12/27/2005 - 12:17 a.m.

So I actually had a good Christmas. And it put things in perspective.

I used to be confident. Cheerful. I think I'm coming out of a lot of bad things now. One feature of that might be that you experience those bad things now, up front, one last time, on your way to putting them behind you. So it seems worse than it is. You're recognizing the badness, and then moving past it.

But I think a lot of my stress over the last few weeks just grew out of the fact that I wasn't listening to myself. And that I was trying too hard to fit in to my new city. So hard I was forgetting who I was, where I came from.

That's not going to work.

So I'm going to try it the new way, knowing who I am. I got some good advice from a friend once. All you can do is be yourself. Because if that's not going to work for them - then it wouldn't have worked out anyways.