I need to practice gratitude more. I've been so stressed about bills and money for the last couple months I keep diminishing the progress I've made over the last half a decade.

I bitch about how broke I am because I don't have extra money to blow on shit I don't need anyway, but we're still surviving. We still have a beautiful backyard and we can afford to feed four cats and a rat terrier. My phone is a few generations old but it's the best phone I've ever had. I'll probably hang on to it for another few generations. My car is a beat up Honda but it gets me 80 miles a day to and from work. And it's a Honda so it'll continue to do that as long as I keep up on maintenance. I'm not the type to fall for brand loyalty usually but I'm an absolute simp for Hondas.

I'll get paid and "everything goes to bills", but really it's not everything. I have enough to get by and I still get to come home to an actual house in a decent neighborhood these days. No more apartments in the hood where we wake up to tweakers sleeping on our porch, using the outside power outlet to charge their phones.

We don't even have to lock the front door at night it's so safe here and I'm getting an attitude because I can't order takeout and blow money on vinyl and other random junk whenever I want.

I realize I need to be more mindful of what I do with money, but above all else I need to remember where I came from. I need to be more grateful for what I have. We are struggling a bit but so are most people right now. The economy is shit. Everything is overpriced. Even if inflation lets up, the prices aren't just going to fall back down to where they were a few years ago. I'm grateful that we aren't out on the streets, or we don't have to get creative and try to make DIY pet food or kitty litter. We have A/C in the summer and heat in the winter, and enough streaming services to spend a lifetime in front of the TV.

Life is hard and mostly boring and repetitive, but it's all we've got. There's a lot of good stuff in here too. I wish we could live in a utopia and feel nothing but euphoria all day every day but that's not realistic. It is possible to get out of a shitty situation without going absolutely mad. It's easy to lose track of progress when things aren't going perfect but there's light at the end of that tunnel.

I definitely have my moments but I'm going to try and let myself breathe more. People and experiences are more important than Things.