Affairs and Religion

Eternal.

My tarot card readings have been interesting this week. I'm supposed to be doing something important, but I'm not. Something creative, something career-related.

Instead, I've become more and more obsessed with this idea that all our life possibilities really ARE spelled out in our transits over time, and we just don't recognize it because we're only looking at two or three years of transits at once and assuming that all describe the path we're on with equal force. I have a theory that if I look more carefully at mine, I'll see that the transits I look at and go, "Huh? What's that doing there? That doesn't describe my life at all!" actually can be traced to something that had an opportunity to occur in the past but didn't, and it's part of an inactive timeline for my life ... a road not taken. Sort of like when I had an opportunity to spend time with Chi every two weeks again, but turned it down.


I took the unprecedented (so far as I know) step of printing out all my Liz Greene transit reports for the next three years and cutting them apart so I can group them according to what they seem to be describing. It turns out that I actually have three timelines in my transits--one where I'm embroiled in a destructive affair with Chi, one where I discover a meaning and a purpose in my writing and go on to discover a blazing passion in life and am happily occupied even though I'm all alone (at least for a few more years), and then there's that last one ... where neither of the above happens. Chi never comes back, I'm STILL all alone, but I sink into apathy and ennui because I feel I have no purpose in life. 


On Astro.com, Liz Greene has a wonderful article about  how astrology reflects a person's will to live. She writes that human beings need to feel that they're here on this planet for a reason, and if they have that sense, they are happily engaged in life. When we don't, we start to stagnate and die, engaging in all kinds of harmful behaviors and degenerating into sour, old, unhappy, unhealthy people. And looking at all this, I can see that's true. If Chi is in my life and I respond unhealthily, giving up on writing because now I can make trying to fix his problems my priority (convenient--now I don't have to brave this difficult marketplace, because I'm a very unhealthy family caregiver instead, and I made that my purpose--"He needs me!") Whether he's in my life or not, I can find my purpose or I can give up on it and be purposeless ... and there's all that negative behavior Liz Greene says we do in that case when we don't know why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing. And I know it's true. (Look at my BPD mom and how she acts.)

OK, I got that, but what's my purpose in life? I had thought maybe it was showing people how to marry astrology and psychology to make more sense of their lives. Chi not ever coming back had cast that into doubt. Yeah, I'd studied hard, I knew what was happening and why, and because I did that, I knew unerringly what to do and why when he showed up again.

But if the guy never shows up again, even though we have these and those transits that said he would...I've obsessed over all that work, to no good purpose. Fatal flaw in that work, huh?

Not necessarily. You're probably wondering what any of the preceding has to do with religion. Well, hold on tight, because it does.

I had to take a break in all this because the 94-year-old great aunt I've taken care of for the past nine years passed away. I had just spent Mother's Day with her a month ago. During the visit, I was upset because I had discovered my own (BPD) mom going around Facebook posting some very untrue lies about me everywhere my brother had posted a family picture of me.

My great aunt responded by saying, "Don't worry, I'll be your mom. You've never ever disappointed me, I'm your mom." And then I started to cry, and she said, "It's okay, we'll sit here and bawl together!"

And a month later she was gone.

I can see through the events of the funeral that she really was my mom, in more ways than one, because she helped me give birth to myself. I don't just mean that it's been a heavy burden taking care of her and her handicapped daughter and I have really had to grow and become more competent in doing all of that these last nine years, or that she treated me better than my own mother all my life. (Although, both are definitely true.)

I mean: She was almost 95, she could have passed away at any time. Why now, right when I'm struggling with why I'm alive, with no one close in my life at all, struggling to pay bills so I can struggle to pay bills? While my horoscope and the cards are saying I have a purpose and I'd better find it or I'm going to sink into apathy and depression and the rest of my life is going to suck, like that of the lonely, empty alcoholic who lives upstairs?

Because of my two cousins who came up for the funeral. When their last aunt died, no doubt they were going to bring a certain family picture to the funeral and say the same things about it, but my aunt died now instead of any other time, right when I'm struggling.

The picture is a group photo of my great aunt and all seven of her siblings, together with their parents--my great-grandparents. Right before my great-grandfather left the family for a younger woman. (Sort of like Chi almost did for me, only all his kids are grown up and gone.)

This never-forgotten family story still gets trotted out from time to time. The children in the photo--my great aunt, my grandmother, and their brothers and sisters--all are gone now, and this happened in 1941. Seventy-seven years ago! Yet, after the funeral, this photo and this family tragedy and the picture made another reappearance.

