So, my sleep has become terrible again.

That means I am going to have to take a Trazadone some time soon. Dammit. I have been enjoying this period of natural sleep but it is clear to my now that the problem that got me onto sleeping pills in the first place has returned and I have to take the pill until I get some fucking sleep.

Right now, I can’t stay asleep for more than an hour and a half. That is Bad. Human beings need deep REM sleep and that takes a while to get to, so one cannot live on napping alone. Not for long, anyhow.

You brain needs time to process the contents of your medium term memory and transfer them into long term memory.

Without tha, I suppose one might lose all memory of the day’s events every time one slept. That would be a terrible medical condition but a heck of an interesting setup for some Memento-like mystery movie.

Or just a particularly interesting piece of epistelary storytelling via the device of this poor person’s frantic attempts to write everything that happens down so they can read it later and find out what the fuck they have been up to.

Imagine what lengths this poor person would go to in order to avoid sleep.

Could be very dramatic.

Anyhow, back to my own problem. I don’t like taking my Trazadone because it makes it harder to wake up in the morning. Plus, my natural, non-chemical sleep seems to get the job done better.

By that. I mean the sleep I get that way is more refreshing and restorative and filled with that deep down satisfying feeling I only get from decent natural sleep.

Or at least, I did until recently.

Of course, it could be that I am in one of my rare hypo-hypo-manic phases. I repeat the prefix because it is like real hypomania in kind but nowhere near it in intensity.

More’s the pity. The real thing sounds like fun. Loads of energy and confidence and such. Like being on the world’s most natural stimulant.

I call this state mania because, while I am not chock a block with confidence and enthusiasm, I do feel quite alert and perky. I am not sleepy at all and were I less self-aware and cautious, I might just go with it and have fun and let the question of when I am going to actually sleep be tomorrow’s worry.

But I have been here before. I know the madness it can bring. There have been times in my life when I lived my life that way, bouncing between bed and computer, awake for two hours then napping for one.

And as long as you don’t really think about it (which is way easier when you are young) you can fool yourself into thinking everything is fine. After all, you’re getting the same amount of sleep as a normal person, it’s just distributed differently. Right?

Wrong. So very very wrong.

Because that whole time, something very vital ito your sanity is draining away.  You can feel it going. It’s like you’re running on emergency batteries and you can feel them running out, even though everything is running fine right now.

In reality, it’s not something running out,. it’s sometime filling up. Your medium term memory. Eventually, it is full and the brain has to compress the contents more and more in order to make room for new memories, and that can get pretty freaky.

I’ve ended up in some rather fucked up and unpleasant mental states that way. Ones where I feel like I am walking along the razor’s edge of sanity… and I’m drunk.

So no. I will be taking an active interest in getting that sleep ASAP. It might be chemically induced and unnatural, but it beats the hell out of going nuts.

Moreso than usual, that is.

I can’t remember ever being good at sleeping. Even as a small child, I had trouble getting to sleep. Perhaps it’s a side effect of my supercharged mind, I don’t know. But falling asleep has always been a long and tricky process for me.

I get the feeling childhood neglect might have played a role there too. It could be that something went wrong during the period where I was “learning to sleep” – I didn’t get enough of whatever emotional nutrients I needed – and that fucked things up.

But it’s probably the supercharged brain thing. It took me a long long time to learn to handle a mind that is racing at top speed even though I am extremely sleepy.

That’s a horrible state of mind right there. Too sleepy to actually do anything, like read or play a game or whatever, and yet unable to actually get to sleep.

Instead, my mind races to nowhere on a hamster wheel three sizes too small and a voice in my head is silently screaming like an abandoned infant.

Funny hwo that image sprung so easily to mind.

As is, I don’t exactly have a normal sleep schedule. I nap. Once in the afternoon, once in the evening. I know why I do it. It’s an anti-anxiety reflex. By going down for a nap, I dump out my accumulated stress and can start over when I wake.

That keeps the background anxiety level within acceptable levels.

It would be different if I had things to do. Like a job. The kind that takes place somewhere other than my bedroom, where I can go from sitting at this computer to lying in bed without even standing up.

Then I would have to get my poop in a group and develop normal sleeping habits. And it would be a tough transition. Large quantities of diet cola would be involved.

Some people have Starbucks, I have Diet Coke. Don’t judge me just because the way I get my caffiene isn’t “cool”!

Okay, I am clearly beginning to lose my mind. Time for a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Seems like a good deal to me. A year of high quality sunshine Seventies happiness. Well sign me the fuck up.

