Even more so than I usually do when I wake up.

But here’s the thing : I know that I, as a person, have not changed. Or at least, I am beginning to know that.

And I am also beginning to see how believing that you are how you feel kind of simplifies things. In a horrible way.

It is actually easier – not better, just easier –  to believe that you feel horrible because you are horrible than it is to think of yourself as a perfectly good person who feels like crap because they are not well.

It takes a certain input of energy to maintain belief in one’s own worth and merit when you feel so bad. Or at least, after decades of depression, it does fore me.

For healthy people, I am sure it does not. Loving themselves is their default state, not some bizarre and alien state of mind that they can only maintain by sheer force of will.

Protip : never make plans that hinge on you being able to maintain such an artificial state of mind indefinitely.

You laugh, but that’s exactly what people do when they go on a diet or otherwise work to overcome a bad habit and never think about what they are going to do when they run out of willpower.

And then they do runout of willpower and relapse, and because they have been starved for pleasure for so long they relapse hard as their body races to restore the balance and doesn’t give them much of a say in it till the job is done.

And then they beat themselves up for their lack of willpower. By which they mean their finite quantity of the stuff.

You have to replace the pleasure, people!

Food is helping me to feel a tad more human. Ditto for my meds. Perhaps I need to remind myself to withhold judgment on the day, the world, and my own worth until I am full and medicated.

Low blood sugar alone is enough to make you hate the world. I can see why both my brother and my father were such grouches before they had eaten.

When my blood sugar is low, everything hurts. Every sound, every light, every action. The world is made of pain.

The difference, though, is that I take responsibility for my emotions instead of taking them out on others. As patient readers know, taking it out on others is something I will never ever do, even if the alternative is being destroyed by my own pain.

It dies in me. I will not dump my pain into others. I will not spread my sickness. I take responsibility for the pain I have received and know that it is within my power to either pass it on like everyone else or keep it contained within me.

And, like in the cinematic at the end for the original Diablo, I have chosen to keep the evil in me in order to protect the world from it.

It is a noble and thankless job.

But I refuse to ever bend, even if it means I will break.

Took a nap. Got up. Took a very long pee. Sat down. Still sleepy.

I have gone almost entirely nocturnal as a response to the heat. I am only truly awake and alert after the sun goes down. During the day, I am never more than two steps awake from sleep.

Three if I am drinking my Diet Coke.

And it sucks. It’s stressful to keep myself awake when my body wants to sleep. It takes a constant input of energy to fight the drowsiness, and I hate those.

I like things where a single, intense, brief input of energy is all that is needed.

I rock at those.

I suppose part of the problem is that I can’t accept being totally nocturnal. I don’t want to be asleep all day. I want to be awake and doing things. If I was to sleep all morning AND all afternoon, I would feel a huge sense of loss and something sort of like guilt.

But not the moral kind of guilt. The personal kind, where you feel like you have failed yourself or done something dumb.

So I sturbbornly refuse to listen to the urgings of Mister Sandman to get into bed with him and surrender to his embrace.

Great, now I am eroticizing sleep. Whatever.

The thing is, that Sandman asshole is an abusive lover. I often feel a lot worse after having gone to bed with him. He cuts off my air supply  over and over all the time I am with him, and nothing can stop it.

And the sad truth is that this only makes me spend even more time with him because the sleep I get is of such poor quality that I need a lot of it just to function.

Man, that guy’s an asshole.

Sorry, got lost in one of my own metaphors again. Where was I?

Right, not sleeping in the afternoon. Well, honestly, I usually end up sleeping half the time anyway, in naps. I don’t want to do it, but I have little choice.

Every now and then I ponder trying to kick the napping habit. Traditional sleep science says that napping too much screws up your sleep schedule and can mean you do not get enough of the all important deep REM sleep.

So it’s distinctly possible that if I could resist the urge to nap all day and only sleep in one long session at night, my circadian rhythmns would finally be able to match up with the actual day and night and I would be able to get eight hours a night and wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go.

But as patient readers know, I use sleep to regulate my mood. Without them, my background anxiety level builds up past the point where the meds can hold my anxiety back and then I end up in any one of dozens of possible negative mind states.

