Or, how to skip your entire life without even trying.

Once more, slept most of today and will likely sleep once I am done typing this. And once more, I cannot tell you how voluntary it was. I have come to realize that my general lack of physical activity makes it very hard for me to figure out if I am sleepy because I need sleep, or I am sleepy because I have not fully awoken from my last nap.

So I tend to assume I am sleepy all the time. when in reality, if I was to become even slightly more physically active, I might find that I wake up and feel energetic once I get going.

The other side of the problem is, if anything, even more disturbing.

I have this problem with being unable to change my mind once I decide to do something. It sounds like a recipe for steely willed determination, and I suppose in the right situation it could be. I know I can be incredibly stubborn, for better and for worse.

But the problem with this inability to change my mind once I have decided to do something is that things change. The thing I decided I would do next might actually turn out not to be the best idea, and I really should change my mind and do something else.

But I can’t. I really can’t. The decision has become a compulsion, and the very idea of changing my mind and doing something else fills me with the kind of desperate, existential terror that I imagine is the bane of OCD sufferers.

So when it comes to sleep, I might wake up, get out of bed still feeling sleepy, decide that after I eat and maybe load of the bread machine, I will go back to sleep, then do those things, and realize that I am not longer sleepy and I could do all manner of things… but I go back to sleep anyway because I just cannot help myself.

I planned it, I intended it, and so I must do it. And it is not like I am a highly regimented person otherwise. It is not like I am a rigid, orderly, organized person who writes to-do lists which always end with “write tomorrow’s to-do list”.

I admire those kinds of people, but I am not one of them. I am more of the free spirit slash slob type. Creative, not ordering mind. That kind of thing.

And yet, I have this compulsion to do what I have planned. I think it stems from my fear of the existential void of unlimited time that I live in. A plan, even one that turns out to be a bad idea, reduces the option pressure for a time, and provides some desperately needed structure and direction in this endless corridor of infinite doors in which I dwell.

All these years, and I have still not learned to generate my own structure to my life. Perhaps some of us just never will. We will forever be dependent on outside forces to be the vessels that give us form and motion, and without them, we are just useless, worthless puddles of potential.

Bodies without skeletons.

At least I have this little compulsion, this writing a thousand words a day. That gives my life a tiny but vital sense of purpose, of their being some reason to be alive and some purpose to my day.

Without it, I would be forever lost in that void of meaninglessness without it. I wish I was more purposeful about it, instead of just splurting out my emotional issues and trying to sort my entrails out every night at this time. If I was writing novels, I could write (well, rough-draft) at least three novels and probably more like five at this rate. If I was writing short stories, including proofreading and polishing and so on, I could probably produce one every three days, or 120 a year.

I would be amazingly prolific if any of this was meaningful. I suppose bits and pieces of it might be useful for my fellow depressives. Heck, some of it borders on poetry. But it is not the sort of thing one can sell, and so from the point of view of wanting to write my way to a better life, it is not worth much. I am hardly building a ladder out of this pit with these words.

At least, not directly. It is always possible that this sort of writing serves a therapeutic purpose, and that combined with the actual therapy I am getting from Doctor Costin, it serves the purpose of helping me cleanse and heal the wounds inside and move me towards being a healthier, happier, saner, stronger, more whole and wholesome person.

And that is what I want more than anything. I want to rescue that abandoned inner child inside, and comfort him, and help him heal and grow and mature and get all the love and attention and guidance that he never got when he was me.

I want to heal inside so I can be a real person, someone who does, no whohas, what other people have. Jobs, co-workers, lovers, homes, money. I want to be like them, instead of just being this ridiculously unbalanced isolated unwholesome pathetic disgusting brain in a diaper.

I want to grow as a person and catch up with my age in terms of life experiences and achievements. I know that I might never exactly line up with the standard model for modern middle class life, and in many ways I would not want to do so anyhow.

But I want the core of it. Love, the money necessary to live as I please and please myself to live, a place to really call my own, meaningful labour towards a worthy goal.

I want all of that, and I am so far behind, and I am catching up so very, very slowly.

Recovery is like crawling over broken glass sometimes.