Day 498

Hey, nearly to 500! Pretty cool. Only now registered on my radar.

Very up and down day. All's well that ends well I guess. I tellya though it's getting harder and harder to be around seriously drunk people. I have plenty of compassion...just not much patience.

Day 497

Bed at 9 tonight. Sometimes the emotionally safest place to be is under the covers. Let the world turn without me tonight.

Day 496

Bah. Long day with a fair number of difficulties.

Dropped Youngest off at home before returning to work for a 4-5pm meeting and found myself telling Spouse "I go to work at a job I kinda hate right now then when I get home I've got all this other stuff to do and now I'm doing all this eating right and walking because I don't want to have a heart attack...I feel like I'm doing everything right and got nothing to show for it." He hugged me and probably said something I don't remember.

Later in the night Youngest said "I heard you tell Dad..." and repeated my words back before saying "and it made me wonder if when I get to be fifty I'm going to feel that way."

That was reasonably stunning. Got no clue what to do about any of it.

Day 495

Today's self care was recognizing that I had to get Away From all the emotionally draining humans and go to bed at 9:30. Fortunately none of them gave me pushback. I write "fortunately" because it's still a little hard for me to just excuse myself from the family stuff. However it is way better than filling my bag of resentment up especially as I no longer cash in a full bag for a full bottle.

Day 494

Long day and I'm tired but it was a better day than yesterday for sure. Tomorrow is already better than either previous one because my big site-visit road trip got canceled.

I am way better than I used to be at taking care of myself and not pushing or martyr-ing myself but there's still room for progress: even though I was complaining about the heat before I crossed the threshold it took Spouse suggesting more than once that I should abandon cooking in favor of carry-out before I said yes. Silly.

Overall though, the whole stress/life balance is so much better than it used to be.

Day 493

So. Tired.

Many frustrating things today, not the least of which was the continued heat wave...but I got through all of them and am now finally in bed. Such a good feeling; bed when tired. And how nice to fall into the bed full of appreciation rather than vodka.

Day 492

Long day.

The unseasonable heat wave had me irritated like a bug bite most of the day but once it cooled off I got better. Got a lot accomplished for the week food-wise, too. 

Tired, though. Started walking again and it's showing by the end of the day. 

Speaking of days, I'm kind of amazed at creeping up to 500. It's very cool. Everything - and I mean everything - is easier. Ya gotta stick with it though - I was telling someone working toward bigger chunks of sober time that the good stuff doesn't happen right away. After the first few days of "hey, I'm not hung over" wear off there's still the messed up sleep for a while and once that sort of fades the one-month mark is all "hey, I did a month, hooray!" But then there's this whole long haul where you don't feel particularly better physically and it's way easy to start thinking all those "maybe" thoughts so getting to 60 days requires more self-care and effort than one would think...and although I may be totally remembering it wrong, I think I felt the -really- good stuff didn't start being obvious till after 6 months and maybe more like 8. It is SOOoo worth it though. If you stick with it you become this whole better version of yourself.