u/Miss_Lib

I’ve done a good job with eliminating social media from my mornings. I don’t do any socials until noon and it’s obviously great for my focus and sets a great tone for my day. But I’d like to take it a step further and not even want my phone in the mornings. I keep asking myself how did we do it before we had phones? Did we just wake up and not think about anything? I’m old enough to have lived before phones but I just can’t remember what it was like. Were we just naturally less curious? I feel like I always need something, or I have a question that needs to be answered. I just want to be less reliant and not react to every thought that crosses my mind.. at least between 7am and noon. lol!

I have been overworked at my job for at least the last 10 months. We’re just in a very busy period. I’m a workaholic.. I really like what I do. I also really want to keep my job in a difficult economy so I definitely go above and beyond. Unfortunately it’s resulted in me working a ridiculous amount of hours. It’s a high stress job with big consequences when not done on time and correctly. The company can be sued and things could be extremely disruptive. It’s a fortune 100 corporate job.

Unfortunately I’m noticing more and more that when I do disconnect, I can’t handle ..life. The smallest things throw me off, my emotions feel disregulated, I make poor choices, I can’t think straight. It’s getting more obvious to my husband. It’s like work is the only place things make sense and I know how to cope. When I do disconnect I’m resenting everything I’m doing because there is work that could get done.I’m trying to take small steps to reclaim my life and set boundaries.. one day a week I’m purposefully getting offline to do something important.. like connect with family or go to a movie. I do get right back online but I find I am able to live in the moment. I’m hoping this extends further. I also do keep at least my Saturday protected. I will work Sunday night.

I don’t have kids, and I’ve never really had hobbies. I have ADHD so things come and go pretty quickly, lol! I’m working on a plan that includes a yoga class once a week as well. We do travel from time to time. I don’t know how to meditate. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like? Any advice? Please be kind

Why am I a motivated to do things I normally put off while I’m drinking? But in a good way! We don’t often drink at home but when we do I get like hyper motivated to clean and finish things I’ve been putting off, sometimes for ages. I’m kind of a clutter bug and I have this one ledge that has been driving me crazy for a year (that’s about how long it’s been since we drank at home) and I just cleaned it off in less than 3 minutes. This happens a lot! In the past I used to clean a lot when drinking. This is the kind of energy and focus I would love to have without booze. I basically become incredibly type A.

I’ll probably regret this but here goes… I can’t stand the way my brother and sister in law ate raising their kids. They have zero manners, they don’t say please and thank you. They’re on their devices all the time. They barely greet you. They’re just rude children. When I try to correct them she yells at me that “they’re just kids” and she’s literally been saying this her whole life and they are now 15 and 12. They are very spoiled and get whatever they want. My husband and I used to baby sit alot when they were younger but stopped because she got mad that we would correct their behavior. In fact, it almost got physical about 8 years ago literally because I wanted them to throw away their sticky trash that they were leaving around our mom’s house. We quickly tried to move on but we stopped taking the kids. We’d still get together from time to time and go to their games but we had no real relationship with the kids. In an effort to try to rebuild the relationship since we’ve only been seeing them a hand full of times a year we thought we’d take them to the beach for the weekend and needless to say it was a disaster. Because in between “fun” you had to still correct their behavior and they’re not used to that. It was a very rough 2 days. They told their parents they don’t ever want to go back. We spent $100s of dollars on them in the arcade, buying them stuff, on rides and all they seem to remember is us asking them to sit up straight at dinner, don’t play the sound on your phone without headphones and to say please and thank you. I honestly have no idea how to fix this. I hate that they hate me for no good reason. I’m the only aunt they have and I had such great aunts growing up I just want to be that to them.

I get so frustrated because I absorb so much decluttering content but just can’t seem to let it breakthrough. Things like “if you can’t find what you need, you have too much stuff” really makes so much sense to me but I just don’t apply it. I used to keep anything to wear as pajamas and I just realized it was becoming too much.. a pajama t shirt I might end up wearing on a Tuesday afternoon which just felt icky so I started curating my pjs. I only buy sets. If I don’t have a set, I can make one but I have to love it and it has to match. I have to love every piece. They have to be a certain softness. It’s been great! I know exactly what I have and I never bypass anything for something I like more. I want to be able to apply this to every thing I own but it’s just not breaking through. I can’t get rid of stuff because suddenly the minute I touch it it somehow becomes sentimental. What was your breakthrough? When will my light bulb go on?!

Currently working out a plumbing issue while we have renters. Waiting for the plumber and I’m just so anxious and angry and embarrassed. What’s the biggest thing you had to apologize for that was your fault and how did you make it up to your guests?

Now I just do a full shift in the middle of the night. Sometimes I will fall asleep around midnight and wake up at 3am and just go on my phone for hours. I almost look forward to it! I do crossword puzzles, read, scroll Reddit… I don’t do anything with sound but I can scroll Instagram without. It’s such a terrible habit. It’s mostly weekends but it’s gotta stop. My “second sleep” is anything that happens after.

Currently laying here wide awake because I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon into anxiety after an evening of drinking. So annoyed with myself. I had a conversation with one our acquaintances from the bar and I think it’s stuff I had already told them and I was just going on and on about it. It was also a corny amount of name dropping. I can’t stop thinking about it. Once that started it then turned into anxiety about everything I have going on in my life at the moment. My stomach hurts. My head hurts. My ego is completely embarrassed. I ate food that I know doesn’t agree with me so now of course I feel like I’m dying. This is me after cutting back on drinking by almost half.

