It’s hard for me to know exactly what I am capable of.

You know, given my health issues. Latelty, what with being sick, I have not felt capable of one heck of a lot.

Although I am feeling somewhat better today, which is good. I still feel icky and sticky and I still got goop in my lungs, but the feeling of energy-destroying malaise has slackened off quite a bit.

And that’s always the worst part of illness for me. Things like a cough or a running nose  are irritating to deal with (not to mention gross), but they are really no more than a nuisance and I can deal with them pretty well.

It’s the energy-draining malaise that gets me. It triggers my depression hard then kind of teams up with it to make me miserable.

I have been spending a lot of time sitting on the edge of my bed feeling lost lately. That is never a good sign, other than being a good sign that I am a lot more depressed than usual. It’s like I sit up to get out of bed and end up just stuck there. All my motivation disappears and this strange warmth comes over me.

It would actually be quite peaceful and relaxing if it were more…. optional.

Instead, I end up feeling trapped and lost. I wish I knew exactly what the fuck was going on there. Clearly, my mind/body needs something and grabs the first opportunity to get it that comes along and is not interested in giving my conscious mind the chance to fuck things up by suppressing it.

But what is it? Rest of some sort, I suppose. The kind I don’t get from sleep or my super low impact lifestyle. And it must have something to do with the specific posture that sitting on the edge of the bed involves, seeing as this doesn’t happen when I sit in a chair or on a couch or anywhere else.

Hmmm.. That suggests that it may have something to do with my lower back. When I sit on the edge of the bed, I am sitting without back support and forced to balance on the fulcrum of my lower back.

Maybe that stretches something that really needs stretching and it feels so good that my body is like, “Forget whatever we were planning to do next, we’re doing THIS now!”.

Sounds plausible. The smart response, therefore, is to plan this shit. Make it part of my day. Tell myself that it’s time to go sit on the edge of the bed and let my mind go blank now. Viewed properly, it could be quite the boon.

Of course, now that I am conscious of it, it might stop workin. Score one for the dangers of living consciously. But if that turns out to be the case, I will simply shrug and move on with my life.

It’s not like I have become attached to the phenomenon already.

Or maybe what I need is some sort of cushion or other appliance that pushes my back forward in just the right spot when I sit.

Or hell. Maybe I need to be sitting on a stool or some other form of backless chair. That goes against every comfort seeking instinct in my body, but if it means less lower back pain, I am willing to do it.

After all, it would be a net gain in comfort. Lose the back of the chair, but gain a big reduction in my constant back pain.

The hedonic valence is overwhelmingly positive.

Anyhow. Back to the topic of what I can actually do. It’s nearly impossible to know because there are so many dishonest players in my psyche that it’s hard to tell genuine realism about my capacities from the dirty and underhanded messages from the usual suspects from the Do-Nothing Gang.

So it’s tempting to call upon my arrogance and say “Fuck it, then. I can do whatever the hell I want. ‘ And it feels very good to say that, At the time. \

But hidden within that seemingly positive message is the new expectation that because I can do whatever I want, if I still don’t get things done, it’s all my fault because I suck and I am terrible and the world would be better off without me.

Depression is a fucking minefield.

So I dunno. I have to at least try to do more than the bare minimum. I can’t stand the thought of my life being nothing but video games, blogging, and hanging out with my friends for the rest of my so-called life.

I want to do things. Things that matter. Things that count. Things that make some kind of difference in the world. Things that mean something to me.

Survival is not enough any more. Survival is easy. Actually living life is the hard part. My default mode has long been to remain detached and apart and safe in my little bubble of reality where I can control what I experience and all the stimulation is mental and thus does not trigger my anxiety.

But that mode sucks. It’s easy, and it’s even comforting, but that doesn’t make it good. I can only heal my self esteem by actually doing things.

Especially the things I can get paid to do.

Right now, it feels like every now and then, the stars align and my biorhythmns sync up and I get some precious, precious time when I can be positive and push forward and get things done.

The rest of the time, I am my usual limp shadow of a human being who can do very little except make it through another day of this prison sentence of a life.

And some would say “well that’s all that is expected of you, dear. ”

Yeah, but it’s not all that I want.

What I want is to rise like a shiny, shiny star and radiate to the whole damned world so they can bask in my brilliance.

But all this other bullshit gets in the way.

I really wish I could just start over again. And get it right this time.

But all I can do is muddle through.

