. Really, though, it’s the opposite: By changing and adapting, you are refusing to be defeated.

Weekly Horoscope Aquarius

Aquarius Weekly Horoscope

This week, your mind is primed to be so very good at creating fresh anxieties. It is aided in this, of course, by how much out there really is worth being anxious about. Real life supplies your brain with all the raw material it could ever need to spin stories of calamity and doom. In the infinite expanse of your imagination, all the bleakest possible futures are inevitable. To master that fear, your job is to get out of your head as much as you can. It’s worth connecting with real people, worth trying, worth participating in the wild present.

Weekly Horoscope Pisces

Pisces Weekly Horoscope

Whether through their words or their actions (or both), some people in your life have recently made it clear that they believe social harmony should never be disturbed. If your needs conflict with the world as it is, they argue, then you must simply stop needing; if your voice isn’t already being heard, then there’s no need for you to speak up. This week, remember that there are battles absolutely worth fighting. You, in all your messy humanity, are worth protecting. And regardless of whether anybody else will defend you, they don’t get to keep you from defending yourself.

Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of May 9. The weekly horoscopes for the week of May 23 will be online next Sunday.

Get Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, out now.

Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of May 16