Eventually, someone on the interview panel flat out told her to “take a second to adjust the blinds, we don’t mind waiting”. To which my client said that she thought they ‘might be broken’ and again insisted she was fine. She was not fine however; she continued to squint and trip over his answers, stuff that should’ve been a slam dunk after our preparation. Then mercifully, they offered my client the opportunity to take a short break to adjust the camera, the window covering…whatever she had to do. After the break, which she reported was about 2-3 minutes, the interview continued much more smoothly.

My client was talking to me about what she felt she answered well, what tripped her up, etc, etc. While I just looked at her with what my daughter calls ‘bombastic side-eye’.

“Okay, okay”, I interrupted, “I have a real question”.

“Yes?”, she said.

“Were you wearing pants?”

“Um, yeah. But they were pajama bottoms”.

“What the actual hell, Amy!?!” (not her name).

“I know, I know. It completely spoiled the flow of the whole meeting”.

Damn right. Amy did not get a call back, even though the rest of the call went pretty well and she would have slayed at this position. She could not stand up on camera because she was wearing Roller-Rabbit or whatever stupid fluffy pants she couldn’t bother changing out of for the interview.

The moral of the story is that the first rule of careers is: Dress for the job you want. Even in the post-COVID, 2020s always on-screen world. That much hasn’t changed. And unless the job you want is Door Dash driver, your interview outfit should not include pajama pants.

This client did go on to land an amazing position doing soul-aligned work with a company that shared her values. Not everyone is looking for ‘soul-aligned’ careers, but this client certainly was. That’s why knowing what you truly want, or getting help to figure that out, helps define and drive the goal.

This post is less advice and more of a PSA. But also, the story is hilarious and I have permission to share it.

That is almost never the advice someone wants when they are mid-sprint toward something big. When a client is chasing a goal — a promotion, a launch, a move, a version of their life they have been circling for years — the last thing they want from me is a suggestion to stop. They want the next step. They want the plan, the structure, the thing to do on Monday. Telling a woman who is already convinced she is behind that the move right now is to sit down and think about what just happened is almost insulting.

It is also, very often, exactly the path.

The energy we are actually in

We’re nearing the end of the 33 (in human design) and astrologers are ramping up for the big Lion’s Gate. I want to talk about this through human design, and specifically through gate 33.

Before you close the tab: if you are the person thinking ‘well, what if I don’t believe in that stuff’ — what if you don’t believe in astrology, or human design, or Jung’s collective consciousness — my answer is that it doesn’t matter. Who cares. No problem.

Here is why I mean that sincerely rather than as a dodge. I’m a licensed therapist, certified in ADHD and career coaching and trained in Jungian shadow work, and I have spent over a decade watching people try to change. What I have learned is that the framework matters less than the structure it gives you. Human design and astrology give me a beginning, a middle, and an end to every stretch of time. They give a season a shape. And when you have ADHD, or any of the tendencies that come with living in a world engineered to fragment your attention, a container for that attention is valuable. You can take the framework and leave the metaphysics entirely. I will not be offended.

Gate 33 sits in the throat center, between roughly 7°37’ and 13°15’ of Leo — the middle point of the season. You may have been thinking that Leo means shine, perform, get on the stage. Gate 33 is the retreat. Privacy, reflection, and then the remembering and the telling of what you found. I feel like it’s built into the season on purpose.

So tell me, even if you don’t believe in any of it: is taking a deliberate pause to reflect a bad thing to do, particularly if you have ADHD?

I think not.

Why your attention needs this more than your calendar does

There are more things built to take your attention than at any point in human history, and I do mean ‘built’. That is the business model. The longer a platform holds your attention, the longer it can engage you and sell to you. This is not a moral failing on your part.

Which is why one of the real goals of your life — not this quarter, your life — is to make good friends with your attention. To get genuinely in touch with your emotions and your cognitions, your actual thought patterns, and to see how all of it keeps leading you back to where your attention goes.

Because most of us are leaking it.

