Tick tock said the clock

After all my big talk, I still haven’t even started on my Secret Informant script.

It is slightly a matter of time management, but not really, because I have still been playing video games for hours and hours. I could have spent some of those hours getting my god damned work done. But no.

I really feel like this is something that will make or break me. Either I will get the thing done and redeem myself, or I will flame out and end up hating myself hard.

Everyone’s been so nice to me. I would hate to let them down.

But that’s not really what this is about, is it? It’s about self-discipline. It’s about doing that which frightens and challenges me. It’s about shutting down the part of my mind that procrastinates and prevaricates, dawdles and foot-drags, comes up with bullshit excuses as to why I can’t do it right now and then makes even more specious plans to do it later.

I don’t know what I am so afraid of. I know I can do a decent enough job. I don’t know why I can write an entirely original animation script every day yet this is freaking me out. I don’t know why this thing became such a… thing.

Perhaps it’s the uncertainty. I don’t get a lot of input as to what the script should be. That, plus the whole “so many people are depending on me” pressure bullshit.

That’s something I did not learn about in school – what to do when you are left entirely on your own to come up with whatever you can. I always assumed that I would be struggling to meet a certain standard as defined by my employer, even if that standards was simply “This is not good enough yet. ”

But no. In both SI and the animation gig, I am on my own. Nobody else involved really “gets” writing and that means that whatever I write, that’s what will be made.

I really thought there would be people to filter me.

But that’s the story of my life, really. No guidance. No advice. No input. No structure. Just me, on my own, doing what I can and hoping I am doing it right. But never sure.

This is what happens when a child is left to raise themselves. When you have an eerily silent childhood, with nobody else’s voice but your own to guide you.

I would go to school by myself, do the work by myself, eat lunch by myself, walk home by myself, watch TV by myself, then put myself to bed.

And so I grew up with this intense feeling of abandonment. True, I had not been physically abandoned or neglected. I had more than enough to eat, a place to sleep, an allowance to use for discretionary spending, clothes, school supplies, you name it.

But emotionally, I was utterly abandoned. Nobody looked after me. It was do it myself or it doesn’t get done.

That’s not how elementary school is supposed to go.


Meanwhile, after going back to sleep, waking up feeling awful, eating lunch, taking a pee, and finally getting back to the computer 45 minutes later…

Enough self-pity. It serves a purpose when I write it down because it helps me mourn for myself, so to speak. It sounds crazy but that’s an important step in recovery.

You’re not exactly mourning the person you might have been without all the damage and pain. That’s almost it, but not quite. It’s more like you are mourning for the pain and humiliation itself, because as they have become a part of you, so must they be mourned as they go away.

Still pretty sleepy. I hope this sleepy shit doesn’t last too much longer. I feel so frustrated. There’s things I need to get done but I end up sleeping instead.

Hmmm. Disturbing thought.  What if my subconscious mind is surreptitiously generating this sleepiness in order to keep me from dealing with my problems? I sure hope that is not it. I have been the victim of my own psychosomatic delusions before, so it is not entirely out of the question.

Well whatever the source, I wish I could just shake it off and get on with things. But it enforces itself quite effectively. It’s hard to just “get it done” when you are so tired and dizzy that you can barely focus on the screen and keep falling asleep at the keys.

Then you have no chance but the surrender and go back to fucking bed, and hope that you will be more coherent and focused the next time.

Aaand I just fell asleep for a couple of seconds. Oy.

Sooner or later, ill write that script for SI. And when I do, I bet I will end up wondering what all the fuss was about.

That’s too narrow a view, however. It will only seem like there was too much of a fuss if I do the emotional work to get myself to that point. Ergo, it would be an egregious fallacy to imagine that I could have skipped the whole thing and gone straight to the end result. That’s just plain not how things work.

Crossing the finish line after a marathon does not imply that you could have gone straight to the finish line and saved yourself a lot of wear and tear.

That’s a pathetic fantasy of the ego, that if you know the answer you get to skip the hard or boring parts of life.

Slept a bit again.

I still have a lot of growing up to do. And like someone once said, “growing up is like the German measles – the older you are when it happens, the more painful it is. ”

And the less sympathetic people are to your struggles.

They’s not sympathetic because you’re so pathetic… and that’s the bottom line.

Oh well, back to the sandman’s sand mine. I still have my episode to write today, so I hope I will not sleep for too long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

The afternoon melt

God damn I am getting sick of this.

