Libra Season Made Me Hate “Balance” — Until I Stopped Trying to Be Fair

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I’m in Libra season and I’m tired of people saying “just find balance” like it’s a personality trait.

For a while, balance meant keeping the peace. I was the one who smoothed things over, mediated, stayed neutral, and called it maturity. In my old church life, that looked like obedience. In my current life, it looks like nodding along in a conversation because saying the real thing would make someone uncomfortable. I do this in work too. I sit with people who are grieving, angry, exhausted, and I hear myself go quiet when I should say: yeah, that part is scary.

When Libra season hit, I pulled The Lovers from the tarot deck and felt immediately annoyed. Not because I don’t like the card, but because it kept showing up in situations where I was pretending I had a choice. I didn’t. I was choosing the version of me that was least likely to cause friction.

That’s when I remembered something Jung talks about: the shadow. Not some fluffy “dark side” you meditate away, but the parts of you you keep hiding because they’re inconvenient. For me, that shadow is my bluntness. My “I don’t care if you’re comfortable” energy. My refusal to perform grace when what I need is honesty.

Libra season made me realize balance isn’t fairness. It’s not giving everyone an equal amount of airtime. It’s not making sure no one feels attacked. Real balance is knowing which boundary is yours to hold and which one you’re using to avoid intimacy.

I’ve been doing that for years: keeping the peace by shrinking myself, then calling it balance because it sounded kinder. The annoying part is that the peace was never mine. It was borrowed, paid for in honesty, and always due back. So now I’m trying a less polished version: saying the true thing, sitting in the discomfort, and letting the relationship show me what it can handle. If someone can’t handle my honesty, that’s information, not a crisis. Balance doesn’t mean I get to be gentle all the time. It means I stop using fairness as a way to avoid deciding what I actually want.

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You’re not hating balance. You’re hating the idea that fairness means equal parts. In visual art, balance is a compositional term, not a moral one. Wikipedia’s entry on balance in visual arts frames it as the distribution of visual weight, not a requirement that every element get the same amount of attention. A small dark shape can hold up a whole frame if it’s placed right. A big empty sky can balance a tiny figure. That’s why a composition can feel “fair” even when it’s lopsided, because the eye isn’t counting objects. It’s sensing center of gravity.

That’s the angle I’d add to your Libra thing: stop asking whether your honesty is “fair” to everyone and ask whether it has enough weight to stand on its own. Your bluntness doesn’t need to be split into polite halves. It can be the one strong element in the frame. The softer parts—listening, pausing, letting someone else talk—can be negative space. Negative space isn’t weakness. It’s what makes the strong part readable.

Jung would probably roll his eyes at the idea that the shadow is a problem to be balanced out. The shadow is the dark area in the photo. You don’t paint it brighter just because it’s uncomfortable. You decide if it belongs in the composition. Tarot works the same way for me: not prophecy, just a prompt to notice where the weight is. If a card says “be fair,” I don’t obey it. I ask, “What am I trying to equalize that doesn’t need equalizing?”