Once more, I am blogging in a state of mind scientifically known as “crappy”.

Extra crappy, actually, because I took my sleeping pill, Trazadone, before going to bed last night. I hardly ever take it any more because it makes waking up a lot harder and I can sleep without it.

But I hadn’t been sleeping well at all lately, so I figured I had better make sure I got my solid five hours of sleep.

And that was probably a very intelligent and grownup thing to do.,

But it sure as fuck doesn’t feel like it at the moment.

Been pondering my physical health. A depressing subject, to be sure, but one any enlightened hedonist like myself must dealt with.

After all, I am on a mission to make myself happy, and feeling ill all the time is like, the opposite of that. So I am pondering reasonable, well defined, achievable improvements in self-care that might makes me a healthier and happier fellow.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, and not just because my brain is all clogged up with sleep and drugs right now.

There’s the obvious stuff. Test my blood. Use insulin to adjust it. Exercise. Spend more time on the balcony soaking up some sunshine so that I both get the light my circadian inputs get calibrated and so my body can make some vitamin D.

And I really need the D. I need it bad.

And all these things seem easy enough to do on paper but it is hard to ponders how realistic they are in practices because there is always that terrible fear waiting in my psyche to shut things down when it comes time to actually do things.

Or even think about doing them in any but the most abstract of terms. As soon as intention is formed, the whole idea dies a horrible and strangulated death.

So the trick is the think smaller, and that’s not something that comes naturally to me. I am a big picture, big ideas kind of dude. Focusing down to that level of smallness gives me the mental equivalent of an eye strain headache.

Perhaps I am making things too complicated for myself.  I do that a lot. my mind wants puzzles to solve so bad that I can end up generating problems for myself that make life a lot harder than it needs to be.

Sometimes inventing your own fun can be hazardous to your mental health. Especially when you forget that it is you making things difficult and not life itself.

I often find myself pondering the emptiness of my world and my life. How very little real world content there is in my soul. How empty my life has been.

It is a depressing subject but there are too many big emotions buried there for me to ignore it. I have to feel all that isolation and loneliness and recognize and accept that I have missed most of life in favour of hiding away from the world and consuming media.

In fact, I want to do more than recognize is,. I want to embrace and accept it. That’s the only way the healing can begin.

Time for a nap.

I guess that nap was worth it.

So here goes. I hereby embrace and accept all the isolation I have experienced, along with all the pain and fear that comes with it.

Come to me, pain. I love you too. Come inside and stay a while.

I know that I have structured my entire life around ignoring you. you were always there, trying to get my attention, but I kept myself isolated and distracted in order to keep you all locked up inside me.

It let me pretend you were not there or that you did not matter.

Boy, does that sound familiar.

So I froze you out. But I know who you are now. You’re the pain from all the loneliness I have suppressed. You’re all the healthy instincts I was too scared to even recognize as existing  let alone actually act on. You’re the social creature inside me that has been desperately trying to be born for more than forty years.

You’re all the tender tendrils reached out to connect with other only to be clain before even truly being born by a killier frost.

So know that I know you, pain. And that the wall has come down and the door is open and it is time for you to come inside and tell me what you want me to hear.

I even made tea.

There, that should help. A lot of the walls inside me have to come down and that which they separate has to be allowed to flow together and combine, as uncomfortable as that process may turn out to be.

I know that when I finish blogging today., I am going to want to go back to sleep yet again. But I can’t. I just don’t have the time. I have to get into the shower to get ready for FRED in less than an hour and a half, and after that will be FRED then hanging out with my friends till midnight.

So I am not going to get another chance to sleep fot at least eight hours, and that suuuuucks. It sucks because it means I have to do something I hate to do which is to force myself to stay awake when I am sleepy.

Says something about my life that I rarely end up having to do that.

I hate doing it because it’s so stressful. And it puts mne in a mind state I hate, namely being too sleepy to think but forced to deal with reality anyway.

I suppose I could skip FRED this time. The idea is very tempting. I really do not feel up to going. but I know that there is only going to be La Gang plus Teresa, so as far as I know, there’s only going to be 5 people there.

I would feel guilty if I reduced that to 4.

Maybe I will find my alarm clock so I cna take a napo. I dunno.

But I am sure I will figure something out.

After all, I’m a genius.

But I sure don’t feel like one right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think mine have been going rather well lately.

