December 24

Who you are

You last. Whatever the thing is, the illness, the course, the bad two years at work, you are the one still turning up in month fourteen when the initial sympathy has dried up and the story has stopped being interesting to anybody else. You do not talk about how hard it is. You do the next required thing and then the one after.

You are steadiest in the small hours. Three in the morning holds no particular horror for you, whether it is a sick child, a deadline or your own thoughts, and you have a way of being calm at times when calm is not obviously available. People who have sat up with you through something bad do not forget it.

Your gifts

• Endurance without theatre. You keep going through the long middle and never turn it into a performance.
• Calm in bad hours. You are reliable at three in the morning, which is when it counts.
• Useful patience. You can wait out a situation that would have panicked somebody else into a mistake.

Your shadow

Enduring becomes the answer to everything, including the situations you should leave. You will absorb a bad job, an unfair arrangement, or a person's poor behaviour for years, because your first instinct is to withstand rather than to ask whether this needs withstanding. Stamina used badly is just a slow injury. Not everything you can survive is worth the survival.

Your soul work

You are here to ask what you are enduring for. Take one thing you have been quietly putting up with and decide whether it is a season or a situation. Your strength is not in doubt. What it needs is a target, so that it stops being spent on things that will never improve.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The tenth sign is the mountain goat with a fish tail: ambition with depth beneath it. Capricorn carries mastery, and the lesson of what summits are for.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

Check a friend's day, or your partner's, and send it to them.