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.