4/12/16

Today's Horoscope

All signs:
Today you will spend the majority of your day with the person that really matters most. No big surprise, that person is you. There are a million cute and trite sayings and songs and Disney cartoons that extol the virtues of learning to love yourself, but they are all true.
And like anyone you love, you have to earn that love by treating yourself like you deserve to be treated. Most of us fall way short of that mark. Pitifully short.
The older you get, the more you come to realize that you're extremely lucky if you have a handful of true friends in your lifetime. Yes, you may have a lot of friends and cohorts over the years, but you usually only get a few people that know you inside and out and love you for it. We sometimes cheapen that by insisting that everyone we know is our bff, when in reality they are people we really like and only have a few shared interests.
There's nothing wrong with having a lot of acquaintances that you connect with on some level, but those people come and go. Real friends are always there when you need them. Sometimes you might not talk for months, or even years, but when you do it's like you don't miss a beat. They don't judge you and test you all the time, and when they see you messing up they tell you, even if you don't want to hear it.
Real friends surprise you every now and then with how well they know you and how fiercely loyal they are, and the comfort they bring you when you need it most. They don't make you feel guilty or ashamed, or try to control you. They know they don't have to, that you're there because you want to be, and if you don't want to be right now, they understand that too and give you your space. They know you'll be back.
Real friends believe in you, and help you without expecting thanks and praise. They prop you up and keep you going, and can say more to you with a couple of words than most people can say with a hundred speeches(or horoscopes!).
Real friends know who you are and never lose sight of it. They will remind you of who you are, when you forget sometimes, and they keep you on the path.
And somehow they make all that look easy.
That's the type of friend you need to be to yourself. That's how you should treat yourself all the time, and you need to earn that. It's a weird duality, a constant inner dialog with yourself, a strange relationship with only one person involved. You must love yourself, and if you don't, one of you must change. Either the person you are that isn't living up to who you should be, or the person that's not seeing you for all that you already are. Both those people are you.
The stars know this. The stars light themselves from within. Everything they are starts at their core, and is shaped and formed and maximized by the time they present it to the universe. But they are also buoyed and stabilized by other forces around them, the gravity and space time that keeps them in orbit and in harmony with the cosmos. They don't pull off their magic on their own, they are still dependant on others to make them everything they are.
So it's a truth as old as the stars themselves: Learn to love yourself so those few special people can love you too. It's really all we have, but you'll find that it's so much more than enough once you get there.