Moon in Cancer: full-strength feeling, and a memory that keeps it

You do not have to work out how you feel; it is already obvious, and usually before you have any information about why. The instinct is fast and accurate about atmosphere.

What it lacks is a volume control. Most people can decide something is not worth minding. You can decide that intellectually and still mind it for three days, which is why advice to simply let things go has never once been useful to you.

The workable approach is not suppression but sequence: feel it first, decide afterwards. Trying to reverse that order costs you a week and produces the same conclusion.

Your recall is emotional rather than factual. You may forget the year and the exact words and still reproduce, perfectly, how a particular room felt.

This is the source of your loyalty — a kindness done to you long ago is still live and still being repaid — and equally the source of the grudge you cannot quite retire. Both run on the same machinery, and you do not get to keep one without the other.

It is worth deciding, then, what you deliberately rehearse. The memories you return to are the ones that stay sharpest, and that is the only part of this you actually control.

For you a home is not a location, it is functioning equipment. The right blanket, the familiar mug, the door that closes: these do measurable work on your state, and living somewhere temporary or unsettled affects you far more than it affects most people.

When you cannot control the place, take charge of a corner of it. A single reliable, personal, unshared space does a surprising amount of the job — a desk, a chair, a shelf arranged the way you like it. People who move often and keep this placement in good condition usually do it by carrying the same few objects everywhere.

You look after people reflexively, often before being asked and sometimes before noticing you have started. It is genuine and it is also how you manage your own anxiety: a cared-for person is a person who is not going anywhere.

The bill comes as depletion you attribute to something else. You will decide you are tired, or that a friendship is one-sided, when the plain reading is that you have been carrying four people's emotional weather for a month.

Stopping is not the answer, since caring is not a habit you would want to break. Counting is. Knowing how many people you are currently holding is usually enough to explain a bad fortnight.