I am feeling sort of unwell today.

I keep cycling between sleepiness and painful wakefulness. I can’t seem to catch up with whatever it is my body and my brain want me to do. When I lay down, I lose the desire for sleep. When I stay up, I become very sleepy. It is really quite maddening.

More Wellbutrin adjusting, I suspect.

I had an anxiety attack last night. I was watching an episode of Mythbusters where they are testing a myth from a viral video that shows a guy surviving a fall from a three story building because he is wrapped in four inches of bubble wrap.

The video is obviously fake, because that is seriously not possible. Not only was it obviously a dummy shot when the daredevil was supposedly plummeting to the ground, but basic high school physics will tell you that falling three stories is like getting hit by a dump truck going the speed limit.

I think we tend to think of falling as a linear thing, where falling three times as far is only three times as bad. But gravity means acceleration and acceleration means a square function because the speed is always increasing. So three times as far is actually nine times as bad.

And I have to say, just as an aside, whoever made that viral video is an irresponsible douchebag. Sure, any intelligent person should be able to figure out that it must be fake, but people are not always intelligent, especially young people, and someone might just get the idea into their heads to emulate your oh so amusing video (after all, it must work, I saw it on YouTube), and end up seriously hurt or even dead. And that is way too high a price for YouTube hits.

Anyhow, Jamie and Adam did some small scale tests that pretty much totally confirmed what physics says, which is that four inches of bubble wrap does jack shit to improve your odds of survival.

It changed the deceleration force from 300 Gs to 260 Gs. Sure, that is a reduction of a little under fifteen percent, but either way, you are a bag of very dead goo.

But they wanted to see what it would take to actually make that kind of thing survivable, so after some highly scientific fiddling around, they decided to wrap Adam in layers of coils of bubble wrap, kind of like bed spring coils, and drop him from fifteen feet.

And they had a camera in with Adam to show us what this was like from the inside, and as the layers of bubble wrap were applied he looked at the camera and said “Good thing I don’t get claustrophobic!”.

That started my own claustrophobia kettle boiling, and then he started complaining how much all that bubble wrap weighed and how much it was pressing on him, and I guess I was over-empathizing because before I knew it, it was panic attack city.

I was seriously freaking out. I had to just mute the show and close my eyes and slow myself down so I could get a grip on myself. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe and the air was being squeezed out of me and I was about to suffocate.

So that was…. bad. I am guessing that I need to be a little more careful about anxiety triggers now that I am on less Paxil and plenty of Wellbutrin. I don’t feel like having to be even more careful in life, but I have to protect my precious emotional state.

Hell, I am feeling anxious just writing about this and remembering it all. I never truly appreciated how protected from my anxieties I have been all these years.

I guess I has forgotten what it was like for me in the bad old days when I was a ball of anxiety, neuroses , and irrational fears. I would really hate to end up there again, to be honest.

That would be the opposite of making me more functional. I hate to say it, but I think I would prefer being an unmotivated lump of lard that never gets anywhere in life if the alternative is to go back to being scared all the damn time.

But I am not anywhere near giving up on Wellbutrin just yet. I knew going into this that higher anxiety levels were one of the risks of going on Wellbutrin and that I might just have to deal with that on the way to becoming more well.

And I know that my anxiety levels are rising partly because my energy levels are rising and all that energy has to go somewhere. I need to learn to take that energy and use it and thus dissipate it via useful activity, instead of leaving it inside me like a stored charge just looking to arc out as a rush of panic or anxiety.

So my journey, as always, is all about translating potential into actual. For my own sanity, I am going to need to learn a new way of living, with more activity in it, rather than simply becoming a more frightened and unhappy lump of lard.

I have lived the life of an energy miser for so long that it is going to be incredibly hard to change that deep set habit.

I keep trying to tell myself, “I will be happier if I go find something to do!”, but I am having a very hard time making myself believe it. The opposite attitude runs so deep with me that it will take an effort equivalent to digging the Chunnel in order to drill through it.

But I will persist. This resistance is now my enemy, and I will continue to combat it until I defeat it.

After all, if the alternative is to be freaked out all the time, what choice do I have?

