I seem to have slipped back into a pattern of sleeping in the afternoons.

I had successfully gotten out of this futile and destructive habit for a few months, but like with any bad habit, it sneaked back in when I was feeling low and emotionally raw and vulnerable.

And it’s just not good for me. Inevitably, any sleep during the afternoon will end up being that dream-filled, dense, draining sleep that leaves me feeling worse than before I went to sleep.

And what is worse, I am pretty sure that I am back to sleeping just to sleep. Sleeping because I don’t know what else to do with myself if I am too bored, restless, or numb in the bum to keep using the computer and mainlining the Internet.

Sleeping just to press fast-forward on life. That is just plain not on. The last thing I need in my life right now is to make life go any faster. Am I that eager to reach the grave?

Actually, on second thought, let’s pretend I never asked that.

As a result of this lousy sleep hygiene, I have been accumulating sleep apnea symptoms as well. I wake up feeling like I have been under a huge rock that is slowly and steadily crushing the life out of me. Even after I have been up for a while, it feels like my lungs somehow got smaller and don’t hold as much air as they used to do.

So I have to steady myself and do my breathing exercises in order to make sure I completely empty my lungs. You should hear the god-awful noises I make when doing this. It sounds like I am vomiting out air from my lungs, or possibly being very thoroughly throttled.

Both of these are not that far from the truth.

This sort of thing is not exactly good for my claustrophobia, and may well be the deep, deep root of it, because my claustrophobia definitely centers around breathing, air, and so on.

And one of nature’s nastiest tricks is that a panic attack can cause a spasm in your throat that feels very much like you suddenly can’t breathe because something is choking you. I have learned to overcome that by visualizing a steel ring keeping my throat open and letting me breathe freely, but you can imagine how suddenly feeling like you can’t breathe (right when your adrenal response is demanding MORE air) can make a panic attack a million times worse.

As a result, this sleep bullshit also tends to wear down my mood over time. For a while, I can just shrug my shoulders and be philosophical about it. Oh well, guess I need to catch up on sleep. I will just keep napping till I have paid off that sleep debt. No big deal.

But when it starts to feel like I just can’t catch up and that I am doomed to be sleepy for the rest of my life, when I keep sleeping and waking up feeling the same or worse, I tend to lose my small supply of cool and start truly freaking out, and then things just go from bad to worse.

That’s when I start feeling like bouncing off the walls or diving out the window. And if I wasn’t agoraphobic, the solution would be obvious. Go outside. Go for a walk. Go next door to Safeway and pick up some little thing. Whatever you do, don’t just stay in your room like a prisoner or an invalid when you are perfectly capable of getting out of your cage for a while.

I have noticed that days when I am out and about tend to be days when I feel a million times better when I get home. I think it’s because I have both gotten lots of fresh, clean, not choked with dead sweat and old dust air from the world outside my bedroom, and that by going out there I have proved to myself that this dusty rusty cage of mine is not, in fact, an escape proof prison.

So far, this usually requires an outside motivating factor. I am not, as of yet, capable of just decided to go out and do something on the spur of the moment, just because I feel like it.

Partly, that is a matter of resources. When you are as broke as I am, it limits your options.

But there are plenty of fun and pleasant activities that are entirely free. The real problem is my fearful and tremulous soul.

I am so very limited by myself that sometimes I just want to scream myself hoarse. I am my own jailer, and I don’t know if I can ever let myself go.

Because then I would be alone with all those possibilities and dangers. My cell keeps me safe from everything except the sickness that comes with just lengthy and uncomfortable imprisonment.

Slowly, I learn, though. Sometimes I even exercise specifically to make myself feel less tense and pent up, and migosh, it even works. And slowly, I will grind through all the calcified junk clogging up my bent and broken soul and be able to actually connect this fact with my emotional core and actually believe that exercise can make me happier, as opposed to merely knowing it.

Recovery is just one long act of integration to me. Getting rid of the junk and connecting emotions to thoughts, thoughts to motivations, motivations to actions, and so forth, all to bring this bloated bulk of mine back to life.

Like the Mary Ellen Carter,I will rise again.

Damn I love that song.

Like I have said before, I am learning to take this anger and restlessness and tension and vent it on the depression itself, and turn myself into a machine of recovery.

