Tuesday, Jul 22nd, 2008 — This is a great time of year because the Sun is in your 3rd House of Communication, a place of natural harmony for you. But you could take a conversation too far today as your key planet Mercury harmonizes with shocking Uranus. Even if you think everything is fine, you could create a problem for yourself and others now if you don’t know when to be quiet.

I have GOT to stop having high expectations of the classes that I take at the Women’s Center, I think. The descriptions in the catalog make them sound very promising, but….tonight’s is a perfect example. “When Your Income Stops But the Bills Don’t” sounded very much as if it would be about resources for the suddenly disenfranchised. Instead it was “how to budget”. It seems to me that if you are in desperate straits, basic budgeting isn’t really going to help you slog out of the hole. Sure, it could’ve kept you FROM the hole, but once you’re there, you have to get to a certain point before that’s going to help…. So, surprisingly, I left early. I decided that the hour of my life that I would spend in there after the hour I’d already spent was more valuable to me than staying. There was some good material in the handouts, but it wasn’t anything like what I had expected.

*sigh* The seminar with Virginia WAS great, though. I don’t like the emphasis on the child as the father to the man, but if it’s right and if it works. Speaking of which…. Stoner had been pimping Allen Carr’s book about stopping smoking on Sludge, and so I picked it up. Weirdly, it was as if I had read it before (I haven’t), being pretty much focused on the concept that the way to quit smoking is just to identify yourself AS an ex-smoker and live as one. Just DON’T smoke. That’s all it takes.

Yeah, there’s positives in that book (although I admit freely that I am not necessarily to the end and may delay it just a bit for my own stupid reasons), but it struck me how similar that approach is to how I’ve handled my breakdown. I pretty much decided that I wasn’t GOING to be fucked up anymore, and I’m kinda not. I have issues, sure, everyone does. But I am learning how to handle those issues on a day to day basis, and the catalyst for the change WAS the decision that I would no longer BE fucked up and broken.

Interesting. And right now? On a scale of 1 to 10, even with all that still swirls around me, I’m averaging between an 8 and a 9 as far as “mental health” goes right now. I wish I had some tangible way of expressing that, but all I know is how different I feel inside. I don’t ever want to be “that girl” again.

Really, I never was. I just convinced myself that I was. And that’s sad, but I can’t go back and change the past. All I can do is learn from it; re-frame it and honor those who have taught me.