Maybe if I stuck with it, I would get over that. I dunno.

What i do know is that I need to get some more sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a very good question. What is it that I cling to so hard that is worth all the hating of myself for being a non-productive citizen?

I htink it must be frustratin talking. I have a lot of pent up ambition and will. All those urges that make younger people want to go out into the world and find their place in it and make a name for themselves run strong in me, but in my case they are crippled by my depression and therefore find no expression.

That has to be at least a large portion of it.

Logically, my lack of productivity is no different than a similar lack in someone who is blind, in a wheelchair, has cancer, or is paralyzed from the neck down.

And I certainly don’t think those people are terrible and should be ashamed of themselves Instead, I am glad they are still with us and want them to concentrate on having as good a life as they can.

And yet, on another level, I am jealous of them, because their handicaps are obvious. Nobody is going to ask a bedridden cancer patient why they don’t have a job.

And yet, many of those people get all the help and support they need in order to lead a mostly normal life.

So what’s so different about me?

Is it simply that they have the nerve to ask for what they need, and I am too shy to do it? Maybe they are more realistic about their illness. Perhaps that is because their handicaps are too obvious for denial and therefore they have to be pragmatic and realistic about what they need in order to function.

But then again, that same obviousness attracts nurturing. Lots of people want to help the obviously handicapped. They tend to suffer from too much help rather than not enough. And their problems have more obvious solutions.

Missing a leg? Artificial leg. Paralyzed from the neck down? Wheelchair you can control with your mouth. Weak heart? Pacemaker.

But there is no such thing as an emotional prosthesis for the weak of soul. There is no device that can make me functionally sane and no form of help from others that can make it so that I am not carrying all this bad juju around.

The drugs help. But they treat the symptoms, not the disease.

My illness is invisible. Both to others and, sometimes, myself. It must be invisible to me if I can both accept its existence yet also blame myself for its symptoms.

Perhaps the real villlain in this story is hope. Specifically, the hope that comes from feeling that I could be doing better. That all I have to do is get my shit together and “snap out of it” and I will be able to go join the world and have a normal life with a job and a husband and everything, just like that.

Well that’s not going to happen. I am sick. Broken. I need to fully accept that, and adjust my life expectations accordingly. It’s not that I will never make anything of myself. I can be one of those handicapped people with an almost normal life.

But I am not going to get there if I keep this toxic dream of “one day I will wake up and it will be over” alive.

Sometimes we have to murder our dearest dreams in order to truily be who we are.

So goodbye, you dirty little dream. I love you but you are holding me back, and everything that is holding me back must go.

Let me make it official : I hereby declare that I have a serious illness that is not going ot go away if I just find the right insight or make the right connection in my head. It will take many years and considerable effort to get better and it is by no means guaranteed.

I might as well face it : this might be as good as it gets. A life spent playing video games, chatting with the fuzzies, and masturbating. ^[1] No job, no spouse, no status, no respect, no “functioning”.

Just this, till the day I die.

It’s not what I want, of course, but I have to admit it’s a possibility. And as it’s a possibility, it behooves me to examine it and plan for it.

That is, after all, how us Taurus bulls deal with our fears. We plan.

And if that turns out to be the case, I guess I could live with it. Like I have said before, my life is not that bad right now. It might not match all of my dreams and ambitions, but it is pleasant and comfortable and I could do a lot worse.

A lot of dreams would die, though, and dreams are precious. Dreams give us hope for the future. Dreams gives us a reason to hang around.

Dreams give us hope.

So perhaps I should take my vision of a life exactly like this one till the day I die and use it like Scrooge’s vision of Xmas future : as something to work as hard as I can to keep from coming to pass.

It could work, as long as I don’t think too hard about it.

Story of my life, really.

What do you know? We’re back to my frustrated ambitions again. If only there was a way I could clear the clog in the line connection ambition to action. Then I could spend my days acting on my ambitions and maybe even getting somewhere in life.

But even if it got me nowhere, I would at least feel better about myself. Better to be a struggling writer than a limp nothing, right?

But still, there is that great mass of sadness and suppressed rage inside of me that turns my face to the wall and says “no”.

It needs to go.

And some day,it will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.