Fuck you, depression. I will yoke my rage, bind my mind, and grind you down to nothingness until the day when I am free to walk this world without fear and with a sense of joy and wonder.

This, I swear.

I feel like I am on the burn again lately.

By this, I mean I feel a kind of deep, intense burning way down in the guts of my soul. Like a well-stoked furnace, or perhaps more accurately, an incinerator running at maximum.

Or a crematorium oven. They are essentially the same thing.

And I am enjoying this inner fire, painful though it is, because I feel that it is slowly and steadily burning off some of the residue of old emotions, spent (or squandered) intentions, dead dreams, and other spiritual detritus that I have accumulated during the last forty years of repression via distraction.

I have lived most of my adult life as if I am just killing time waiting for something to happen. It is what I did all through my childhood. I killed time in class because I always had my work done within minutes and had no choice but to spend the rest of the time daydreaming, or whatever it is you might call it.

Somewhere between meditation, contemplation, and mental masturbation, I suppose.

I know it wasn’t daydreaming the way popular culture depicts it. I was never imagining myself having grand adventures while doing amazing things and fighting terrible enemies.

In fact, there was no wish fulfillment aspect whatsoever. And the same goes for my actual dreams. I never dreamed of a better life for myself. My dreams have always been both more complicated and more mundane than that. Often times, they are not even that weird.

And it’s not like I don’t have the imagination for it. I have a frankly amazing imagination. And yet never, in my daydreams or my night dreams, did I imagine my wishes coming true.

That seems important somehow. I was such a serious and sensible child, and trust me, that is a fairly appalling state for a child.

Children are not supposed to start out serious and sensible. They are supposed to learn to be serious and sensible via life experience, and then only reluctantly and as little as possible. That way they retain as much of their youthful vitality and energy as they can.

Sure, they might do things that are not all that smart. But there has to be some sort of moratorium on having to do the smart thing because you should know better, at least until puberty. There has to be some time for just doing things because you feel like doing them and taking what consequences may come.

Otherwise, how do you ever learn what you can get away with doing?

But I absorbed a painfully adult point of view at a shockingly early age. It must be somehow related to the trauma I experienced being bullied and isolated, but it feels like it started before that somehow.

Maybe it really is possible to be too damned smart for your own good. I have always had powerful inner perceptions and that passionate drive to know the truth of things, and I think that, combined with the ability to absorb a hell of a lot of information from all my reading and television viewing, caused me to know and understand things on a level far above what was appropriate for my age.

It’s distinctly possible that this did me a lot of harm and led me down this path of overdeveloped cerebral capacity and the tendency to use the cold clear light of reason in order to freeze unwanted emotions in place via the unblinking eye of rational analysis.

And don’t get me wrong. That is some heavy duty magic, that rational analysis stuff. Without ever planning it, I have been honing and honing my analytical blade for most of my life. I get the distinct feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of what I am capable of and that is both exciting and, sometimes, scary as hell.

But even the greatest genius who ever lived (whoever that is) could not successfully substitute his or her mighty intellect for all the other human needs like acceptance, community, companionship, sexual connection, romance, camaraderie, and all the other areas of human life which the cold clear light of reason can never touch.

They are part of the warm circuit, not the cold. And we cannot live without warmth. The intellect is all light and no heat. It can dazzle, it can entertain, it can distract, but it can’t stop you being lonely.

Being as bright as I am is kind of like being the rich kid with a million toys and no friends. I have always felt for characters like that, even when they are behaving badly. They are in a terrible trap with no obvious way out. Society says they should be the happiest people on Earth, that they “have everything”, and yet their over-privileged and often emotionally distant upbringing has left them without the necessary social skills to get the things they really want, the things that money can’t buy.

My unearned wealth was intellect. I was always so much brighter than the other kiddies that I couldn’t relate to them at all. It is really hard to get into playing in the sandbox when you would rather be in the library reading Bradbury and Asimov and books about animals.

And so sure I was that their activities were “pointless” (since when does everything have to have a point?) that it never occurred to me until it was far, far too late that maybe I just didn’t see the point in it and it was, in fact, quite fun.

Then again, as the biggest outcast in the school, it’s not like anyone wanted to play with me anyhow. Maybe my attitude was a reflection of my rejection. I don’t want to play their pointless games anyway!

