December 27

Who you are

You take stock honestly. Once a year or so you sit down with the true state of things, the money, the work, the state of a friendship you have been avoiding, and you do not round any of it in your favour. Most people cannot do this without either despair or excuses. You manage the plain version and keep going.

You are discreet with what you know. People tell you things and those things stay put, including the ones that would be useful to repeat. You have watched other people trade information for standing and you find it cheap. It is one reason your friendships are long. The other is that you do not need them to be dramatic.

Your gifts

• Honest accounting. You can look at a bad result without excuses and without falling apart.
• Discretion. What people tell you stays with you, and they know it.
• Long patience. You are willing to work on something for years before it looks like anything.

Your shadow

Reflection without kindness turns into a private prosecution. You review the year and somehow only the failures are admissible, delivered in a flat voice you would never use on anyone else. Then you call it being realistic. Meanwhile the good things go unrecorded, so your sense of your own life is drawn almost entirely from the evidence against you.

Your soul work

Record what held. Write down the parts of the year that worked, in the same plain language you use for the failures, and give them equal weight. An honest account includes the good. Leaving it out is not modesty, it is a distortion you have practised until it feels like the truth.

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.