You know the movie where the hero gets shot early and has to finish the mission anyway? They keep moving, dragging themselves from room to room with one hand pressed hard into their side. And at the end, when they finally lie down and someone moves the hand away, everyone realizes how much they have been bleeding out the whole time.

That is what is happening with our attention. We press a hand to the wound and limp from one area of life to the next, wondering why nothing feels satisfying, why We can’t achieve our goals and even when we do, the goals we hit don’t feel the we expected them to.

This is not a lecture, because I am not above any of it. I just want you to understand what the resource actually is before I ask you to spend an hour of it sitting still.

What the retreat actually looks like

It’s not a silent meditation retreat in the desert. It’s just is a chair, an hour, a journal, and a cup of coffee. Okay 30 minutes…some of us have ADHD.

It’s raining here in New England as I write this, which is convenient, because everybody needs a reason to chill out and weather is the only one most of us will accept without arguing.

Sit down. Give yourself the time. Then work through some version of this:

“What has been happening?”Not the summary you’d give a coworker. The real inventory. The vacation, the cookouts, the birthday parties, the deadlines, the week you didn’t sleep/got shitty sleep.

“What did I learn about myself?” I know, such a ‘therapist ask’, but this is the one that does the work.

And if that feels like a little much right now — try, “what do I appreciate?” About any of it. Did you take a trip. Did you finally have coffee with a friend you hadn’t seen in two years? Did you work yourself into the ground?

That last one is where it usually gets interesting. Because you might sit with it and arrive at something like: ‘I spent this entire summer covering for everyone else’s vacations, and I am not doing that again next year.’

That’s a lesson. It’s specific, it’s behavioral, it’s actionable, and you just can’t get to it while you are still inside the thing. You have to step back far enough to see the effects of what you have been doing, who you have been being. This is the part we often skip, and it’s the reason so many intelligent, self-aware people accumulate experience without accumulating wisdom. The experience happened. Nobody ever sat down and extracted anything from it.

This wasn’t useless mindfulness; we’re gonna do something with it

Here’s the second half, and it is built right into gate 33: the reflection is only half the mechanic (is that a dumb word? Please let me know; I’m experimenting with ‘mechanic’ because I say ‘framework’ way too damn much). The other half is the remembering and the sharing.

If your work already involves teaching — if you are an educator, a manager, a parent, a leader of some sort — the sharing is obvious. You take the lesson to your team, your clients, your kids. You let what you learned become something someone else gets to use.

But if that is not your role, the lesson turns inward, and that is not a consolation prize. Ask yourself: what did I learn about what happens when I put myself out there? What did I learn about what happens when I am running around giving to everyone and secretly hoping someone notices? What did I learn about how I actually operate when the pressure is on?

Then take that and apply it directly to the goal you were sprinting toward before I asked you to stop.

This is why the retreat is not a detour. You go back to the goal carrying something you didn’t have before, and you move faster than you were moving, because you’re no longer running the same play that already cost you a summer. It’s why athletes watch tape of games they’ve already played. So that they don’t let the play that lost them the game repeat and cost them the whole season.

The lesson was always sitting there in what already happened. You just have to stop long enough to pick it up.

If you want the full structure for this season — the six gates of Leo, week by week, with the practical framework I use with clients (good to implement anytime of year, btw!) — Subscribe for free and I’ll send it straight to your inbox!

The average house cat sleeps around sixteen hours a day. A lion in the wild clocks in at closer to twenty — it hunts in a burst, eats, and then takes a long cat nap on the open tundra. You’ve probably watched the domestic version of this in your own living room, your cat tears around the house at top speed and then sleeps so hard you have to shake the bag of Temptations to wake her up.

That’s the animal we have collectively agreed represents Leo season.

Which is worth a second look (aka a cognitive reframe), because the familiar battle cry of Leo season is: be seen, get out there, it’s your time to shine! — thirty consecutive days of visibility, showing up. By about day four it’s exhausting, and that’s especially true if you have ADHD or similar tendencies and the pressure to perform on demand keeps colliding with a brain that doesn’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to continuous motivation or consistent output.