But no. I remember it clearly. I literally could not understand why they would want to play with toy trucks or dolls or any of the perfectly normal things kids that age did.

Now I understand, of course.

But it’s a bit late for me to start hanging around in playgrounds.

Well, not really. But lately, when little things go wrong, I find myself saying that to myself and so I figure there must be something up down below in the boiler room of my emotions.

I suppose it’s frustration building up like it does with me. No one source, just tiny little things that remind me of how dissatisfied I am with my life and how it’s turned out and where it’s going.

So once more I have that caged tiger feeling. I feel trapped and frustrated and angry at nothing and everything all at the same time. I want to rip my world into tiny pieces so that it can never trap me like this again, ever.

That’s why I often get the idea of smashing my computer when I am in this mood. The sheer amount I depend on this goddamned thing for everything makes me resent it sometimes.

I hate my computer like a junkie hates junk.

And because of that dependence, it often feels like it is this computer and the Internet it connects to that is holding me where I am, where I no longer wish to be, but which I lack the courage, the strength, and the sanity to leave.

And who knows, maybe if I walked away from this damn thing for a while, I would return to it a healthier, hardier person who can better manage his life, and include many things both inside and outside that overheated cranium of his.

But right now, it’s also my lifeline. Blogging and vlogging are what keep me going now. Adding the vlogging component kept this process going for a while. Two months, in fact, and counting. But alreayd I can feel a boredom and frustration building around that, too.

Will I end up having to add a third thing to my routine just to keep up with my ever increasing creative energy output? Perhaps a workout would help me to feel more calm.

Help me blow off some steam and let my boiler cool down to a more workable pressure level.

Or maybe I should just let that pressure build and build until the only way for it to find release is to forge new pathways through the semi-frozen clay of my moribund soul.

Of course, I might well be insane by then, so…. it is not without risks.

But we all know what will really happen. I will just keep mutating in the dark, and hope that one of these forms will be the one that sets me free.

You know what the ultimate pain of it all is? Knowing that I am free. No chains bind me, no locks bar the doors, no brutal guardian keeps me frozen to the spot with fear of reprisal.

And yet, I go nowhere. My brutal guardian is the deep and terrible paralytic fear that stops me cold like I am frozen in place whenever I contemplate truly walking away from my broken cage.

It is that fear and that fear alone that stunts my growth and keeps me down. It keeps me from even promoting the feeble things I do manage to do, because that would mean leaving the comfort and security of the deep dead doldrums, and those sleeping giants inside might wake up and eat me from the inside out.

At least that’s how it feels. It feels like this fear is a finite thing, though, despite being more than I can handle at this point. I feel that over time, I can wear it down, and that this means that, one day, that last bit of ice will melt and all my pent up life force will come forth and make my world bloom with a million colors of joy, and a thousand species of hope.

Until then, all I can do is bail my little boat out as best as I can, and try to warm myself at that tiny little fire deep inside me, that deep down spark that I thought for many years was gone, but like a pilot light it never truly went out.

It just got lost for a while.

So if the madness is upon me and I want to fall about something like a bloodthirsty berserker, it is that permafrost of the soul that I should be tearing apart, hacking into it like there is a hundred million dollars worth of gold at the bottom and my stake runs out at midnight.

It is tricky to remember to aim your anger at your problems. I am so used to taking it out on myself that I forgot that I was even doing that, and for a long time though that was just the way things were.

But it’s not. If you cut your hand, it did not make the world more painful. The world has not changed. It is you who have changed.

And if you are all cut up and cruised and broken inside like I am, that does not mean the world is horrible place simply because it hurts me to touch it.

The world has no nature, opinions, personality, plans, or intentions. It is just the backdrop to life, and you can take or leave whatever you want from it and makes your life into what you want it to be. Not entirely, of course, but enough to change your polarity, if you are willing to pay the price.

And the price, as always, is pain… and change. Cutting out the poisoned parts of yourself is going to be painful, messy, and frightening. You must approach the exercise with the grim determination of a war-weary surgeon who no longer cares about the dainty details of life and only wants to get in there, remove all the necrotic tissue, and leave the patient to recuperate on their own.

Do not be afraid to give up parts of yourself if they are holding you back.

Only when the old flesh dies can the new flesh rise.

And I want to be a new person so badly.