My cousins, both of whom are religious, God-fearing kind of people, talked a lot about how terrible it was for the children, how it wrecked the children's mental health, and how they just couldn't understand why or how a person could do such an ungodly thing and leave eight children and a wife.

At no other time would I have reacted to that photo and that discussion the way I did yesterday.

Because before Chi, I was just a little girl. "How could that person do that to all those other people? No wonder the Bible calls that a sin." Just like everyone else, I reacted that way to that family story when I actually was a little girl.

Now I've been the other woman, and I know why my particular man had to leave, and my entire last three and a half years has been one long ongoing consideration of what the right thing is to do and what's fairest and best for everyone. Not just me, everyone.

(Being the other woman, I've come to understand, confers a very grave responsibility. Not all of us recognize this, but it's true.)

I've read before that we don't see things the way they are, we see them the way we are. And it's true that most of the pain in this mixed-up world comes from everyone seeing that person or group of people they're angry at or disappointed in, from their own perspective and not the other people's.

This is what I heard at dinner last night, and because of the last three years, I see that this is what's wrong with using religion as the sole guiding principle of your life. And now that I've had these experiences, I can tell you why this is.

Religion is great at providing prescriptions for life, but in most cases religious dogma does not take into account what's going on in the marriage. As a general rule, it's best to stay married and work out the problems with the one you married, BUT...

Maybe somebody is mentally ill. Maybe somebody is being abused. Maybe the combined dysfunction of the two people dovetails on itself such that a mutually unhealthy situation keeps perpetuating between these two--behind closed doors, while things look so good in front of everyone else.

What I do know is, in the case of my grandmother, all six girls in the family were diagnosed bipolar--and that is highly heritable. So, just like my mother's grandmother showed signs of mental illness back in the day, and that side of the family talked about that for decades--it's possible that some problems we will never know about affected my other great-grandparents' marriage.

Religion just says, "Stay married. Period." And, knowing what Chi was living with and how, "Stay married. Period." turned out for him, it would upset me greatly--and did--that other people reacted this way to him. They did not understand anything about the marriage or what the marriage was doing to the people in it. I knew what to ask, and Chi would tell me a bit about what the two therapists were saying. Other people didn't know to ask these things. They just saw a man leaving an apparently good wife after an apparently happy 38-year marriage, and they rushed to judge.

"In life," says Religion, "generally it doesn't work too well to do things in that way or that way. To get your best results, we strongly recommend that you do things this way." Only humans came along and attached these other harmful ideas to that: The idea of a Big Boss in the sky who watches and judges what we do, who's angry and displeased, who metes out pronouncements and sends people to hell fire eternal if they, for instance, leave their wives. Look what you did to your children! Sinner! Hell and Damnation!!!

All I'm saying is, who knows why my great-grandfather left? Who knows how the marriage really was? We'll never know, because all the people who were living at the time have died. Maybe it really was the awful childish mistake the extended and descended family believes it was. Or maybe, like Chi, my grandfather was running for his life. I'll never forget what Chi wrote me once. I know I just can't move back into that house. It feels like death to move back into that house.

And, last October, that's exactly what he was describing to me. It happened. (And the cards and the astrology are in agreement that it probably hasn't gotten much better.)

I hope something happens so it doesn't end that way for him, whatever that may be.

That stuff after what's in orange up there is what Religion does wrong, and how it's undoing with the left hand, the good stuff it just did with the right. Let's not even talk about all the religious wars, and how humans here on earth hate and kill one another because of the idea of the judgmental god. Even my hyperreligious relatives, including the very aunt just deceased, used to sit around and argue that this one was going to heaven and that one was going to hell because one of them believed the right way and the other one believed the wrong way.

All this is stuff and nonsense, and obscures all the other ways humans have to make sense of life, which some ignore and pooh-pooh because they are not Religion. Religion says, "My dogmatic teaching is the only thing you are to use and listen to, and it's a sin if you use any other source of knowledge," and that's too bad, because Religion as practiced by what I grew up with, is a good start, but woefully inadequate alone.

So here we have Religion, who offers great prescriptions about how to do things in the way that generally offers the best results. But unfortunately Religion offers no deeper explanations for human behavior, as I've pointed out here before. Religion simply slaps people's hands and says, "It's bad. Don't do it."

Dogma does not help people see or learn the deeper reasons behind the doing of it, nor help them heal so they no longer NEED to do it.