(Tip: This one gets technical, so I created a free Leo Season Guide you can use to manage your energy and productivity all season. Subscribe for free and I’ll send it right to your inbox!)

So what if the season is actually built more like the big cat itself? A surge of energy and visibility, then a retreat, then a nice long cat-stretch of working out what it all means before the next burst of activity. That’s a different instruction than just shine, and it’s more livable for a brain that hates pressure.

The heresy: I like combining astrology and human design because, first of all, I have ADHD and cannot do just one thing. Second and more importantly, following an astrological sign’s season through its corresponding transitions in human design adds so much nuance to the energy you can actually tap into week by week. If you’re a seasoned astrologer, you might not have the need for this layering; but for the rest of us, layering the degrees of the sun’s transit through Leo over the human design mandala provides insight without needing to be able to read an astrological transit chart. This works whether you’re a Leo, Leo rising, a Leo moon, or a person with zero placements in Leo who is simply trying to get something out of the next thirty days.

The double-heresy: What if I don’t believe in any of this stuff? Fine. It doesn’t matter. I’m not dying on a hill for any of this (well, maybe Placidus). The system I am proposing works perfectly well as a framework to structure your energy, creativity and productivity over the next 30-ish days. No belief in archetypes or devotion to luminaries required.

Here’s how it works

Every degree of the zodiac maps onto a gate in the human design body graph. It isn’t perfectly exact, but it’s good enough to be useful.

Two things come out of that. Where your Leo placements fall tells you which specific energy is activated for you during this season. And as the sun moves degree by degree, each of those gates becomes available to everyone, in a sequence, every six days, so roughly a week at a time.

The sequence is the part I’m fascinated with, and it looks more like the lion’s typical day than like the fabled-advice about the lion.

Leo season, week-by-week 🦁

Gate 56 — The Wanderer. Stimulation.
0°–2° Leo, roughly July 22–24
Throat center. The core quality is storytelling, curiosity, adventure, and giving your lived experience a voice. This is the one everyone means when they say “Leo season.” You’re at the party or on the stage, you’re telling the story, people are listening and laughing and leaning in. We bust into the season with the shine.

Gate 31 — Influence.
2°–7°37’ Leo, roughly July 24–30 — this is where we are right now
Also the throat center. Recognized leadership and speaking for the collective. The distinction that matters here is that this is leadership conferred by the group rather than claimed by the individual — you’re influential because people turned toward you and asked.

My moon is in the 31, which is interesting, because a body graph gives you sun, moon, earth, and all the planets you’d reference in Western astrology. Everyone says the moon is about emotion, and sure. Go a layer deeper and it’s also where your fuel comes from, your motivation, your reason for doing the thing. Mine sits in the 31, which means I’m genuinely lit up when I’m called upon to present, to lead, to teach and share with the group. That’s what motivates me to show up and deliver, despite my own ADHD brain. It also explains a truly unreasonable amount of my career.

Gate 33 — Retreat.
7°37’–13° Leo, roughly July 31–August 4
Throat center again, and here’s the record scratch (I made a nice record scratching sound on the podcast for this, you should really listen to it.) Privacy, reflection, remembering, and the sharing of the past. Wait–Leos don’t want privacy, right? They want everyone looking at them, all season. Wrong.

This is the twenty-hour nap, arriving right on schedule about a third of the way through. But it’s not just blank downtime — the 33 is specifically about reflection, remembrance, and telling the story of what already happened, so there’s still something social living inside it. You went out, you led, you gathered people together, and now you retreat, grab your journal and make meaning of it.

This part is important for your mental health. Even an epic world tour has a break somewhere in the middle. And when it doesn’t, there’s an MTV documentary a decade later about the breakdown that occurred when that artist refused/wasn’t allowed to rest (Spoiler, the band is not getting back together.)

Side note that might explain someone in your life; If you know a Leo sun or Leo rising born somewhere between about 7.5° and 13°ish who has never once read as a “typical Leo,” this is possibly why.

