Still not a heck of a lot of luck sleeping. Yesterday’s prediction that my hypo-manic state was collapsing and that I was heading into one of my long sleepy jags turned out to be wishful thinking. I have not gotten a heck of a lot of sleep lately. I get tired, I lay down, I relax, but I never quite get to sleep.

I just sort of hover around the edge of sleep, floating on its waters without ever going below the surface.

And it is beginning to really bother me. I feel increasingly anxious and squirrelly and restless and bored. I can partly cure that by doing some baking of one sort of another. Part of it is, I think, that I have not gotten my bizness together enough to do anything productive in the last few days, and the high from having finally written some fiction last Thursday has worn off.

Plus, I finishes my last (successful) bread this morning, and that usually means it is time to make another one. So there’s that.

Problem I have right now is time. I have a social engagement this evening. My friends and I will be going to ABC Country Kitchen, one of our fave local eateries, and joining us there will be a friend of dear Felicity’s to whom she has been wanting to introduce us for a while.

I am sort of curious about this fellow myself, so I am looking forward to the meeting, despite the little jolts my social anxiety is trying to inject into my mind.

<em>Stranger danger! Pretend you are sick, get out of it! He won’t like you! It will be awkward and weird! You will wish you had just stayed home anyhow! DO NOT GO!

Yeah, fuck you. I am learning to lean into the pain and to follow my fear. To deliberately do things that my fears tell me not to do and which hurt psychologically, because that is where the good stuff is hiding, the growth, the purification of pain, the energy to change for the better.

Of course, it is also where the bad stuff is, and I am all about finding the bad stuff and tackling it head on lately. I am so damn sick of my stupid life that I do not care about anything but battling my personal demons and kicking their filthy asses out of my mind, no matter what it takes.

No matter how much of myself has to go with them. Fuck it. I have nothing I am looking to keep anyhow. I have been weighed down by excess baggage for too long, and every bit of it I jettison makes me stronger and more powerful and more capable in direction proportion to the weight of the baggage I lose.

That is incentive enough for me. I have built up a reserve of the kind of deep down crazy of the man with explosives strapped all over him and the button in his hand, screaming that people better start paying attention to him or a lot of people are going to die, including himself.

And I am willing to use that craziness, that kamikaze desperation, to motivate myself into leaping into the abyss and defying my fears and eagerly anticipating the kind of pain that brings growth.

Go ahead, hit me. Scare me, make me desperate and confused and awash in the spring thaw rush of unfrozen emotions. I am so god damned ready for it.

Hit me hard and break me open
Crack my shell and take me apart
I fear nothing any more.
Take me, break me
Scrape me, rape me
Leave me in pieces on the floor

You can only make me stronger and hasten a long delayed rebirth.

Of course, first I got to get some sleep.

It is odd, though, this near-sleep I have been getting. It is a lot like sleep. I even sort of dream, although it is more like deep vivid daydreaming or really intense thoughtfulness than it is like real sleep dreaming. And time does seem to sort of pass faster. I am less aware of the passing of time, anyhow. So it is a sleep-like state. One might even call it parasleep.

But it is not real sleep because I never really totally let go and relax and surrender to sleep. This deep restlessness prevents it. Part of me still wants to get up and do stuff, I guess.

And it is hard to sleep when you are bored. As counterintuitive as that is. You would think that being bored would make you want to sleep, but no.

And sometimes reading before I sleep just does not cut it. In face, sometimes reading just seems to make it worse because it is more mental stimulation and just jazzes me up even further.

Maybe the real solution is that I need to somehow counterbalance my mental stimulation (which is basically what I do all day) with physical activity. That way, there is no big tension between my brain wants and the activity my body craves.

So I need to move more. That is certainly nothing new. And I am slowly chipping away at the iceberg that is my anti-action bias and pounding the idea into my skull that sometimes, actually doing things is actually a good thing that feels good while you are doing it and feels good afterwards too!

It is a radical idea for someone who has spent almost two decades doing as little as possible at all times due to the evil influence of depression and its dark voice that says movement is bad, action is bad, only stillness is safety, only stillness and remaining hidden and not being noticed keeps you safe and keeps the emotions you have frozen deep inside you from thawing out and forcing you to deal with them. Just lay low until the danger has passed.

But the danger never passes, does it?

So fuck it. I am outta here.

Seeya later folks!