Because really, people. Folks wouldn't drink, folks wouldn't eat themselves to six hundred pounds and up, folks wouldn't have affairs, folks wouldn't do anything "bad," anything that heaps condemnation down on their heads from all of family and society, unless they really NEED to for some reason. And religion does nothing to help people understand that.

And when we're short on understanding and long on judgment, it does not help to heal these people, ourselves, and the world.

So along comes Psychology, which says, "Here is why that person is doing what he is doing." Now we can make some progress toward fulfilling those great prescriptions created by our Religion, because we can see and understand what's standing in the way. We can see how things got that way. That means we now know how to prevent, so things don't get this bad ever again, and we have an easier time forgiving, because we see the why behind that person doing that painful thing that we hate him for. Religion isn't good at this, except for the riddles such as, "The sins of the father are visited upon the child unto the seventh generation."

WTF does THAT mean? Religion tries to get it in there, but Psychology explains it in a way that we can understand it.

Now we come to Astrology. Ah, that terrible discipline with the bad name. It mostly has a bad name because it purports to be able to predict the future, and sometimes it "looks" like it's "wrong."

(Oh, and because Religion says it's bad, of course.)

But what I see, because I've studied psychology as well as astrology, and because this awful situation in my life drove me to look at more than three years of transits at a time (the way most professional astrologers do), is that astrology not only accurately describes your character, but it also describes your life. In my transits right now I see three different outcomes, and when I ask--and this is important!--Does this sound likely? Does this make sense? the answer is yes.

And who decides which outcome I will get? Well, one of them is partially decided by someone else, but the main answer is, I do. Not only that, but your natal chart has something to say about why you decided to come into this life, what you meant to do here, and why things turned out the way they have.

Not ONLY that, but when you can look at three charts and see everything in one reflected in the other three--and this is all in the position of the planets and stars--obviously you have some evidence of intelligent design.

This does not mean that you have a punitive god you have to answer to, and who's supposed to direct your life  (as in, the way some Christians apparently do, you think you should stand in front of your closet every morning and let Someone Else think for you ("Lord, should I wear the red dress or the green?"), or the idea, with the concept of Godly this and Godly that, that you are better than everyone else, because you're allowing certain other people, speaking and writing as this cosmic Superbeing, to think for you.

But Something is obviously cocreating with you, for every planet in the heavens to reflect something real about you, something psychology can confirm, tell you how it came about and what you have to do to get it to go better, and religion can give you some guidance about the most desirable earthly outcome.

And I can tell you all this now, so that must be my purpose.

I'm supposed to have some faith that if I build it, they will come.

(Whoever they is.)

The Way Forward

PRESENT

(I started composing this entry in November. It will probably be long. I'll break it up.)

IT HAPPENED.

I can hardly believe it, but IT HAPPENED.

Assessment at this point: He's still trying to hang onto the marriage. Not because it's going well, not because I destroyed a marriage that could have been made healthy, and not because he doesn't love me or I don't love him.

And: IT HAPPENED, exactly as I always thought it would have to, exactly as the horoscopes predicted.

Which means: I'M NOT CRAZY. The whole time, I was right. I wasn't crazy!

And this is good. This is all, for the first time in three years, very, very good.

I had agonized over some of this.

And, consider this: nine times out of ten, after a breakup, the other person does not come back to provide answers. Ever.

I can consider myself extremely fortunate on all these accounts.

His attitude is, "I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it." There's not much I can do with that. If a person's stated intention is to remain married, then there's no relationship of any kind that's possible.

Some may elect to have an affair with the guy anyway, hoping to persuade him away from the wife at some point. And there's no doubt it would be possible to do that. All three horoscopes are in agreement: If I chose to do that, I would eventually win.

But the price exacted is terrible. The worst thing you can do with a codependent is encourage him to live any more dishonestly with himself and other people than he already is. If I elected that option, it would take six years, I would get dumped again in the  middle of it and get shattered even, even worse than I've already been, and all three people in the triangle remain in arrested development, or possibly even go backwards.

No one changes. No one develops any new skills. No one learns anything. No one gets better.

I go on unable to learn to be happy in the world the way the world is, all on my own. He goes on absolutely convinced that the point of all relationship is that if anyone anywhere in the northern hemisphere is disappointed by his choices for any reason, he has to make them happy no matter how grindingly, wretchedly miserable this makes him.

(What IS the point of relationship? To be known and loved exactly AS YOU ARE, BY STANDING IN YOUR TRUTH AND BEING WHO YOU ARE.)