I have been so damned sleepy lately. I sleep all through the morning and into the afternoon as well. Then when I AM (techincally) awake, I am strung out and incoherent due to both the heat and whatever it was that was making me so sleepy in the first place. So it’s still a struggle to get anything done.

Right now, I am the most coherent I have been since going to sleep last night, and I am still struggling to keep my eyes focused. I feel lightheaded and floaty. I am weaving slightly in my chair. My fingers are tingling.

Anyone got an oxygen tent I can borrow for a couple of decades?

There are things I would rather be doing than sitting here in a stupor as I do my best to type coherent sentences. Like getting my Secret Informant work done, for starters. I plan on sitting myself here in front of the computer with absolutely no programs running except for CeltX (screenwriting program) and staring at the blank screen until something comes to me about how to make the teaser trailer for Secret Informant more fun and funny and cool.

Thus, I plan to harness the power of boredom to haul myself over the jagged ragged rocks of my mental health issues so I can finally get down to business and rock the world instead of being trapped in anxiety, indecision, and self-loathing.

I’m pretty fucking sick of that, too.

And over all this lies a thick heavy blanket pushing my down, down, down. I feel like gravity on me has doubled and the air pressure has tripled. My head hurts and my sinuses ache, and I feel this knot of pressure just above the bridge of my nose that makes me feel like my nose is going to pop off my body like in a cartoon any second now. Along with my eyeballs,. maybe.

In short, I am not at all well.

Oh, and that terrible cycle of waking up with a very full bladder and a ravenous appetite every 80 minutes is back. It’s very stressful. So not only have I been rendered utterly incoherent and been barely able to stagger to the bathroom and back in order to get abnother 80 mins of sleep, I have been growling-coyote hungry the whole time too.

It’s very hard on the nerves.

At least I know that, in time, this will clear. Enough of this deep sea diving naps and I will fulfill whatever need they meet and I will be released unto the world like an animal raised  by humans that is suddenly released into its “native” environment as part of a well meaning yet horrible cruel repopulation program.

I mean, we humans have a native habitat too, someone in the Olduvai Gorge in Africa, but few of us would do too well if we were “released” back into it.

Instincts can only take you so far. After that, you have to know things.

I am trying to keep up. I did manage to eat lunch, yay that, and I have been hydrated fairly well. As much as being sweaty sucks, it is far worse to need to sweat but nothing is coming out. Either because my pores are clogged, or I am dehydrated, or both.

That’s when heat sickness happens. I know that much. When my body can’t shed enough heat for homeostasis, my temperature goes up and, naturally, I get sick.

We mammals only function well within a very narrow internal temperature range. It’s the range needed for our high performance metabolisms to function. Anything above or below that and things break down.

Trust me, I know this from experience.

So I dunno. I hope this bullshit works itself out soon because I am trying hard to get back to some kind of happy state where I feel confident and strong and ready to take on the world with one hand tied behind my back.

Right now, I barely feel ready to conquer gravity enough to go back to bed.


And now I have had another round of napping and whatnot. I am cautiously optimistic. I feel a fair bit better now. I might need one more nap some time tonight in order to get truly clear of this quagmire, but I am at least confident that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train now.

I can only assume that I need such quantity of sleep because of its poor quality. My brain needs all this sleep in order to get through all the dreaming it needs to do.

And by “dreaming”, I of course mean “processing the contents of my medium term memory so they can be stored in long term memory”.

It’s more or less a lossy compression routine.

I guess I am doomed to have these sleepy days. At least until I get a handle on my sleep apnea. I keep telling myself that I will give CPAP another try, but I never seem to get around to it.

Because it’s hard. And it is always so much easier to NOT do things, and forget about them for a while, and just keep on like I have been keeping on.

Easy… and deadly. After all, that’s what I was doing for those twenty years of oblivion. Just floating from day to day, letting the time flow by, never thinking about the future, just making it through the day with all my distractions. When I tried to think about the future, a black nihilistic terror gripped me, so I just…. didn’t.

Thank goodness I eventually got into individual therapy.

In fact, I wish I had done it a decade earlier, but the sad truth is that if your illn ess makes it hard to advocate for yourself, you are pretty much fucked.

There is nobody whose job is to look in on you and make sure you are OK and persist till they find out the truth then make you do the right thing.

All that is up to you.

And if you can’t, well….. nobody cares.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.