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Wellness Wednesday for October 15, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I've been dealing lately with grief from the loss of my brother in law (back in December, 10 months already) to alcoholism. It's honestly been pretty hard and I wonder if it'll ever feel ok. Sometimes I'm angry at him for not making better choices. Sometimes I'm sad that we won't hang out any more. Sometimes I'm worried for my wife, for whom this is 10x harder than it is for me (he was her brother, after all). Mostly I just wish that we, his family, could have him back. Fuck alcoholism you guys. It is the worst thing I've ever seen someone go through, including fatal illnesses. I wish that he could've beaten it. :(

I wasn’t as close to my brother-in-law as you seem to have been. But I can commiserate with you in your concern for your wife. My wife’s brother’s overdose messed her up pretty bad and even delayed our having kids by an appreciable amount of time.

I made this about me somehow, and I’m sorry. There’s nothing really I can say, and you knew that.

I hope you and your family can find peace. Ours is trying in part by memorializing him with various objects around the mother-in-law’s house.