He never gets out of this "I have no choice but misery" orientation to life, forever and ever unable to state his own feelings and needs, back himself up, and establish boundaries and limits with other people (and might I add, LIKE other people.) And Rory goes right on with...whatever her problem is.

No, clearly, this scenario should never be allowed to happen. If it is, unhealed childhood brokenness and bad habits just wreck our eventual relationship anyway.

But, boy, this sure could happen. He already asked how I felt about him coming back to club meetings, so he can see me and talk to me. He's trying to use tiny crumbs of a relationship with me to make living in the marriage bearable.

And how is that okay? Who condemns themselves to a miserable fraction of the good, happy, healthy relationship all people want, and that he's dreamed of his whole life, so everyone else doesn't have to adjust to reality? (When, in truth, some of these people have USED him quite a bit, and treated him very poorly.)

But, this is the reality to which I must adjust, so I will. There's no point staying in contact. All we'll do is tear ourselves to pieces.  Or end up in the other scenario, which is the worst possible result.

And, because I worked and worked and studied and studied and struggled and struggled so hard lo, these past three years, now I see all this. Not only see it, but KNOW it in my bones.

What the affair remonstrators like Anne Ortelee do (See Hiring an Astrologer: Avoiding the Quack) is slap your hand and say, "It's bad. Don't do it," just as people do when another person is overweight.

That's not healing. It teaches nothing. It explains nothing. It leaves people torn and confused and lonely and in pain, and it says, "Just forget it and pretend it didn't happen."

And when we do that, we make the same mistake again. We didn't learn. We didn't grow. We didn't change into a healthier version of ourselves, the person we would have been if our parents and childhood had been healthier.

The last three years have been horrible. Horrible. HORRIBLE. But I wouldn't trade them for anything, because of what I learned. Because of what I see. Because of what I know. When you deal correctly with pain in your life, this is how it ends up.

I now know that there really is an overarching purpose to everyone's life. I now know that LIFE IS NOT RANDOM. Interesting...Simon getting sick took away all faith I had in a fair universe where life had any purpose, and Chi leaving me gave it back.

I now know that there was a purpose for everything that happened to me, no matter how senseless and terrible it looked at the time. And I will never look at life the same way again.

I now know that psychology and astrology reinforce each other, and that if you study both, life makes a LOT more sense, and the most painful things have purpose.

I now know that feelings of pain and distress are life's way of telling you, "You're missing something, the discovery of which would change everything for you."

I now know that running in the opposite direction from the pain of addressing something that's not working out in your life, attractive though it looks, is a bad, bad idea. The painful problems we don't work to unlock and solve today, return tomorrow, ten times worse. How much worse do we have to feel before we'll crack a book and read what the experts who study our problem have to say about it? How much worse do we have to feel before we'll do more than just sit with supportive people and complain?

For all those critics who snort, "You've been obsessed with a married man for THREE YEARS!" Yep, I sure was. And I often felt like I was on some kind of deadline, racing and racing to find out something I needed to know before this time in my life rolled around. And I was ALSO obsessed with finding and fixing what I didn't know, what I didn't understand, about where childhood damage was still crippling me in my life.

And I discovered this: When you've worked with pain correctly, you will know, because you no longer have to fight to escape it or fight to ignore it.

When you work with pain correctly, it goes away, and you are freed to live a new life.

And if it's not going away, you are running from or ignoring or missing something, instead of working with it correctly.

One thing's for sure, I didn't ignore ANYTHING these past three years. I split hairs and split hairs and SPLIT hairs. And I learned so much I'm so grateful I know.

Which brings me to an...

Serendipity and the last stages of learning

PAST

I find it absolutely fascinating that Chi's and my Davison specifically states that we each came into the other's life with a lesson for that person.

And, seriously. THE WEEK after I had finally completed that learning...here he is. He told me he had wanted to contact me again for a long time, but he was afraid to. He was afraid he would open old wounds.

Really, I don't know how I ever would have closed those wounds without him. I was reeling over being rejected, and felt horrible that I may have tarnished something that would otherwise become beautiful.

Oh, and there was the obvious evidence that I was nuts. Yeah, that.

The learning I was meant to complete was quite the riddle. My transits for this and next year told me that completing it was a major make-or-break issue, but neglected to mention WHAT this specific task actually was. I had to go on a hunt for that, through our Davison and through all of our transits over the next twenty years.

And it was a damn good thing I did, because I had never, ever suspected that the way I was around this issue contained anything unhealthy at all! I thought it was simply the way I was. I thought it was the way all people were!

