The affirmation, the positive direction, the acceptance, it made sense to me that it came from reading Louse L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life.  Wisdom comes from those attuned to nature.  (For males, ego often gets in the way.)  Love yourself, forgive, let go, just as I learned to accept people in my line of work then let them go off into the night, with a subtle air of forgiveness, though a deeply surprising thought when it occurred to me.  It made sudden sense to me, on this the Eve of Orthodox Easter, forgiveness being at the center of the Christian message to humanity.  I thought of all I'd distracted myself with, dwelling on the past and many other forms of unhealthy things, and read, and began work on living in the now.  And maybe that wasn't easy if I considered myself a writer in a particular way, a creature of remembrance of things past.  And I saw how I'd taken my problems as unsolvable ones locked in a past, down on myself for, say, the student I was at certain times, the company I kept, and how I did more of what other people wanted to do and less of what I wanted to do to the point of giving up control of my life's decisions.  I had become too much a mourner of paths open once,  not taken, now gone, like that song, "Days of Wine and Roses."  (And yet, this is exactly the place where poets bring in meaning, interpretation, finding an understanding.)

But in the large sense, we come here for a reason, to learn, eventually, all these things about how to live a better way, so to heal, and then, maybe to help others heal.  Maybe that was the story of a lot of admirable people, overcoming fear and distraction, finding a reason.  I needed, first and foremost, before anything else, forgive myself and accept the power to change worn patterns.  I was not being kind to myself, beating myself up and thereby allowing other people to do the same.  I think that somehow, while it might make little logical sense, Lincoln could identify, separating himself from his mind's habit of melancholy take, mastering himself to self-evident truth.

I thought of my job, how after a certain number of extra shifts I would get into a crazy pattern of being awake at night, completely alone, sleeping much of daylight away.  It helped to hear Daniel Day Lewis hint that one good reason for staying in character through the length of a project protected him from being pulled into the social life of a movie set with all its interesting people, that engagement being 'very draining.'  And that was what I was finding out, that it wasn't the duties of the job, but having to balance that with people's need for engagement, such that I couldn't walk past a table without them wanting to converse.  Multiply that, and drag it out over five or six hours, no wonder I was drained.  And somehow I knew within that something was being taken away, that I wasn't doing the things I knew somewhere within I should be doing.

I knew that I had been unhealthily dwelling a long long time on the past, too wrapped up, too identified with it, and I was, I suppose, slowly making myself sick sometimes, such that it took being sick to see it clearly.  Marking time, I felt burdened as a kid stuck in a marching band, unable to play his own music.

We're here for a reason, once we've learned, and it is our great task to find the reasons and explain the wisdom that comes out of them.

So, take a day off, a mental health day, Orthodox Easter, Christ is Risen.

Most importantly, love thyself.