Cancer – The Crab (5 Minute Freewrite)

This post is a response to the daily prompt by @mariannewest. The word for today is 'cancer'.

I've noticed that most people have responded to the 'cancer' prompt by thinking about the illness: the dreaded disease, the destroyer of lives, one of the most feared conditions in the human imagination (though I personally fear diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's much more than cancer – to me, nothing seems more terrifying than the loss of my mind: the inability to recognise my loved ones, engage in activities that once interested me, or lead an independent life). Because I am an unrepentant away-with-the-fairies type of person, however, my thoughts went elsewhere (astrology sceptics, look away now 😉).

I found myself musing about my sun sign: Cancer, the Crab, well-known for being a nurturing, family-oriented sign, though it also harbours a tendency towards moodiness, grumpy behaviour, and a legendary grudge-holding capacity ... though we are only trailing behind Scorpio in this department. Scorpio – as anyone familiar with star signs will know – can hold a grudge like no other.

I was born on July 22nd, so I am almost at the cusp of the change between star signs, and I do feel as though I have quite a few Leo traits within me, though Cancer is more dominant. Side note: getting on the wrong side of a Cancer/Leo person is never the best idea ... Cancerian crabbiness and Leonine pride do not a happy combination make 🤣!

Throughout my life, I have had to learn how to work with the shadow aspects of my sign: a tendency to withdraw into my shell and avoid communicating with anybody when I'm hurt – coupled with an unspoken expectation that when I am sulking in my shell like this, the person who wronged me needs to somehow, magically understand what they did wrong and apologise at once. I can be moody, unreasonable, conflict-averse ... I am well aware of that pattern within myself, but through maturity and life experience, I have learned how to move past it. I am much better than I used to be at speaking my mind and communicating clearly.

I embrace all that is positive about being a Cancerian too: my nurturing qualities and my desire to 'mother' people in need have been extremely valuable to my development as a decent human being, and I wouldn't change them for the world ... though I've sometimes noticed I do need to be careful that I am not rushing to be there for everyone else at my own expense.

When I was a child, I remember being annoyed by the fact that my star sign shared its name with an awful disease. I wondered why it had to be called Cancer – why it had that unpleasant association attached to it. Incidentally, when I'm finished with this, I must look up the etymology of the word 'cancer' and see whether it is connected in any way with the star sign – though now that I think of it, I remember reading somewhere that it actually came from an old, seldom-used word called 'canker', which denotes a state of decay and rust (pleasant stuff, I know) ... a bit of fact checking must be done here, methinks!

Anyway, my five minutes are up, so that was my rant for today. 😁