My sleeping pill, that is. Good ol’ trazodone.

My relatiobnship with it has become more nuanced and complex lately. It used to be that I took it before going to bed no matter what.

Now I take it on an as-needed basis.

The change started when I lay down to relax and read one night and ended up falling asleep for four hours or so, without taking the pill.

Interesting, but that’s all. The pill has always done little to help me get to sleep, it just helped me stay asleep. Before I started taking it, I was lucky to get two hours of sleep before I woke up and had to get up for a while till I calmed down from whatever night terror had awoken me.

Probably a reaction to my sleep apnea, that.

With the pill, I could get four to five hours of sleep in a row and that was a big help.

So when I fell asleep and got that same amount of sleep sans medication, I was surprised and pleased.

More importantly, though, I woke up feeling fine. Let me repeat that. I actually woke up feelinjg rested and relaxed.

That’s very big news chez moi,. Normally I wake up feeling like day old crap and it takes me over an hour to fully wake up. And sometimes, I don’t make it, and end up having to go back to bed.

That’s how I feel right now. Patient readers know the drill. I feel sleepy and dizzy and dragged down and kind of like I have been squashed flat and now I am slowly re-inflating to full three dimensional status.

Oh. And I feel lightly bruised all over.

For many years, I thought this was entirely due to my sleep apnea. But due to the incident in question, I have been questioning that assumption, and that led me to try a night without the pill.

And that was fine. I got to sleep fine and slept for almost as long as with the pill, and found waking up far easier to do. And so I made the switch.

I only take the damned pill when I am having a lot of trouble getting to sleep. Generally, that means I have had one of my goddamned attacks of being perfectly sleepy then suddenly being wide awake and tense and anxious and unable to sleep at all.

That happened last night. hence me ffeling like used crap right now. When I hit 500 words, I am going to go back to bed, at least for a little bit, so I can get my second wind and finish the damned thing.

I might end up getting another couple of hours of naptime, or the liter of diet cola I am drinking might finally kick in and I more or less bounce back out of bed and am actually able to think and act and get shit done.

I am hoping for the latter, naturally.  I would rather be wakeful. It’s so very frustrating to want to be awake and alert and enjoying life but you can’t because this goddamned heavy sleepiness makes it impossible to concentrate or even function properly.

That’s when I turn into a little kid who protests going to bed and claims he is not sleepy even though his eyes are heavy and he has been napping on and off for a while.

Well, not really. I used to do that but I am more philosophical about the whole thing now. I still feel that way and I have the urge to try to do what I want to do through the haze of sleepiness and feeling crappy, but I don’t indulge it because I know it’s futile.

Better to give in to the urge to sleep and see where that goes.

And speaking of which, time to do that myself.

Aaand I am back. Ended up getting another hour or so of sleep. I feel a lot less crappy now. I still don’t feel that great, but at least I feeling marginally human now.

This got me to thinking about my attitude towards my own illness. It remains tortuously complex. On a deep level, I still can’t accept that my illness keeps me from doing what I want to do and that I need to take that into account when judging myself.

It’s that thing I call my ambition rearing its ugly head again. I burn with ambition and want so badly to go out into the world and strut my stuff and show the world what I can do, given the chance, and to finally make a life for myself instead of my current pitiful and entirely unsatisfying existence.

There I go again! Yes, my life is very unfulfilling right now, but heaping corn on it does not help and only ends up making me feel worse and even less likely to get anything done and even more likely to cling to my video games as a safe escape.

And yetm these energies cannot be denied. They have to go somewhere. And with my path to action blocked by my physical and mental infirmities, they have no outlet.

And it’s driving me crazy.

I feel so goddamned frustrated sometimes that I want to go on a rampage of violence and destruction just to get some god damned relief.

Instead, I wait. I wait for the day when the frustration overwhelms the resistance and blows the doors wide open for me and lets me finally step out into the light.

But in the meantime, it would be nice if I couild find my way towards not taking the frustrations out on myself. That means I have to forgive myself for being sick, and that is not an easy thing to to do.

Why? I am not sure. Hating onself for being sick is blatantly unfair and highly illogical. Hate the illness, sure. But being sick is no reflection on one’s worth or character.

But I just can’t help myself.

I am too damned sick to stop doing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s entry will probably piss some people off something fierce.

To those people, I apologize.  But ask yourself : why are you so mad?

