Two planets enter kind and diplomatic Libra this week: the sun on Sunday morning, and Mercury on Thursday. If your life has felt off-balance lately, you might find a new equilibrium in the next month. Your best tools now are compromise, tact, and charm: If trying to muscle through problems has failed, collaboration and creative problem-solving could lead to a breakthrough. On Sunday night, Venus enters provocative Scorpio, where it’ll stay until mid-October. During this time, you’ll probably be hungry for more intensity in your relationships. This can be a good or a bad thing. Jealousy is likely, but it’s also possible to forge deeper bonds.

Working in a group can be difficult for you — not because you don’t get along with other people, simply because you want to move at your own pace. If you have a great idea, you can’t stand waiting around for permission, you want to act. This week, though, the best thing you can do for yourself is travel at the same speed as everyone else. Other people can help you refine your ideas and ask valuable questions. The more you listen, the more successful everyone will be.

Lately, you’ve struggled to make yourself useful. There’s so much suffering in the world, and you want to do your part to change that, but you worry your skills are ill-matched to the issues at hand. But you probably have more to offer than you realize — and if you can’t find a way to contribute, it’s not too late to pick up new skills or develop new relationships. You’re still growing all the time. Don’t imagine that you’re too set in your ways to learn anything new.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to find the time to let your playful side out. One day you’re swamped with work, the next your best friend’s going through a bad time, the day after that a terrible story comes out in the news. All of this stuff matters, and you don’t want to act like it doesn’t — but you still have so much creativity to express, so much joy to feel, and it’s hard to figure out how. There’s work to be done, but this week, give yourself permission to play and to laugh.

You’ve been called on to stretch yourself lately, to take big risks and travel far outside your comfort zone. This is how growth happens, and while it’s not always enjoyable, it is always worthwhile. But at a certain point, you need to return home and appreciate how much you’ve changed. This week, it could be time to return to familiar settings. You don’t need to be striving in every moment of your life: for now, give yourself time to simply be.

You’re not a person who will settle for second best: You’re clear about what you want, and you won’t pretend to be satisfied by less. It takes strength to hold out for what you deserve — but sometimes, this single-mindedness prevents you from recognizing other possibilities or from taking a chance on someone or something unexpected. This week, try not to reject opportunities only because they aren’t precisely what you imagined. Keep an open mind, and you might be surprised.

Some people close their minds to new information, but not you: You want to continue evolving, becoming wiser and better informed than you were yesterday. If you’re prompted to reevaluate old ideas, all the better. But, sometimes, people critique in bad faith. Sometimes, they confidently offer ideas that are biased or incomplete. This week, as you sort through all the facts and opinions that come your way, don’t be afraid to reject some of them. Open-mindedness is valuable, but so is discernment.

In order to figure out who you really are, it’s necessary to try on some lives and selves that aren’t the right ones. Life doesn’t follow a linear path: The detours and deviations are important. You might feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn or two lately, like you’ve lost touch with your true essence. Don’t think of these as mistakes. You’ve been in a period of exploration. Now you can find your way back to the path you want to be on.

Although you’ve been working incredibly hard lately — not just at your job but also in your life overall — you could start to worry, this week, that you don’t have enough to show for it. If you haven’t finished any major projects recently, if you don’t see any important milestones on the horizon, you may wonder whether your efforts are in vain. But what’s most important is that you’re working toward goals you genuinely care about. As long as you’re aligned with your values, you’re on the right track.

You don’t like to map out your life too far in advance — you value having space for spontaneity, for seizing the opportunities you never could have predicted. But the more ambitious your goals are, the more strategizing is required of you. You can’t count on the universe to drop everything you want into your lap. So, this week, don’t be afraid of making plans, especially big, challenging, daring ones. Even if you change your mind down the road, you won’t regret setting your intentions now.

You project an image of competence and wisdom, and your friends might be surprised to learn how often you question yourself. No matter how hard you work, there’s a part of you that worries you should have done more; no matter how much you learn, you worry you’ll never know enough. This week, though, you’ll get a glimpse of the person that others see. Try to remember that this confident version of yourself is every bit as real as the version filled with doubt.

Living in this world can be heartbreaking: There’s so much cruelty, so much unnecessary pain. How are we supposed to keep living as though everything is normal? Maybe you’ve been feeling hopeless, but this week, let that hopelessness shift into something more like resolve. Maybe life makes no sense, but you’ll keep going anyway, if only out of a stubborn refusal to be worn down. You never know which small action or gesture or conversation could be the one to set change in motion.

It’s comforting to blame all of your problems on everyone other than yourself. After all, lots of them genuinely are outside of your control: You’re only one person and you can’t take responsibility for, say, the state of the economy. But this week, you may become suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the bad habits that you could change, if you wanted to. You might not be able to fix everything wrong with the world, or even everything wrong with your own life, but remember that you’re not powerless. Do what you can.

Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of September 15th. The weekly horoscopes for the week of September 29th will be online next Sunday.

Buy Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, here.