Gate 7 — The Army. The Role of the Self.
13°15’–18° Leo, roughly August 4–9
This one moves into the G center, which is identity. Direction, leadership, and guiding others. “Army” is the traditional name and it’s a little much, but the meaning is people who take a group somewhere — teachers, principals, public service. But it’s also the role of the Self, which definitely rings true to our collective impression of Leo.

Gate 4 — Youthful Folly. Formalization.
18°–24° Leo, roughly August 9–15
Ajna center. This is where you go looking for mental answers, settle into logic, work to resolve doubt, and try to solve the problem.

I don’t think it’s called youthful folly because the energy is young. I think it’s because when you’re young you’re trying to figure everything out — where to go to school, what to do with your life, who to marry — and the folly is reaching for an answer purely so that you have one. With my clientsI call this box-checking syndrome. That’s the shadow side of the 4, and you’ve watched it happen. Someone announces they’re going to be a doctor, you privately cannot see it, they go anyway because the path was there and it came with answers, and at 41 they’re miserable. It could be a doctor, a lawyer, or the family business that was sitting right there when they needed certainty.

If you want to work the shadow of this one, the move is to allow yourself the trial and error. You are still formalizing, you’re still making real decisions, and nothing you decide is permanent or set in stone. You can always pivot; this is true whether you’re 21 or 70.

Gate 29 — The Abysmal. Perseverance.
24°–29°+ Leo, roughly August 15–22
Sacral center. Commitment, devotion, saying yes to something and then actually following through.

I love this energy for ADHD, because we do have a tendency to start things and not finish them, and the assumption is always that we weren’t committed enough. That’s usually wrong, because the devotion is real. Saying yes and following through are two separate capacities that have to get woven together over time, and that weaving is something you have to stay with rather than something you decide once. You’re weaving the thread back and forth through the fabric, over and over and over again until the stitch is complete. Or however sewing works, I don’t know. Anyway, the 29 closing out Leo season is almost too perfect.

But just to be clear, this is definitely Leo-coded commitment and devotion, not the Virgo commitment that reads more organized and competent. The clearest evidence for this devotion-to-a-craft is the sheer amount of heavyweight Hollywood superstars whose birthdays fall in the 29, namely:

Madonna

Angela Bassett

Steve Carell

James Cameron

Halle Berry

Steve Martin

Jennifer Lawrence

Ben Affleck

Robert De Niro

Sean Penn

And seriously so many more, but I rest my case.

Leo comes in like a lion and out like... an accountant?

Gate 56 actually begins back in Cancer, and gate 29 keeps going briefly into Virgo, which gives the whole season more flow.

Let’s explore this for a sec. Leo season opens with an energy that started in Cancer — tribal, family-oriented, gathering — and arrives as storytelling and giving your experience a voice. You collect your people first, and then you have something to tell them. It closes with an energy that carries into Virgo, all commitment and to-lists and doing what you said you’d do. Virgo’s follow-through shows up before Virgo does. Which is good, because I need extra time to commit myself to anything.

So what do you do with this

The realistic version of Leo season looks like the lion’s everyday/b-roll rather than the lion’s highlight reel. You get about a week on the stage, and you still have to write the material. If you get booed off, you get a retreat week to reflect and refine the material before we enter the 7 and you find your sense of direction.

Find your Leo placements and see which gate they land in — that’s your personal activation this season. If you don’t have any Leo placements or you generally don’t care and just want to follow the framework, skip this. Then track the weeks. When we enter the 33 on July 31 and you shut yourself up in your room, remember you’re not ‘failing Leo season’. When we enter the 4 and you’re suddenly desperate to resolve every open question in your life, notice whether you’re formalizing or just grabbing. Talk through this with your therapist or mull it over in your mastermind group. We’re currently going deep into this inside Coterie; the breakthroughs my members are having are truly liberating.

I put together a free Leo Season Guide with the degrees of Leo mapped against the human design gates, the centers, and guidance on each core quality, so you can see the whole arc at once. Subscribe for free and I’ll send it right to your inbox! If this post was useful to you-please restack and pass it on!

I’m Buffy Fermino, a licensed therapist and coach certified in CBT, ADHD, and Jungian shadow integration. Heretic is where we look at the patterns underneath the overthinking, the self-sabotage, and the procrastination — through the lens of psychology and the esoteric.