In a way,. it will be a continuation of my line of thinking about people not being willing to invest any effort or time in things they say they care about, but with a twist.

Basically, what I’ve been pondering today is what I will call the ‘passive reflex’ but which probably deserves a way better name than that.

It has to do with how we respond to life’s challenges. The active reflex says either attack the problem or flee it, but DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT.

The pasisve reflex says either hide or go limp, but above all, DO NOTHING.

Both have their drawbacks. There’s many people beating their head against the wall over and over again because of their inability or unwillingness to do nothing, or rather, to stop, examine their situation, think about it, and then take intelligent action.

But what I want to talk about tonight is the passive reflex because it’s what makes people give up on things.

That’s not that bad in and of itself, but a lot of the time, the thing they are giving up on is themselves. Their hopes, their dreams, their drives, their desires.

And all to avoid what seems like extremely trivial challenges. So what gives?

For one thing, as I have said in this space before, failure can become addictive. The active portion of the addiction is relief. When you give up in the face of a challenge, you go from stressed to relaxed and ‘free’ in a heartbeat and that sudden release of tension can feel very good. Practically euphoric.

The failure addicted is hooked on that little high. And in order to ensure their supply, their develop a pattern of rapidly escalating tension and fear and anxiety so that the moment of sweet release that resolves the situation without requiring any actual action be taken happens as soon in the process as possible.

In essence, you freak out because it works.

It works because it gets you out of the situation rapidly and rewards you for doing so.

The mind then, as a matter of course, justifies this action after the fact, and it’s this process of justification that I am pondering today.

When people bash millennials, you often hear tales of spoiled kids being suddenly surprised and offended by the idea that life expects them to do things they don’t want to do and some of those things are not easy at all.

We have all heard the horror stories from employers who find their new hires have to be slowly and painfully walked through the absolute basics of what it means to work for a living before they can even start the job.

What, you mean I have to come here whenever you want me to for like hours at a time AND do a bunch of stuff I don’t feel like doing just because you say so?

What unspeakable cruelty is this? Why is life so hard? Nobody could do that, it”s IMPOSSIBLE, that’s too hard!

But it isn’t too hard, kids. You’re just not willing to put in the effort it takes. Life is work. Nothing truly good comes without cost. That’s just how life works.

And before you go declaring that to somehow be unfair, remember that it works the exact same way for everybody. So to say it is unfair, you have to believe that things should be different for you and you alone.

And how privileged is that? What makes you so special? And just what do you think it “wrong” with all the people who pay the price for what they want and consider it worth it? What do they have that you don’t?

Life’s not meant to be easy. If everything was easy, life would be boring. And the universe does not owe you an effort and suffering free path to the top.

Look at it this way. Every time you give up on or refuse to even try something related to what you want out of life, you are saying “it’s not worth it. ”

So if you dream of being a famous artist but never get around to actually painting anything, you are saying “this dream of mine is not worth the effort to me. ”

And that’s fine. Maybe it truly isn’t worth it to you and you should seek something else to do with your taelents and energies.

But if that’s true, at least be honest enough with yourself to give up on the dream. You’ve already decided that the price is too high for it to be worth attaining, so really, you are only giving up what you have already rejected.

Why would that hurt?

Or are you waiting around for someone else to make it easy enough for you? Because I have news for you, princess. Nobody is going to do that. If you’re an adult, your time of other people making things super easy for you is over and you have lost your right to give up and then whine about it.

Because who are you whining to? Whining is what children do when they want their parents to come to their aid, and when you do it as an adult, you just look pathetic. There is nobody out there who can take over your life when you get tired or cranky.

You are on your own, and no, that does not mean you have been thrown out into a cold cruel world that expects the imPOSSIBLE from you.

All it asks is that you, ya know, try. And I mean seriously try, not just “he look everybody! I’m trying! See me try? You can’t say I never tried! So you will come to my rescue NOW, right?” type trying.

I mean trying and trying till you get it right type trying.

And if you are not willing to do that, at least admit your dreams mean very little to you and are therefore not worth the effort it would take to achieve them.

And if the idea of giving up on your dreams makes you sad, mad, or upset, then maybe you should reevaluate what you consider to be a price worth paying.

Because the world is full of people with dreams they are unwilling to pay to pursue.

so just by paying the price, you put yourself way ahead of the pack.

Why not parlay that edge into a future?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.