How do you respond to guests who claim the place smells like cigarettes? It’s not something that’s ever come up before. My husband was in the unit today before check in and didn’t notice anything. Our cleaner didn’t say anything. I think the neighbors smoke so maybe it’s coming from there but they’re not new so I would think other guests would’ve complained and no one ever has. I don’t know if the guests before them were smokers and it lingered? I want to take their feedback seriously but not sure what the appropriate response is. I have no reason to believe them or not believe them.

I work for a company that is all in on AI. Non-stop, every day it’s giving us more things we have to do. I manage a lot of timelines so I try to use AI where I can to appease the bosses but literally everything it does is wrong. I had to convince it of the date the other day! One day it tried to tell me that $5000 was higher than $7,000. It just blows my mind that my very valuable company has decided peoples jobs are now to correct AI. A coworker created a deck and the boss put it in AI and made her edit the AI version of a deck she created that explains what our team does! The deck was done. It wasn’t full of data, it was an intro deck to the function of a team she manages. It has rarely ever successfully completed a task and when it does there is so much word salad that I have to read through. I have been writing emails since you had to take courses to learn how yo write emails and now I get so many AI responses from people where the first paragraph is just full of extra words that mean absolutely nothing because it’s part of the AI response. What are we even doing? I get genuinely depressed to see my company continue to invest and double down. The timelines for projects have increased substantially and they just continue to think it’s fine. I seriously live in the most bizarre timeline.

I’m so lost and am afraid of being “influenced.” I grew up with a mom who scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees. Then we had a sponge mop? I think they’re called. Now everyone is using string mops..and then moving into flat mops? Are sponge mops no longer good? Sometimes simple is better with cleaning and I just want to make sure I’m not just jumping on a trend. Aren’t flat mops with removable pads kind of like swiffers? String mops seem so clunky sometimes. Then drying them. Where are we at on mops and why?

My property had a good 5 star rating that was so important to us until we just got our first 4-star review 😕. I know it’s more of an ego hit than anything else but it’s so annoying because apparently they told our manager it was because the shower didn’t drain well enough (!?). They never reached out to us in real time and we’ve had a couple of stays since then and haven’t been able to get into the unit and now I’m afraid people are going to continue to complain even though we had zero idea this was happening. It’s really important to me that people have a good experience because we’re a beach town that can be highly competitive in the summer so I just hate seeing this. How do you handle less than perfect reviews? Also, half of our recent guests have been a pain in the you know what so it’s especially annoying that they’re complaining. I can’t believe how many people just try to check in whenever they feel like it!

I got my first lip filler on Tuesday and so far I guess it’s fine. I’m so afraid of messing with anything. Every time I turn around there is more stuff they say not to do… no straws, no kissing, no puckering.. I’m stressed. I am wondering about smiling though. I noticed it’s kind of difficult to smile or even laugh..like my mouth feels smaller. Will this go away? I had a pretty big smile and I would hate to think I screwed that up. But my brain tells me it makes more sense to just do natural stuff and the filler will spread more naturally, lol! I’m still a bit swollen, bruised and peeling a lot but it does get better each day.

We took 5 months off and went back to drinking 2 weeks ago. I’m still trying to find the moderation. We relearned how to live without alcohol and the goal is to relearn how to live with it.

Today was annoying. The goal is to never really have more than 5. We aim for 3-5 on Friday and Saturday (we don’t drink the other days). We go to our beach house on the weekends. We used to drink 5-6 drinks on the beach during the day. Today we had 1. It was incredible. I took a nap. I have not been so peaceful on a beach in years. Great start! Then we came home and rested for a couple hours.

The plan was to go to our home base bar (we had 1 drink there and then they poured us a shot that we did not ask for on the way out) uber to the entertainment district with all the bars to visit a sister bar to our home bar. They don’t serve food so we went to a nearby place. Ordered a drink.. they took over 35 minutes to tell us they were out of our order so we left. Ugh. Went up another place we like, turns out there was a private party so the restaurant was closed.. they love my husband ao they gave us a drink. Ugh. Finally decided to go to a restaurant that is tried and true.. had a drink there with our food. Never made it to our destination bar because we were so annoyed we just ubered back to our home base where we had 2 drinks before going home. It’s so frustrating how we just suddenly ended up 8 drinks deep yet none of them felt out of place. Like we did try. We dont drive in our beach town so it’s fine but sometimes it really feels like there is no at yo get a handle on it. Even with the best intentions.

Rainy weekend where we are. Are there any games you’d suggest we can put in our unit that won’t get destroyed?

We started in January with the intention to do one month. We just kept pushing it back and yesterday was finally the day and I must say…what a disappointment. We were very heavy weekend drinkers. We went in with a plan, I stuck to it. I was so bored, I can’t believe it. The first drink made me buzzed and I didn’t really care for the feeling.The whole time I kept my NA drink of choice handy (club soda/cranberry). Drank that. Realized I couldn’t handle another mixer drink so tried a seltzer I had been looking to try…it was fine. Drank more NA. Then had my favorite seltzer (white claw) didn’t care. I have been sober around so many people and at so many bars because we actually did a lot of bar hopping during our dry time that it just felt stupid. I had one more white claw to be a good sport but easily could’ve skipped it. I literally don’t feel excited about drinking again. I just keep wanting to say bored but I don’t know if that’s the word. Just didn’t feel the need to numb. I’m excited to have the option because there are plenty of places I romanticize having a drink especially in the summer but other than that I really want to keep not drinking as my default. What a strange experience. I just did not expect it as someone who has had a crazy drinking journey.