Dissenters Welcome 🔮✨

Today I helped a career coaching client by walking her through how AI could create a bridge between her resume and the job description of a position she was applying for by analyzing both documents without emotion. My career coaching client Michaela (used with permission) was feeling frustrated and fed up with procrastination and task avoidance related to applying for new jobs that were above her current position’s level but were definitely positions she was qualified for. Elements of her ADHD, such as RSD (rejection sensitivity), overthinking, and squirrel syndrome escapism, were kicking into overdrive. Like so many of my clients with ADHD, Michaela is brilliant and capable in so many areas but tends to sit for way too long in positions that demand excessive grunt work from her while underpaying her for her brilliance.

So I had her open a ChatGPT account while we were still on the call.

The prompt was simple: draft a cover letter connecting the experience in this resume to the requirements in this job description, with particular attention to the new community program initiative she had developed at her current company. From a clinical-coaching perspective, the purpose of this was to override Michaela’s emotional bias to see her accomplishments as not worthy. To prevent task avoidance, I spent a few minutes guiding her through uploading the resume and job description as attachments. Michaela’s read on her own accomplishments was running through a heavily biased emotional filter that discounted them before she typed a single word. A machine has no such filter.

I walked her through uploading both documents right then. Two minutes, maybe. Not because she needed help with attachments, but because When you have ADHD, the optimism around completing a task ‘later’ quickly clouds over once later actually arrives and you’re alone at your desk with twenty other tabs open. This void is exactly where the task avoidance lives, So my first job was nipping it in the bud.

Then we read what it produced.

Her first reaction was that it made better connections than she could have on her own. What it did was pull a clean through-line between her nonprofit background and her program development work —ones she hadn’t seen even after hours pouring over her resume. Nothing was invented. Nothing was inflated. The information was accurate and the experience was hers. It just came back to her without her internal editor marking it up with a fat red Sharpie.

Next, I had her edit it. Keep the newly discovered experience, but write the actual letter, the human parts—her passion for building community-wide programs for disadvantaged populations, the real reason she does this work. Inspired by AI, not written by it. I realize many people have AI write their entire cover letter, I’m not judging. But I’m a professional and the ultimate purpose of this exercise was to to build self-worth through evidence (the CBT term is literally “finding the evidence”). The final letter had to be hers, and not only for integrity reasons. She needed her own fingerprints on the document she was about to read back to herself.

The takeaway here is, when used well, AI can bypass the self-worth barrier that interferes with an objective read of your own skills. That barrier is one of the most consistent things I see holding my ADHD and career coaching clients in back. Not capability or credentials. Certainly not hard work or effort.

This is where I pulled out my ladder metaphor (this won’t be the last time you hear it, sorry-not-sorry). Michaela could see the bottom rung, where she was standing, and she could see the top rung, the job with the fancy title. What she could not see were the rungs in between, so the climb looked impossible, and the reasonable response to an impossible climb is to not start it. We used technology to build the rungs. It provided the concrete connections between where she was and where she was applying—the rungs. And when you have the rungs you can climb the ladder. It’s still an effort, but it’s possible.

Her homework: 1. Apply for the position with the shiny new cover letter. 2. Read the letter to herself three times, out loud, as an affirmation — not the false-manifesty kind (”I have a million dollars,” when you know damn well you don’t have a million dollars. There is definitely a road to manifestation, but trust me, this ain’t it), but as a factual recitation of things she has actually done. 3. Then pull the strongest paragraph into a LinkedIn summary that leads with inner city program development and non-profit leadership.

We spent the rest of the session on positioning. Her LinkedIn had been quietly advertising her as a direct service provider, which is what she has been and what she is ready to stop being. We rewrote it to point toward leadership roles in community programming and the non-profit sector, because her stated goal is financial stability and direct service work was never going to get her there. She has been underpaid for her brilliance for a long time. That isn’t a mindset problem. It’s a positioning problem with a self-worth problem sitting on top of it.