Imagine, if you will, a five year old getting separated from his parents in a huge department store, or maybe one of those colossal theme parks. Suddenly the child looks up, having been absorbed in some toy. Mom and Dad, brother and sister, are gone! How will that child get home? Who will feed him, who will take care of him? Where will he sleep? Will he ever see his family again?

Just study the reaction of a tiny baby when Mom and Dad head out the door for a date night. The panic. The despair.

I was a kid rejected at home and rejected at school from birth until the age of twelve. I always believed there was something deeply wrong with me, else everyone around me would not have rejected me. I was in touch with the sense of terrible inferiority I always felt. When I finally started to make real friends, in college and as a young adult, I was ecstatic. I could fit in with people after all! And when I married Simon. Finally, I had a happy family! I was good enough, after all! (And, I had WORKED HARD ENOUGH to know how to make a marriage relationship work.)

What I was NOT in touch with was that feeling that overtook me after Simon was gone, went away when Chi arrived, and plunged me below sea level when he left. This horrible, abiding, aching sense of sadness that felt unhealable. That felt like it would never go away. And the fear that went with it. I'd be out jogging and it would get dark outside, and I'd think: I could be raped or mugged out here and not a soul would know. Or the horrible time I had norovirus and the flu alone in a hotel room miles out of town. I threw up and had so much diarrhea, and felt so horrible, I truly was scared. What if I got seriously dehydrated? No one knew or cared where I was.

Now I understand that feeling that way all the time is NOT the way life is or the way normal people are. And if I feel that way all the time, I would grab onto Chi long before he was ready, wrenching him out of a family he just wasn't ready to leave. I suppose I would have learned eventually anyway...but who knows what horrible things would have had to happen to me and my relationships over the rest of my life as I discovered it the hard way? Since finding this in my chart and reallllly thinking it over, I could apply myself to addressing it now.

If I didn't do this, the consequences could be disastrous.

As you know, I worked. I worked hard on this.

And I thought I had it. I really did.

Until...The Incident With Richard.

In my frantic search for friendship after Chi left my life, I ended up taking over a writer's group that had been left orphaned after the organizer quit. Somebody had to take over, so I did.

Writers, I am discovering, have a lot of emotional problems as a group. My group is now down to two members, thanks to the childish behavior of two other members.

I had thought things were smoothing out with Richard. Although he brought in writing that was atrociously spelled and had a lot of newbie plotting and structural problems that would bore the reader to tears left as they were, his story was so weird and so inspired (and, well, so gross), that I could see it finding an audience. The problem was that his reader deserved his best work, and since it was a critique group, I told him so.

He would sit there turning red in the face and then explode in anger at me. Others in the group stopped sharing their honest reactions, fearing to start a temper geyser that would have people at neighboring tables staring at all of us.

Not me. He brought the book in for our opinions. I knew what it needed, and I told him. We thought he would never make it all the way through to "The End."

But finally, he did make it. He had grown calmer, and even told me once that he'd made some of the changes I suggested. We marveled together at some of the outlandish behavior of a couple of other people who acted even worse. Finally, it was down to just us three: Me, Richard, and Judy.

I was so proud of him for finishing. He came to his last meeting fuming about his illustrator, who was clearly a few cards short of a full deck, and we commiserated about that. Then I started on his last ten pages. I actually did like them, except that he had included as an epilogue something that there was no way for the reader to recognize as connected in any way to the story he had just finished telling, and he'd left dangling loose ends that really needed to be the actual epilogue.

I was so happy that morning, as Richard sat there telling us stories about this illustrator that would curl your hair. And I thought, " See? You're going to find real friends again. Look at this. It's going to be me, Rich, and Judy together at this table for a long time to come." And I felt that coziness...the safety and security of having other people in your life you can call real friends.

I hadn't even finished discussing the pages he brought before Richard erupted. And I mean ERUPTED. Although any reasonable person could see that I had valid points, I didn't even get to the part about the loose threads needing to be the epilogue instead. Richard got red in the face, screamed at me for "eviscerating" his book, called me a C You Next Tuesday right there in the restaurant, threw papers at me, and stormed out. Judy, who is in her seventies, sat there trembling and told me he had scared her to death.

It was as if I had slipped back into that needy mindset one more time, and the Universe used Richard to bitch-slap me right back out of it. Immediately.

And I felt this little click inside my head. All my life I had felt like other people were great and I wasn't, and everybody needed people, and the world was just this warm and fuzzy place I was locked out of.

I realized suddenly that I hadn't met but one or two sane people since Chi left me. And I understood finally, It's not such a good world out there. People are crazy. People are goddamned crazy.

