public transit experiment / daylio
icon: "garrulous(a photo of my lips with the skin greyed out and the lips overlaid with a green and blue fractal pattern)"
I mentioned that I was thinking of staying in the house I'm in for the next few years to save money, and in keeping with that I'm going to try public transit on my short days. Leaving at 4pm usually means at least an hour and fifteen minute drive home, and lately it has been almost 2 hours every damn time. So there's no reason NOT to take public transit since driving doesn't shorten my commute. And the best part of that is that I'll have hours every week of time to read or write. Today my car is still being worked on, so I'm trying out my route for the first time.
I just barely made it to the bus on time! Topaz dropped me off, and as soon as they drove off I realized I was at the wrong spot in the park and ride, so I called them. They came back, found me (I was walking to the right place just in case) and took me to the right spot. I was the last to get on! so lucky. it's nasty weather though, heavy rain w puddles everywhere. But now that I've successfully done it once it will be so much easier. I have huge anxiety with being alone in public without my car (it used to be to the level of a phobia) so this was a big step.
Also the extra speed-walking is good for me. When I have to be somewhere by a certain time I can't stroll, even if I know I have 30 minutes of leeway. So this morning I speed-marched to work for like 20 minutes and this afternoon I did the same. I don't remember if I mentioned it but my brain meds raise my blood pressure and that makes exertion SO unpleasant that I'm always looking for sorta "automatic" exertion that I don't have to think about or spend activation energy on.
I've been using this app called daylio for mood and goal tracking. I love the goals tracker - you can pick a symbol for each goal and then you have a grid of symbols that get filled in when you click them. This is a lot like my old sticker rewards project, but electronic. You can set reminders to make an entry -- I have it set to twice a day. I wish the mood tracker had more options because I need a 0-10 scale not just 1-5 but I have finally started to get enough of a baseline that I can think about it and figure out if I am neutral, positive, or negative. I had a really hard time doing that at first, because as a coping habit I tend to avoid thinking about how I am feeling since for so many years what I was feeling was CONSTANT MAXIMUM STRESS. But my stress is manageable now, and getting more so.