I defy anyone to find a more Leo-ier Leo than me. I might be the Leo-est Leo in the world. Numero uno out of 7 billion, divided by 12.
For example, I don't just want a gold star for overachieving and successfully impressing you. A few extra stars that don't even count wouldn't hurt, of course. Useless praise like that might be sufficiently gratuitous to please my Leo soul, sure.
But you know what would really put a smile on my face? Someone hand-trucking dozens of 30-pound boxes of gold stars into a room and piling them all up around me. (Only if I actually deserved it, naturally. No point otherwise.) Now that would a satisfying gesture. All the more so for being absolutely fucking ludicrous. Others might not get the joke at my expense that the boxes would also be. Wow, all those boxes. "They must really love him!", an observer might guess. "Actually, lol, he's the one who thought it up and coordinated it himself."
And would that not be the single most Leo thing ever? Actually: No, it wouldn't! Because this very Facebook post is the Leo-est fucking thing that a Leo-est Leo could ever do. Only a shamelessly megalomaniacal Leo would rehearse that kind of vainer-than-vain fantasy to begin with...let alone then go announce how he'll react to the future adulation and explain what criteria he'll be using to judge it, lmfao.
Bullseye. For real. There's something to it. I feel like living, breathing, self-congratulating proof that some percentage of some aspect of astrology is not bullshit.
Now, the tragedy in all this is that Leo-ness could be mistaken for mania. Which I'm susceptible to, for sure. (Only the best!) But as co-morbid as the conditions may be, I am definitely still a gigantic sufferer of Leo Syndrome, in ways that would persist even if I were consistently totally sane (or whatever people want to call the pathological consensus everyone submits to) and I might have still become the Leoest Leo of All Time, an appropriate title for a Leo to give himself, and all that may yet still be misinterpreted as manic symptoms, hilariously/depressingly.
Hilarious, because I think I could make a good case, in a courtroom, with scientific evidence, backed up by expert critics of scientism, that in some cases astrology is just as accurate and probably way healthier (socially and, defeating the purpose, psychologically) as a paradigm for understanding "madness" than the dominant psychiatric one. I know I'd much rather be sold a box of horoscope bullshit to explain my life and improve my attitudes than some literal box in a medicalizing prison cell, a literal box of pills to follow, for the rest of your natural life. And don't forget to stow away the lifetime stigma you'll now carry next to the pills, forever! And, if you defy the stigma, they might decide to lock you up again. Your crazy-ass word against their M.D. pedigree. With zero meaningful due process for you to challenge their opinion. All this, you get, for being better than them, essentially. They must get such a rush, right, controlling other human beings, pronouncing them beneath legal consideration, declaring them non-compliant with reason, which they are the supreme arbiters of? Is there a certification course on Good Reasoning in med school? The power, tho! Must be intoxicating sometimes. Ahem. Talk about self-medication. They at least must maintain a nice, persistent baseline of self-affirming, pseudo-altruistic pride in being "helpful", in being the Definition of Sane. "I'm sane", says the person who studied to be a scientist for 10-20 years...as she plays God after 5 minutes of contemplating a stranger. "I'm not insane, you're insane, says the nurse arguing for no good reason with a mental patient about the TV, or nearly misadministering-insulin someone to death. (True story, poor Richie.) "I am sane enough to be the lone, final authority on your sanity", says the constitutional-oath-swearing judge who condones the Les Vulnerables being railroaded into submission in jury-less proceedings obscenely stacked against the defendants-who-are-not-known-as-defendants, defendants who'd have way, way more opportunity to prove their innocence if they had "sanely" committed armed robbery. "This is fine", says whoever still thinks it's a good way of encouraging sanity to stick the merely-questionable in a locked ward with the batshit-crazy, to hang an albatross of permanent irrationality around the neck of the confused, to gaslight patients with white lies to calm them down. You try it. Get committed, despite not being nearly crazy enough to deserve it, and then try dealing with people telling you that you're hopelessly insane every day for three weeks, surrounded by genuine psychological disasters and physical dangers, locked in a confined space with them, every day, and when you complain about the conditions and protest that you're not insane, the doctor will just gently smirk and nod compassionately, and then speak around your concerns with happy hospital-speak horseshit, and then speak over you, if need be, and then strap you down and inject you with "medicine" against your will. That last part never happened to me thankfully, saw it happen, though...talk about a double-iatrogenic whammy. Not only will they force chemicals in you that damn well have side effects, they'll emotionally traumatize you in the process. Haha, just what you need! And they'll feel they're perfectly justified in doing it. See, it says so, on the paper in that frame on the wall in their office. A license to be a professional sadist. The biggest psychos, are the pros! They don't know what the fuck they're doing, at best, and they're just as deluded with grandiose role-playing as the bipolar flakes they're abusing. Playing strong daddy, kind mommy, the wise priest, the stern judge, the rational scientist, or God. Think they'd ever listen to feedback from the blue-gowned loons whose lives they're ruining? Hahahahaha!
All psych wards, in every case, need a consigliere, a red team, a devil's advocate, a patient's advocate. No one should ever lose their due process. Not enough money, I know, I know. Yet. Class action lawsuits have a surprising way of revealing how much money there really is, though.
As a Leo, the bullseyest Leo ever maybe, I have obviously visualized myself being applauded at various award ceremonies. In those visions, for the last 12 years, I've always been wearing a tuxedo made of hospital-johnnie blue fabric. Gonna have to custom-order a business suit of the same material, someday, fit for a courtroom, too, to wear as the plaintiff.
Whatever I win in a settlement, I'll set aside some of it to buy myself 500,000 gold stars. And I'll be generous with them, as a picture-perfect Leo should always be with his treasure.