And that I had better get the FUCK out of the mindset of just marking time until I had people again, because there aren't very many good ones out there, and with crazies like the ones I'd been meeting, what I needed to do was toughen up so I wouldn't need any of these bozos.

When you are too needy for companionship, and all you can find is this, you are going to find yourself in one bad place. When you are too needy for companionship, and all you can find is this, you could accept behavior you should never, never accept.

There was simply no need to miss people. People are crazy sons of bitches, and I am wayyy better off by myself.

I went walking downtown after that alone, to an Ethiopian restaurant I love, and for the first time I went about by myself without this funny feeling that it wasn't right that I was alone, that I needed company and I would never, could never, feel happy or safe without it.

I had turned the very last corner. And I knew it. I had finally gotten the last lesson Chi came to teach me about feelings from childhood I really needed to change.

For the first time in my entire life, I could be alone, quite possibly forever, and feel perfectly okay by myself.

                          ***

And the very next week, Chi came back.

It's All Happening...

PRESENT...

(Composed on 11/5/17)

If anyone's been wondering what happened with me and Chi, sorry for the delay. Things took a while, and I had already scheduled some blogs, so I let those post while I waited to see what would shake out.

In short, I will never doubt astrology or tarot again.

Chi messaged me on Facebook, we talked on Facebook a couple of times, then we spoke once on the phone. I had two basic motivations in this: 1.) Find out WHAT had actually happened over there, and 2.) Ascertain whether I was crazy or not.

1.) What actually happened over there: Marriage counseling did not go well. Nothing much has changed. Chi still loves me, I still love him, and we've Facebook stalked one another and missed each other every day for two and a half years. Chi was dealing with a pretty serious health issue, and a couple of family members have been as well. Chi feels that family members have been very dependent on him and feels somewhat squashed by that. When he tried to leave Rory, family members basically got very vindictive, took her side, threatened to cut him out of the family, and he's stayed because of that. I'm hearing things like, "I was causing other people too much pain. I've made my bed and now I have to lie in it."

He is not, however, finding that particular mattress very comfortable.

2.) I am NOT crazy. I used to wonder, when the tarot cards indicated marital stress and difficulty, and the horoscopes were saying, Get these lessons under your belt now. Get ready, he's coming back, yet I was seeing Rory post these happy-looking things on occasion, WTF was WRONG with me. Who would believe tarot cards--ONLINE tarot cards, by the way!--and HOROSCOPES over what she could see with her own eyes? A man who left two and a half years ago, showed NO sign of even remembering her name, and postings that implied things were fine now and he had moved on?

Well, Alice Portman, the online tarot, and my own nascent talent at reading horoscopes all proved correct--as well as my instincts, developed over a lifetime of reading about psychology and relationships.

(And may I please point out, Anne OrtElee did NOT.)

(I'm SO snarky.)

The online tarot is now telling me I am going to have to use every last sand grain of what I've spent the last two and a half years so very painfully learning. And I plan to.

And I have to say that I am so, so very grateful for this entire experience. All the tears I cried, all the obsessing I did, all the pain I went through, all the reading, all the study, everything I learned...I wouldn't trade it for any amount of money.

Now I NEED what I learned, and if I hadn't learned what I would need to know, these past two weeks could have led to unmitigated, life-destroying disaster. (They still could...it just depends on how closely I can cleave to what I've learned.)

That obsessive process was how I, myself, learned it. Yours may be different. But this is how I learn best, and make fundamental changes in myself that I need.

If you find yourself obsessing along these lines and others are fed up with you, as long as you are uncovering unhealthy childhood patterns WITHIN YOURSELF that need to be changed AND YOU ARE CHANGING THEM, you are doing what YOU NEED to do.

(Tell the Anne OrtElees of this world to go fuck themselves.)

After the events of the past two weeks, I am making another prediction, based once again on horoscope transits. These transits were always there, but if the past two weeks hadn't happened, I would consider it not very likely. Now it's in the "highly probable" category.

I had to come clean...Chi now has access to this blog. I can't post the prediction now, because I don't want to affect the future in so doing. But if it happens, it becomes imperative that Chi know what's in his chart for the next several years and beyond, and it's doubly imperative that my behavior is perfect. NO dating him. NO sleeping with him. Limited and infrequent contact.

I'm on my honor. You guys keep me honest.

So What Happened with Me and Chi??

PRESENT

(Yes, I'm going to update you on the Chi situation. Just let me get these three astrology blogs out first.)

Tune in next...