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down and think about all this.

I was an impossible child
Nobody could reach me

– ABBA, “What’s The Name Of The Game?”

That line really sticks with me, because I really was.

I was an impossible child. Between being incredibly bright and incredibly stubborn, plus having absolutely no inherent respect for authority whatsoever and ergo no fear of adults at all, I was incredibly hard to reach, emotionally and intellectually.

My mind was just too fast and too strong for adults to handle. All the usual ways of getting kids to toe the line just did not work on me. I could not be intimidated, browbeaten, cajoled, jollied, or intellectually overpowered at all.

It was just lucky for everyone involved that I am a basically agreeable and helpful person who only breaks the rules when he has a damned good reason.

Otherwise, I would likely have ended up in jail before I was 20.

And I know I have talked about this before on this blog, but I feel like I have not truly processed this revelation about myself yet.

I was just plain hard to deal with. I totally understand now why a lot of my teachers kept me at arm’s length and always seemed sort of tired and frustrated with me.

I used to be angry at them for that. Couldn’t they see how badly I needed them? They were my only friends in school. I just could not connect with my fellow students. We just lived on different planets. The gap between us was so enormous that there was just no chance of real connection.

And, well, they hated me. I was just a big bag of weird to them. Pretty much everything about me upset them in one way or another. My strangeness, my contempt for our school work (oh, how I wish I had thought to hide that..), the way I clung to the teachers, the bizarre disconnection between my low social status in the schoolyard (none lower!) and the apparent approval of the school system…

I can see now how they got the impression that I thought I was better than them. Sure, I never said I was better than them, nor did I believe that I was. But I acted like I thought I was something special and the normal rules do not apply to me, and actions speak a lot more loudly than words or attitudes ever did.

In fact, to be honest, I guess I did, in fact, think I was better than them and that the usual rules did not apply to me, in a sense. In the back of my mind, I thought anybody could do what I did, defy the teachers and get away with it, argue with them in class, and so on.

I guess I just thought I was especially clever and cool for being able to figure out that I could do it. And in that sense, I was kind of showing off when I did it, even though I would not have thought of it that way at the time.

And this wasn’t a constant thing, I was no Bart Simpson. But it happened often enough to color the opinions of my classmates.

And my teachers, to be honest. I have a smartass streak a mile wide (classic youngest child) and I am sure at least some of the time I seemed quite smug and self-satisfied when in the classroom setting.

It is bad enough to have some way too smart for his own good kid correct you or defy you in class, in front of all the other students.

But it’s even worse if the little shit is laughing at you with his eyes and seems downright amused at the idea that your word means something to him.

Now I say all this not to beat myself down (after all, I was just a kid, doing the best I could) but to flesh out my idea of my past with details that do not fit the victim narrative that I have been carrying around for a long time.

Life is rarely as simple as black and white, and so there is rarely a case where a purely innocent person is victimized by purely malevolent forces.

That is not to say that I think that my bullying was justified. Not at all. It is the sort of thing that should never happen to any child, ever. The system failed me, and in doing so, they became passively complicit in my abuse.

It is, however, still very useful to understand what really went down back then in as great a detail as possible in order to make sense of it all.

I am always seeking a fuller understanding of things. It is, in many ways, my lifelong quest. I have always sought knowledge, but not for it’s own sake. I seek knowledge as the key to understanding.

That said, there is no knowledge that is not power. All knowledge helps one understand the world better, although some more than others, of course.

But us philosophical types tend to view knowledge as input for our contemplations, and that sets us apart from the scholars who collect knowledge for it’s own sake.

So I would like to think that this rehashing of my childhood is more than just wallowing in the past and taking shelter in my own victim narrative.

I think it helps me to better understand myself when I plumb my own past for insight as to just what sort of a person I am, and most importantly, what exactly was I like before I became a depressed adult?

I want to get to know the person that I could have been, and maybe, if I am really lucky, he and I will merge and I will get to be him, or at least, a version of him.

I can never erase the terrible things that have happened to me in the past.

But it may be possible to transcend them.

And I am in dire need of transcendence.