Pity. I deserve better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pretty depressed lately.

But I am trying to keep a positive attitude about it.

The problem is that I am still sick. And it has moved into my lungs. I had a very scary incident earlier today where I woke up from a nap to find that there was a distinct rattle to my breathing. Every breath felt like I was breathing through water and I could feel the goo inside my lungs bubbling as I did so.

That is a very scary sensation in any situation, but it was especially bad in this household because poor Julian had bacterial pneumonia not very long ago.

And a chest rattle like I had is the top symptom of that kind of pneumonia.

So now I am freaking out some. Getting pneumonia is bad in any situation, but it’s especially bad for a person with sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is already displacing my lung capacity and causing a low blood oxygen level in me in the first place.

I don’t have any to spare for fucking pneumonia.

In fact, pneumonia is one of the things that can kill a sleep apnea sufferer like myself. Sleep apnea is one of those diseases that is not, in and of itself, fatal, but it can easily team up with something else to kill you.

Pneumonia would be a perfect example. So would obesity and diabetes,. for that matter.  You know, just to pick two random examples.

So I am feeling pretty scared right now. Not being able to breathe is like my worst phobia. Even my claustrophobia bows down to it. When my claustrophobia triggers, it always does so by making me feel like there is not enough air where I am and that I am going to smother to death.

Physiologically,. this is caused by an adrenaline response that triggers the muscles in my throat to constrict and rigidify, thus causing an actual drop in oxygen intake capacity at the exact same moment when adrenaline is also signaling my bodyh to take deeper, fuller breaths in order to load up on oxygen for fight or flight.

It’s terrifying, of course, and might well be part of the cause of my fear of smothering, along with other breathing and cardiovascular issues of mine.

So I feel like I am on some mighty thin ice, health-wise, right now. I am doing what I can to stay hydrated, eat plent of fruit and veggies, and stay calm about stuff.

That last one is, of course, the trickiest. One of the cruelest ironies of stress is that the smartest thing to do about it is to calm the fuck down, and that is pretty tricky when you are stressing out.

But like anything, you get better at it if you practice it. Part of my dragging myself out of the pit of madness I fell into in my early twenties was learning to not freak out when my IBS started causing problems because that only added fuel to the first and made the whole thing so much worse.

So I had to learn to, in a sense, force myself to calm down. To move in the opposite direction of the one the pain and fear and stress wanted me to go. So instead of grabbing my sword and holding it tight, I let go of absolutely everything and go totally limp and visualize hot metal being dunked into cold water, or similar.

It solves the situation, and that’s fantastic. I will always be grateful that I found this escape hatch through which to escape one particularly bad form of madness.

But I do wonder sometimes if I have gone too far in the other direction. It’s possible that a lot of my problems stem from that big and well-developed emotional override muscle being far too quick on the trigger and suppressing any kind of adrenaline-provoking response, even the good kind, like happiness and enthusiasm and feeling love.

If so, I really need to teach it to calm the fuck down.

Honestly,. the best thing for me would be a democratic revolution against the harsh facist state inside me.

An inner coup, if you will.

But that would require surrendering a lot of my precious and fragile feeling of safety. And I am not ready to do that yet.

But I am getting there.

What really bugs me about still being sick with whatever infection I have is that it is robbing me of productivity. I would prefer to be writing stories for the text app and working the music video gig, but being sick is making it really hard to concentrate and robbing me of my energy and focus, and that makes things so much harder.

Still, there has got to be a way. I am super bored a lot of the time. My usual distractions just plain are not enough any more. I need to reconnect with my slender thread of feeling like I contribute to society, and so I am going to have to force myself to get some god damned work done.

EVen if it’s really hard. Even if it would be soooooo easy to keep letting the days go by (water flowing under). and watch my life go down the drain… this time with a vaguely plausible excuse, even!

Well clearly I can’t do the things that actually move my life forward, give me a much needed self esteem boost, and justify my entire existence.

After all, I’m sick.

Well if I waited till I was healthy to do shit, I would be waiting forever. In the war that is this life, I am one of the walking wounded and no matter what happens, it’s either fight wounded or never fight at all.

And not fighting is no longer an option for me. Resistance is life. I no longer accept life as one of the walking dead, moving but not truly alive.

So bring the pain. Bring the fear. Bring the dread. Bring it all.

Anything is better than feeling dead inside.

And it is through pain that I will live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.