The last thing I did was normalize it. Career advancement is genuinely harder with ADHD — not because of the work, but because of your self-worth running interference and the inconsistency patterns that make you distrust your own track record. If you have ADHD or struggle to be consistent, I want you to know that this is a known pattern. It is not a flaw of your character.

The point here is not the hand holding or the accomplishment of a task that was getting under my client’s skin. The platinum thread here is unearthing the cognitive behavioral pattern of not recognizing a truth — in this case Michaela’s experience that qualified her for the job — then getting stuck in an unproductive behavioral loop (procrastination, task avoidance), because you don’t believe you have the information or substance you need to move forward (belief, the underlying shadow). We accomplished this by using AI to short-circuit both her cognitive behavioral pattern and her underlying shadow belief. In one fell swoop. By letting the robot literally spit the facts in her face.

We went deeper into the shadow to begin the work of integrating it, but I won’t go into all of that here. I just wanted to illustrate how pulling the thread of practical coaching strategy through the fabric of shadows woven deep into a client’s beliefs can spark wins on both a practical and self-worth level.

On that note, Hey—if this was helpful for you, please restack it or share with a friend, and let me know if you’d like to see more of these Platinum Thread moments in future articles or as a series.

Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema

There’s been a lot of talk that the new moon in Cancer on July 14, 2026 being your “Last chance to set intentions”, “Last chance to manifest”or “Last chance to mobilize important goals”...until September! But if you have ADHD, that is just too much pressure. And even if you don’t have ADHD, if you struggle with overthinking or scattered focus (and who doesn’t these days) - the new moon in Cancer messaging can be simply overwhelming.

Here’s what I’d tell you instead. Not as an astrologer—because I’m not one, but as a therapist—which I am, and also as a Cancerian whose sign is ruled by the moon. 🌙

1. Ignore the last chance doomsayers. What you create out of stress and pressure is usually not worth keeping. And I know the analogies: Diamonds are created under pressure. Pearls are cultivated under pressure. But what you see at the jeweler are the best of the best. Stones that meet criteria to be ‘gemstone quality’ by the GIA are those with the highest clarity; that language also applies here. Clarity is the goal. What you want is a strong sense of intention, not frazzled, chaotic pressure.

2. Instead, embrace the calm quiet of the new moon and simply think about what you want. What you want to create. What you’ve been working on that hasn’t really made it out of the blocks yet. What have you been putting off that would feel meaningful to pick back up? Write it down. Send yourself a voice note. No elaborate ritual necessary (unless you really want to and it feels like pleasure, not because you think you have to and it feels like pressure).

3. Celebrate the ADHD coding of this Cancer new moon: Emotions changing like the tides? Snapping like a crab when you feel backed into a corner? Hello, rejection sensitivity! I can’t think of anything more ADHD/RSD coded.🦀 Except maybe this: Remember a few sentences ago when I said What have you been putting off that would feel meaningful to pick back up? I have to ask, we have ADHD after all. Well, this new moon is conjunct Mercury, which is currently retrograde in Cancer. What that means is you can stop feeling bad about projects you’ve procrastinated on and simply look at them as a well from which to draw your inspiration. Cancer, a cardinal water sign, wants you to initiate through water (feelings). So draw water from that rich well of inspiration by reflecting on the intentions you’ve set aside. You get a fresh start, another chance.

4. About that Mercury retrograde: I’ll ask again, What have you been putting off that would feel meaningful to pick back up? Not the “I should really finish this” the “This would really feel good”. And before you think I’m telling you to throw your goals and ambitions out the window and go skipping through a meadow, I’ll remind you that Cancer is not just feelings. It’s home, it’s nurture, it’s stability. So when you’re choosing what intentions to set or projects to revisit, ask yourself: what would feel good because it nurtures you, your family, your clients, or your tribe? What feels good because it gives your idea or your voice a home? What feels good because it creates stability? When your feelings match your values, you’ve found the thing. Now write it down. Send yourself the voice note. Then let go and wade into the Cancerian waters, whether that’s a bathtub or a beach. 🌊