Today was not a great day in class, but it wasn’t the class’ fault. Or mine.

It was the fault of a blood sugar crash.

I had been in class for half an hour or so when I felt this deathly chill go through me. At the time, I had no idea what it was. But that instantly turned what had been a pretty pleasant day into one of these murky miasmas of confusion and frantically treading water that I seem to get myself into far too often.

Seriously. Why can’s I just have some stability? Life is so hard when your mood might alter in radical ways and you might find yourself awash in conflicting emotions and mental confusion. And all you can do is run to stand still.

This time, it was clearly a blood sugar thing. But other times, it’s more nebulous, and probably has something to do with the chemical imbalance in my brain that makes me mentally ill. Subtle shifts in brain chemistry can send me into a nosedive or make me feel super disconnected to reality and like I am dangling over the abyss.

It’s just not fair. I didn’t do anything wrong. But I suffer nevertheless.

Anyhow, so there I was all mentally fucked up and feeling both lethargic and crazed at the same time. Not fun. And I had to present (in a mild informal way) twice today.

That did not go well. I can be very good at presenting when my head is in the right space and I have all necessary facts loaded into my brain and I can concentrate on delivering the message with warmth, strength, and conviction.

Today was not such a day.

So I feel like I did my ideas an injustice by being all confused and nervous when presenting them. I can do so much better!

It wasn’t until I got up to leave that I realized what my problem had been all along : low blood sugar. I realized I was very hungry, at least physically, and that tipped me off. So despite not wanting to spend my cash before this weekend’s convention,  I had lunch at Bon Chaz, and picked up some ginger cookies too.

Which means I broke my sugar fast. I had gone almost two weeks eating nothing naughty. Not bad. And this was an emergency. After eating my wrap and my vegan chili and drinking my mango juice, I felt I needed a kickstarter to get my blood sugar to a good place while I digested the healthier fare.

Plus, to be honest, after feeling so bad, I really needed a pick me up.

I have indulging in self-denial lately. It was for a good cause – my Vancoufur weekend – but I am thinking maybe I should not have so offhandedly removed a bunch of little pleasures from my life. It may have contributed to my mood struggles this week.

The higher dose of my psych meds is still working, thank god, in that I still feel far more focused and energetic than I did before the bump. And that, in turn, helps me to feel less helpless and confused and more like I just might be able to handle life.

But it doesn’t guarantee happiness. Nothing can, really. Nothing safe, anyhow.

I feel like i might be processing some stuff. I can feel something like a heavy load in my mentation. If only you could get the recovery without doing the work!

But that’s impossible. It’s your frozen emotions that need to be resolved, and nobody, no matter how much they love you, can do that for you.

It’s like cleaning out a closet. It’s a lot of work and for a long time it can seem like you are not getting anywhere. But if you stick to it, you will be so happy to have all that old garbage around any more, and to have so much more room to maneuver.

Still, sometimes I wish I could just climb down the riverbank to the pure and cleansing waters of the river of life, and lower myself naked into their cold clean waters, and there, in the safety of such overwhelming purity, release all the toxins from my soul, and be made whole and clean again.

Kind of tough to do that kind of transformation without religion, though. No belief in the supernatural at all. I cannot mediate my being through the power of faith and belief and thus create the kind of transformative event for myself that another might employ.

I have to play by the rules of my austere pragmatism, and limit myself to only what makes sense. I can understand the religious experiences of others and I envy them their ability to resolve emotional crises and take comfort from their imaginary intercedent.

It’s a long hard road through rough weather that I have chosen. And it’s one that, if you have been on it long enough, completely removes your ability to change paths.

There is no going back for me. Oh, I suppose some intense emotional experience might put me into the properly malleable and receptive frame of mind. I am certainly capable of a kind of transcendent frame of mind.

It happens all the time, in fact, and often at the worst possible moments.

And in such a state, I might even reach the necessary state of extreme agitation necessary to overload the consciousness and create a vivid hallucinatory episode where I could resolve some of these goddamned internal conflicts once at for all.

But it still wouldn’t be magic to me. It would be brain science. That speaks a lot to how I look at the world. I would be very grateful for the experience but it is not the sort of thing I could bring on myself via religious practice, nor do I have a handy set of deep metaphors taken from religion to help me understand my inner world.

Instead, I am constrained by a sharp but narrow kind of rationality. I suppose I can take some comfort in knowing that what I do know is “real”.

I just wish it made me happy instead of merely smart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.