Man my afternoons suck sometimes.

Like today, for example. I usually would have gone straight from lunch to blogging on a Sunday. But I just couldn’t. I was too tired. So I had to go back to sleep. Dammit.

And afternoon sleep always sucks. It’s always the kind of sleep where I have super vivid dreams and wake up feeling like I have taken a savage beating while running a marathon underwater. And I know this, and that makes it doubly frustrating to have no choice but to do it anyway.

Seriously. I would have fallen asleep and hit my head on the keyboard if I had tried to blog right after lunch.

Windows 10 continues to be cool. There was one program it wouldn’t run, MUCKClient, the program I use to connect to Tapestries MUCK and hang out with all my furry friends. So I downloaded another program, Mudlet. And it’s okay, but I missed the old program.

So I right-clicked the shortcut to MUCKClient, and whaddaya know, one of the options was “Troubleshoot compatibility”. A few minutes with that, and now it runs just fine.

Thanks, Windows 10!

Ugh. Even now, part of me wants to crawl back into bed and go back to sleep, or at least hide from reality for a while. Stupid reality. Always so complicated and irritating. If I wasn’t terrified of what would happen if I was trapped inside my own mind, I would give up on it entirely! (Not really. )

The real problem is that I have not been using my CPAP lately. I had a very bad experience with it and I have been spooked since. I put it on, and it sort of felt like I was not getting enough air. But I ignored that, figuring it was just my claustrophobia messing with me, and went to sleep.

Two hours later, I wake up incredibly freaked out and tense, and I have to take the damned thing off and get up and use the computer for a while until my heart rate goes down and my blood oxygen level goes up enough for me to go back to sleep….sans CPAP.

And I have been afraid to use it since. I checked and the hose was connected firmly at both ends, and not leaking, and the mask was on securely. So I have no idea what could have caused the situation. It could be that my sleep apnea is getting worse and I need more pressure now. Or it could have been a fluke one-off thing and if I tried it again it would work fine, just like it’s done for hundreds of hours over the last year or so.

But I am too freaked out to try that. The thing about a machine like a CPAP machine is that you are trusting it to give you all the air you need while you sleep. That’s a rather extraordinary level of trust to grant any piece of machinery when you think of it. And I am not very trusting by nature in the first place.

I have emailed my rep, Marielle, about the problem. She wants me to bring the machine in for service. That’s doable but tricky with my schedule. Part of me wants to try it again before I take that step, but it’s going to be a while before I work up the nerve.

Then again, considering how crappy I have felt lately because of my sleep apnea, could it really be all that much worse?

Sadly, the answer is yes. I feel like I don’t have the words to capture how I felt that fateful night when my CPAP failed me. Oxygen panic has to be one of the worst kinds in the world.

And the thing is, it’s not the first time this has happened to me. It’s just the first time it’s happened with a CPAP machine on. It used to happen to me fairly frequently before I went on CPAP. That seems bizarre now. How could I have just put up with the possibility of that happening for so long?

I am beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as being too good at rolling with the punches and going on no matter what. Sometimes falling apart is the way your body and your life signal to you and the world that sometimes is terribly wrong and needs to be fixed before things get any worse.

But me, I just keep going. No matter what. Even when I was wasting my life doing nothing but play video games and hang out online, I never entirely broke down. And because of that, there was no crisis. No panic. Just day after stupid fucking day of distraction and depression.

And I feel like I still lapse into that as my default position. That’s why I have so much trouble keeping up with homework and assignments and such. I get home and I lapse back into useless mode.

It’s a terrible way to live, but I seem to be addicted to it. I suppose it’s a way of clinging to childhood, when it was perfectly fine to spend your free time amusing yourself and waiting for the next thing to happen. When I retreat into my cocoon of distractions and entertainments, I detach from life and go to a place where everything is safe and fun and easy to deal with.

It’s like a magic amusement park where there are all kinds of fun things to do inside… so fun, in fact, that you forget the rest of life. It stops being a way to deal with life and starts being a way to avoid dealing with life. Then it becomes your life and everything else gets pushed out for being too messy and complicated and scary and…. well, grown-up.

Hmmm. That might make for a good children’s book. Or maybe a book for people having trouble with the whole growing up thing.

Well I guess that’s all for me for today, folks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.