The first time you see your birth chart, it is a circle full of symbols, lines and numbers that seems impossible. The good news: there is a reading order that makes it clear. Follow these five steps and the hieroglyph begins to speak.
Step 1: your big three
Begin with the essentials: your Sun (who you are), your Moon (how you feel) and your Ascendant (how you arrive in the world). With those three alone you already have the skeleton of your personality. Do not move on until you feel you understand them.
Step 2: the balance of elements and modalities
Look at the whole: do you have fire to spare, do you lack water? Do cardinal or fixed signs predominate? That balance gives you your base temperament, before going into details. It is reading the forest before looking at the trees.
Step 3: the personal planets by sign and house
Now, one by one: where Mercury is (your mind), Venus (your love), Mars (your desire), by sign and by house. Sign says how, house says where. Here the fine detail of your character appears.
Step 4: the tightest aspects
Look for the aspects with the smallest orb, above all those that touch the Sun, the Moon or the Ascendant. Those exact angles are the central themes of your life: the tensions that move you and the harmonies that sustain you.
Step 5: the story of the soul (the nodes)
To close, look at the axis of the lunar nodes: the South Node (what you already bring mastered, your comfort zone) and the North Node (toward where you stretch in this life). It is the compass that gives direction to everything else.
Do not try to understand it all at once. A chart is read in layers, and reread for a lifetime.
A final piece of advice: read your chart with curiosity, not with fear. There are no good or bad charts, only different instruments. What matters is not what the chart 'says you are', but what you recognize of yourself as you read it.