After nearly a month of being in my new apartment (at least it will have been a month as of when this goes up), things have continued to settle into a comfortable pattern. I’m still adjusting my apartment bit, since I prioritized rest and relaxation over finish up hanging art and string lights, but I’m getting close to being done. Plus, there’s some stuff you only ever figure out as you live in a place, like what constitutes an adequate number of curtains, which sections of the floor really need a carpet, whether or not you need more lamps (or just need to move around the ones you’ve already got), and so on. There’s plenty that I’m only figuring out as I move from my recovery period to my comfortable occupation period, so it might be a while before I’m one hundred percent done. I will say that sleeping without earplugs is great and that finally getting the right curtains set up (with two sets layered atop each other in my bedroom) has really improved my sleep. Now I just need to fix my horrible broken sleep schedule and I should be good to go. All those late nights from moving and then stress have really messed up my body’s sense of when to go to sleep.

Last week marks my return to a full workout every morning before work. I did a few partial workouts, plenty of days of just stretches, and a lot of choosing to avoid working out because days/nights full of moving my apartment around were enough stress on my body. I kept up my daily walks, of coure, since those are mostly just a way to get sunlight and fresh air rather than a source of exercise, but I mostly took it easy until I started to feel the need to get moving again. And wasn’t drowning in mental and emotional exhaustion. Now that things have calmed down a little and I’ve got the time and energy to put toward getting back into healthy habits, I’m taking my shaky first steps. Two weeks ago was actually supposed to be the first week back at meal prep, workouts, and pre-midnight bedtimes, but I fell off the wagon pretty quickly, had some surprise stress come up, and wound up having another week of just doing what I can.

I thought last week was going to be the same, after a rough Monday that saw me skip my workout so I could sleep longer and then didn’t improve from there, but Tuesday went better. Not perfect, mind you, but well enough that I feel like I’ve finally had a solid start. Every prior attempt has felt like my feet have slipped out from underneath me as I’ve tried to get moving, but Tuesday felt like I finally managed to make some progress. The rest of the week was similar. Not perfect, but solid enough that I’m starting to rebuild momentum. Which is a great way to be going into this current week, with my four-day weekend and lack of plans. I tend to only have the discipline to get up and work out in the morning when I have to be out of bed for work anyway, so I might be missing two workouts this week just because I’m not going in to the office [which has played out exactly this way]. I’m not doing much of anything, actually, since most of my friends are busy or out of town, and I don’t really feel like going to any public events since I’m not in the mood to celebrate the US given everything that’s been going on these last several years [and then in the days after I wrote this post]. I will probably try to work out this week (and will have already succeeded or failed by the time you’re reading this), but I have a bad track record.

Still, as I start to slowly form habits and adjust to the nuances of life in a new apartment, I will hopefully be able to build even better and stronger ones this time around. Most of my habits in my old apartment were concerned with mitigating the noise my upstairs neighbor made, dealing with the stress of being alone, and having a living space that was separated by function in order to push me to move from one room to another during the first year of the pandemic. Now, as I start to mix the purpose of spaces again and no longer need to push myself to move around or deal with noisy neighbors, I’m hoping I can focus on actually doing positive things for my health and well-being rather than putting in effort to remove negatives. I want to get back into puzzles and building lego sets again, now that there’s a space in my apartment that isn’t constantly under threat from noisy neighbors. Maybe even pick up some other kind of similar hobby so I can have something to do that doesn’t involve screens or reading. A good “mental checkout” activity.

Honestly, I’m really liking the place. It doesn’t fix the lonliness issues I was having in my old apartment, but it removes all the other issues that made it more difficult to deal with the loneliness. I might actually miss it a year from now, when I probably move out. Who knows what else might happen between now and then, though, so it’s not like I’m planning to be gone. I’m just preparing myself to be gone. I don’t want to live in apartments my whole life and rent is already as much as a mortgage for a small house a mildly inconvenient distance from my city (housing prices within the city and its immediate surroundings are awful), so I’m hoping to buy next year. Or leave the area entirely. Who knows. Life’s a mystery and all I know about the future is that it won’t be what I expect it to be a year from now, so making long-term plans feels foolish today. There will be time for that later, once I’ve saved up some more money and don’t feel like I’m one major inconvenience/minor crisis away from a total mental breakdown.