I am learning to banish the negative voices and concentrate on a feeling of clean white light flooding into my soul and washing all the bad stuff away.

That means I am very carefully easing up on my death grip on reality and being absolutely,. totallly, completely logical accurate and realistic at all times.

I have loved The Truth for a very long time. It is the ultimate intellectual virtue. And it’s one that is hard to argue with. One cannot consciously choose to believe a lie.

You either have to decide the lie is true or discard the lie entirely as bullshit.

But as much as I have loved and sought The Truth, it has never really loved me back. All my devotion to the pursuit of the truth has gotten me is a certain degree of mental discipline and a lot of insights I am too psychologically damaged to use.

And speaking of psychological damage….

My headlong and relentless pursuit of the truth has damaged me in so many ways. I have never, ever allowed myself the comfort of denial. I have been relentlessly realistic and took everything on head first and heedless of the cost.

But denial is, as it turns out, rather important. It takes the hard edges and sharp points off of life and allows one’s self-worth to protect itself against the harshness of life.

Denial and delusion are the shock absorbers of the psyche. Without them, you end up all torns up, battered, and bruised on the inside, just like me.

But you’ve heard all that before. I’ve got to cool it with the reruns.

My point is that I have been easing off on myself, and that’s marvelous. The voices of negativity are, as they must, losing ground every day..

There’s no wall strong enough to withstand stready, unrelenting pressure applied over as long a period of time as it takes to crack it.

Victory is inevitable.

It’s just a matter of time.

We resume our story after Pizza Hut pasta and PVR-age with J&J.

The real proof to me that my recent psychological progress is the real motherfucking deal is that I have felt physically better lately.

In fact, there have even been some happy little periods where I barely felt bad at all. And for someone who normally feels like shit 24/7 (only the intensity varies) that’s a pretty big deal.

I think ridding myself of the idea that I am inherently toxic and flawed will help. My biggest leap of faith of late is to dare to believe that I can be clean. That a clean, strong, healthy, whole me is even a possibility.

That I can be something good.

Back when I was far, far more depressed and had massive hygeine issues because it was very hard for me to take the sensory intensity of showering and I had become, essentially, afraid of it, someone in my therapy group asked me why I didn’t wash more.

I said, “Because there’s no such thing as a clean turd. ”

Well, I knew what I meant.

But it speaks as to just how horribly toxic I used to consider myself to me. People with a healthy self-image don’t compare themselves to shit. And it was true that I often felt like cleaning was futile back then due to my twisted sense of efficiency.

After all, the minute you step out of the shower, you start sweating and shedding skin calls and coming into contact with the dust in the air all over again, so what’s the point?

The idea that it might be worthwhile to embrace an artificial state which would require a repeated and regular investment of time and energy to maintain would not have occurred to me at the time.

Even now, I feel anxious at the thought. Part of me still feels like to do that would be tantamount to self-annihilation.

But that’s the old energy-miser thinking that has cost me so much in life. Since then, I have embraced the knowledge that you can have a lot more energy than you feel like you have, and that often the body only generates the energy it needs when it needs it, so the energy you need to do something will only be there once you commit to doing it.

I am now fully committed to learning to open my arms and my heart to life so I can enjoys its many gifts, including the gift of true inspiration.

I used to think I had lots of inspiration. But all I really had was lots of ideas. Ideas that never go anywhere and never leda to any actual activity are not inspiration.

Inspiration implies action. You are inspired to do something.

And for decades, that’s been the stumbling block for me. My profound emotional inertia and heavy resistance to doing anything that involved a large investment of energy with no guarantee of returns and no defined end point meant that most of my ideas resulted in nothing more than a brief, amusing thought before getting dropped right back into the bubbling brew that is my creative subconscious mind.

But from this point forward, I will open myself up to being prodded into action by a notion or a thought or a brilliant idea. I mean, why not?

Would I really prefer to keep just playing video games all fucking day when I could be doing something way more fun like writing?

Because I really do have a lot of fun writing, at least when I am doing it right. It’s a lot more work than burning through the precious remaining hours of my life playing video games, but my new motto is, “Easier isn’t always better!”.

Repeat until believed.

I have a lot of energy that never gets expressed and therefore hangs around my head increasing my mental tension and turning into anxiety or depression or both when only the slightest of provocations.

I would be a lot better off if I found my way to using more of that energy and leaving less of it around to cause me pain.

And all I have to do is get over the whole energy miser thing.

And that is well on its way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.