You need to look much more deeply within if you are going to understand what motivates your more than occasional tendency to be pessimistic or depressed about your current or desired relationship. Can I give you more answer than that?

If you require more, than I would say you need to see if there is a part of you that still nurses a grudge from a past injury. I know, I know, it is impossible to injure you, but perhaps you can try the experiment of stopping teling yourself that and actualy *looking*. For the most part, your forward-looking self is getting on with your life pretty well, but my opinion is that part of you may be holding back, still nursing old wounds from painful abuses of trust. It's time to let those wounds heal. There may be scars, but you don't have to let old wounds impact your current relationship in ways that are uncomfortable for everybody.

In a nutshell? Stop. Projecting.

Healing always begins by scrutinizing your current motives and attitude. Are you exercising the forgiving part of your nature? Who's winning on the inside -- your optimistic and trusting impulses, or fear and resentment? I understand that such a pessimistic tendency is sometimes learned through experience and can feel like the truth but now is the time time to reprogram your beliefs so that things can work out.

Leave old negative feelings in the past where they belong, my dear.

::mirth::

One of the funniest things I've read this morning:

"You still must face the intense emotional processing that goes along with the dance, unless, however, you use that ancient spiritual technique of denial."

I know a lot of people who subscribe to that sort of ancient spirituality.

Believing you can, you can. Though you might not.

Believing you can't, won't change that you can. It just hides it.

Whereas simply getting started, however timid your first steps are, and consistently moving in the direction of your dreams day after day, will eventually create such unstoppable momentum, you'll find it nearly impossible to believe that there was ever a time when you wavered.

If you really think about it, you can always know what's going to happen next: the universe is going to be there. It's going to help. And there will be miracles.

And there will always be those who wonder, darlings, where you've been all their life.

If you change your thinking, darlings, but not your behavior, you haven't really changed your thinking.

Drinking tea with Justice this morning.

True Justice always asks you to distinguish between desire and need, doesn't it? It is something I attempt to teach el nino constantly. Justice may carry the scales and sword of legal probity, but in her heart she is attempting to understand what is behind the conflict so she can meet the needs on both sides.

You kid yourself if you think that justice is always meted equally across the board, however. Sometimes one side must be treated differently than the other.

The fundamental concept behind your relationships? The greatest good for the greatest number.

"Talking may stir up some touchy emotions right now, but it's always better to get things out in the open than to keep them deep inside, isn't it? Do a quick inventory of what you have worked on lately in your personal life. What do you want to stop or rid yourself of? It may be time for a clean sweep."

Couldn't suit today's mood better, and this time I read it *after* my mood was established, so no self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm tired of repetition without evolution and spinning wheels without movement. Relationships are a reflection of how you feel about yourself, so seek out and develop only the best ones.

NYC in two days, darlings. Chill the Moet.

Exhaustion

Because someone was right when they said to me today 'your people can bring you a lot of good times -- but right now it seems that each one has something new that they want from you. One at a time wouldn't be so bad. But all at once? Please.':

"I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger, cries of joy. He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair on a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right. I was still right. I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing, but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he.

Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate the think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who call themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn't cry at his mother's funeral? Salamano's dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Celeste, who was worth a lot more than him?...

... It was as if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, I that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

-- The Stranger
Albert Camus