I don’t feel very good right now.
I feel twitchy and anxious and paranoid and overwhelmed. I feel like I just plain can’t handle life right now and all I want to do is hide till it all goes away.
I know that part of it is simply caffeine jitters. I had a litre of Diet Coke with lunch and if there is one think I have learned about being a slave to the caff, it’s that if its dark gift is not used, it turns into anxiety, tension, and all the rest.
Makes sense. Don’t call up energy unless you’re going to use it.
But stupidly, I decided to take a nap after lunch instead of going straight to blogging, like I usually do. Blogging expresses the energy and that keeps me moving for a thousand words. To lay down and nap just because I felt sort of sleepy was dumb.
Doing it without having the CPAP on was doubly dumb.
So now I am not only tense and jittery, I’m also enjoy the effects of low blood oxygen. Wee.
And I also have a headache, which is honestly the thing making everything else seem worse. I just took a fistful of acetaminophen. I hope that does the damn job. My head feels like something is trying to drill its way out of my sinuses.
Trying to figure out why I am not more angry at my dad for making life miserable for the whole family during my childhood. Life would have been so much nicer without him. His tirades and attacks at the dinner table were only the most direct and blatant expression of his rage.
Day to day life with him around did more damage, to me and to my siblings.
I guess part of why I am not more angry is simple exhaustion. I am tired. Getting angry requires energy.
But the real deal is that familiar terror of my own capacity for rage. I feel like if I started getting mad at him, I would never stop. My rage at him (the rage he gave me) is so vast and potent that I am afraid that if I open that door at all, I will explode.
That’s not the sort of thing that actually happens, I would imagine. But it feels like it will.
So all I can do is release the anger a little bit at a time and hope that it helps over time. He wasn’t the only one who hurt me in my childhood, but he’s the main one.
And yet, it was all indirect (well, almost all). I suffered more from the tense atmosphere than from his actual anger. I was very afraid of him, and really preferred not to be around him at all, but I didn’t become the focus of his rage very much.
It was the walking on eggshells that really drained me. Childhood shouldn’t be like that. It should be a time for friendship, family, and fun. Not fear.
They say that one of the most psychologically damaging things is long-term stress about something which you cannot predict or control. That’s why soldiers in Afghanistan have such a high rate of mental breakdown. They can’t predict or control when they will be attacked or encounter an IED or end up in the middle of a violent sectarian dispute, so they end up mentally ill from the strain.
Most recover once they get out of the war zone. But some don’t.
I grew up in a kind of war zone. I could never tell when my father would go off. I went through my period of believing that I could control it by doing everything right, just like a lot of victims of abuse.
But that didn’t work, and it didn’t work because he was a toxic, angry man who needed to abuse people in order to calm his inner demons. My siblings and I could have done everything exactly the way he wanted them done and he still would have gotten mad at us for something else, even if he had to invent an excuse.
So we lived in a house with no way to avoid or even predict when the bad stuff would hit us. At times, it seemed like there was no hope.
And sometimes, I think we took it out on each other.
Back to my own tension in the here and now. I think I went through this same thing in the first month of my first semester, when it all seemed so overwhelming and I was sure I was going to crash and burn.
Then the first round of tests came along, I did great on them without even studying, , and I was like “Well…. that was easy. ” And for the rest of the semester, I was chill.
Dunno if that will happen again. I hope it does, but in another way, I hope it doesn’t. It might do me a lot of good to face something where I have to try really hard in order to succeed.
Academically speaking, life has been very easy for me.
I haven’t been doing that well physically lately, probably because of the sugary shit I have been eating. I’m super thirsty all the time, I drink tons of water, I pee frequently.
Peeing once an hour becomes quite tiresome after a while.
So part of my revitalization has to be getting my diet back under control. No more muffins. If I want something dessert-like, it will have to be something sugar free, or it had better be at least two weeks since I had something else sugary.
The restricted diet of a diabetic can be very depressing. But it beats feeling crappy all the time.
Still, I wonder what it would be like if I had tons of money. That would make the temptation far worse. Without the financial barrier, all the sweet things in the world are open to you.
Then again, so are the neat ways to exercise. Hmm.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.