Stuff is all moved out, place is almost clean. Kids are mopping it right now. After that, I want to start sorting the stuff we kept into categories and hopefully pare it down some more. My wonderful, new, virgin mattress is queen size and is too big to fit into the house and leave much room to do other stuff. So instead, I was given a twin mattress and put this onto the little twin frame that was in the house. This new mattress is the texture of a very firm loaf of bread....or perhaps a mostly dry kitchen sponge. I don't know if I've slept this poorly since being in the hospital, whose beds and policies seemed designed with a goal of sleep deprivation in mind.

A sidenote: they need to really rethink the way they're running places like that hospital, if their goal is to help people heal and get back into the daily routines of life. I know that enormous advances have been made, but....if a long term success rate is desired, there are improvements which could be made. If, however, having a very low recidivism rate is considered success, they may have attained that for other reasons. I can say that avoiding ever going to that place again has been a powerful motivator for me to do whatever I have to do. One's priorities change after experiencing something like that. Sometimes the cost of trying to do it all is too high, and cuts have to be made, goals have to be reassessed. I almost returned once....got there, talked to various people, and realized that I could take much better care of myself than they could, so I went back home and just rested, ate good food, slept, was nice to myself, for about a week. That worked, and I learned a lot from that.

So really...looking at the job I lost: the stress was present even when I was only going in to shop! I'd been experiencing anxiety for months....not the kind that I had as a cashier, when between the caffeine and the anxiety, there were all the signs of needing to go to the ER, only to feel stupid about it later on when I found that my heart was fine and I needed to cut the caffeine out already....I've had a number of similarly bad incidents since then, but not at work, thank goodness. Nevertheless, the chronic, mid-level anxiety was awful in its own right. Now it's gone. I need to find a way to live in which I can be functional and productive and really utilize the strengths instead of highlighting the weaknesses. There has to be a place somewhere, a niche somewhere.