So... finished day 9 at new job. I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable with it. I have enough understanding of what's going on that even though I've only learned a small portion of the job, I'm not nervous about being broken into the rest of it.
Now that the anxiety is over with, I'm starting to really feel the positives of leaving my old job behind. It's such a massive weight lifted. At this point, I no longer feel like I'm just forcing myself to push on through every day. I don't feel like it's a desperate imperative to de-stress after work. I have the emotional energy to deal with issues at home and pay more attention to my family. Even though I'm not getting any more sleep than usual, I feel alert throughout the day, when before I would suffer deep crashes and mental fog. Smiling and humor is coming more naturally to me now than it has in several years. I'm working harder and yet feeling like my days are more relaxed at the same time. The previous 7 years already feel like a distant nightmare.
I'm sure I'll eventually run into things that bother me here, too, but right now I can't imagine it ever amounting to the way I felt just a month ago. And I know now never to put up with anything like that ever again. It's just not worth it. Not even for family, because they've probably been more unhappy having to live with me while I was working there than they would have been with the consequences of me just quitting. Advice to anyone with even a single free-spirited bone in their body: Never work for a Fortune 500 corporation. They will poison your soul.
Also, whoever this quote actually belongs to, it's more true to me now than ever.
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."
Because the people you interact with on a daily basis are such an enormous component of your well-being. I don't think it's commonly understood just how easy it is for a toxic person to make you feel like a dead thing by nothing more than their presence within a shared environment.