For some people that would not be enough. I call those people “spoiled”. Sure, love can last forever. But it might not. Love ends. People change. Stuff happens.

It’s like people complaining about their last marriage saying “It was great for the first three or four years…. ”

OK, STOP. Hold the phone. You’re saying you were happy for three or four years? As opposed to forever?

I’d buy that for a dollar. And don’t bother wrapping it up. I will wear it out.

Anyhow. that’s not what I wanted to talk about tonight. Tonight, we talk of sunshine.

I had another “sunshine moment” last night, like the one I described before. This time, I was walking through a parking lot when I suddenly saw the beautiful sunny day with its blue sky and yellow sun and green grass, and I said to myself, “Why can’t I have this?”

Why can’t I live in this wonderful world of sunshine and wholesome goodness? Why am I stuck in my dark, hot save, hiding away from the world playing video games? What is keeping me from walking out of my apartment and enjoying the day?

The quick answer is “depression”. But tonight, I want to go deeper than that.

Because I felt a real longing in that moment. Something deep inside me wanted to reach out and touch that gorgeous day and become a part of it, and it a part of me. I desperately wanted to leave my sad little life behind and go wherever the sunshine led me, and in doing so, get some joy into my life, god dammit.

For the most part, my life has very little joy. Happiness of a sort when I am hanging out with my friends. But the rest of the time, my life is something to be endured. not embraced. It’s something to avoid via constant distraction because if I am not distracted, I will realize how bad my life sucks.

And it sucks because I spend all my time distracted. Etc.

It used to be that, while my life provided little in the way of joy, it at least provided a limited kind of contentment. But that’s not the case any more.

My discontent grows daily. This life of mine just won’t do any more. I am going to have to do a heck of a lot of growing and changing in order to fashion myself a new one.

And going from a state of contentment (ish) to a state of unrest is always going to suck. Parts of me that were dormant are waking up and disturbing my equilibrium. There is going to be a tectonic level of change chez moi, and that is going to involve a lot of pain and distress on my part.

But right now, I am feeling sick so I need to lay down for a bit.

Well that was blleedin’ unpleasant.

Got a tad overwrought, I suppose. Plus other factors. Blah blah. The long and the short of it is that I had a nasty Irritable Bowel Syndrome attack, and truth be told, it’s probably not over yet.

But during this lull in the fighting, I am going to try to get some blogging done.

The attack same fairly suddenly and acutely. Suddenly my head hurt, I felt naseous, my guts felt like a mass of mating snakes, and I knew it was time to deal with some things.

Luckily, I know pretty much exactly what to do in such a situation. The key is to de-escalate (descalate?) the tension as quickly as possible. That means going in the opposite direction to what the pain and so on would naturally take you.

It means laying down and letting go of all pressure and tension in my mind and in my body so that my body can resolve things sans interference from the mind.

That means laying down someplace quiet and dark. Usually, I end up sleeping briefly.  That doesn’t necessarily solve the problem but it gets me through the crisis point.

Beats the hell out of spending an hour or two on the toilet while my guts are twisting up like those aforementioned snakes are now SUPER mad at each other.

I have presumably tripped over all ym usual risk factors. Like my sinuses. I wasn’t sure if I had taken my sinus medications or not,. so I didn’t take them after realizing that because I didn’t want to double dose myself.

Now I am guessing I did not take them. Argh.

But as VERY patient readers know, for me, the sinus stuff is just the most acute manifestation of a whole body wide inflammatory response.

A response which, sadly, includes my poor testicles.

Yup, in times like this, my boys begin to ache in a way awfully reminiscent of that awful, soul-shattering, nightmare inducing way they would ache after being kicked.

Hence the nausea. It’s possible that sinus pain alone can make me nauseous, if it’s bad enough, but throw in testicle ache and my guts doing the mambo and it’s a sure thing.

Luckily, like I said, I avoided all that. And writing it out like that has helped to further calm me. Enough that I am catiously nibbling my interrupted supper now.

The other factor in these attacks is the psychological factor. Often if I am psychologically upset, my IBS makes sure my stomach gets upset too, sometimes at the same time, other times half an hour after I have calmed down again.

Which, if you think about it, is brutally fucking unfair.

Haven’t I suffered enough?

But I don’t think emotions were the trigger this time. It’s not like I was writing about something upsetting or something had stirred up deep passions or anything.

But maybe I was asking myself questions that my depression didn’t want to hear and so it pulled the emergency brake. I don’t know.

Oh well. I seem to be recovering and that’s what matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.