Been really feeling the badness today.

I keep getting these brief but intense attacks of rage, frustration, fear, and self-loathing. My internal surge protectors deal with it in a heartbeat but it’s still harrowing.

And it really feels like my mind is trying to do something. Something important. It’s like my brain is trying to throw up but my vastly overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit keeps shoving everything back down again.

So I am thinking that I should just let whatever it is happen. My mind knows what it needs to do in order to heal, and I should probably get out of its way and let it do what it needs to do, even if that means experiencing a lot of negative emotions.

If you keep suppressing your negative emotions – you know, the ones that aren’t fun to feel – sooner or later, they are going to kill you.

They are going to accumulate in your bloodstream like heavy metal poisoning and things will get worse and worse until one day you have a massive toxic shock reaction and lose your freaking mind.

You end up feeling bad all the time, and all because you won’t endure the bad feelings that you are suppressing. People like me end up total emotional cripples because we picked up the emotional procrastination bug and now don’t even realize just how much of a tab we’ve run up.

And in those rare moments when we do realize it, all we do is suppress those motions even harder because they scare us shitless. It seems so massive that to open the floodgates even a little would totally obliterate us.

So it can seem like a total impasse. A problem that will only get worse if you don’t deal with it, but dealing with it would destroy you.

And it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not that bad for as long as it takes to go back to ignoring the whole thing and burying yourself in your maladaptive coping mechanism once more and returning to your life of misery and denial.

That’s where I would be if I didn’t have therapy and this blog. Hell, that’s where I was before therapy and this blog. I spent twenty years of my life in that terrible pattern.

So if this sounds like your life, dear reader, please please consider doing whatever it takes to break the pattern. Find some way to let those emotions out. It is the only means of salvation until we invent a way to delete our suppressed emotions from our minds with drugs.

Actually, that’s a pretty interesting science fiction concept. And it is not that far fetched. These suppressed emotions must be stored in our minds and in our bloodstreams. In theory, a drug could destroy them.

But my guess would be that if you did that, the patient would rapidly go completely insane. These emotions are part of our psyches, after all, and not just excess fat we can safely liposuction away. If they simply disappeared, odds are that the patient’s mind would simply unravel, and they would end up in a vegetative state – if they are lucky.

The operation would have to be far more than a simple find and delete. We would need a picture of the entirety of the patient’s psyche. Only then could we consider removing the troublesome emotions with all the skill and care of one of those expert demolition jobs where they building falls in on itself.

Still, it might make for a decent science fiction story. Probably a mystery.

Anyhow, my point was and is that you need to let those emotions out. And that meas feeling them. There is no escaping that. You need to stop suppressing them, which I know can feel like utter madness because you have been ducking, dodging, and fleeing these emotions for so long that it seems normal and natural.

But it isn’t. Normal and natural people feel things. Pain, sorrow, frustration,, anger, and all the rest. They feeling them as they come and even (shock!) act on them in order to maintain their healthy emotional state regardless of what logic and reason dictate.

That’s one of the hardest things for me to come to grips with – the prospect of having to do things that are illogical or unwise by the standards of my icy isolating intellect in order to serve emotional needs that I cannot justify rationally.

The prospect of doing things without knowing why other than knowing it’s what my emotions are telling me to do chills me to the core and makes me feel like I am going insane. How can it be right to do things for purely emotional reasons that I could neither explain nor justify to another human being?

Luckily, I am fundamentally a pragmatist and that means I have to go with whatever works. If my goal is greater mental health, then I have to do what I feel to be whatever it takes to achieve that goal, even if that means occasionally abandoning the very sort of rational reasoning that led me to that conclusion.

It would be so much easier to do all this if I went someplace new so I could remake myself. With nobody around who knew the current me, I could be as emotional and irrational as I needed to be and in the process, I would find out who I really am.

If I tried that in my present life, it would end up hurting and confusing a lot of people I care deeply for and that is just plain not acceptable to me at this time.

Were I a classic individualist hero, I would do whatever is best for me and to hell with the consequences for others.

This is the new me and you will just have to deal with it!

But I can’t be that irresponsible. Not even for self-actualization and my mental health.

So I will continue to do it the hard way, one day at a time, little by little.

Oh well, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And by this shit, I mean being sleepy all goddamned day.

It was bad enough when I would not really be awake until 3 pm. But now it took until 6 pm, and I am still kind of sleepy even after sleeping all day AND drinking a liter of Diet Coke with my dinner.

Don’t even get me started on why I don’t seem to be able to get the same alertness boost from caffiene that everyone else gets.

I feel like it must be related to why sleeping pills don’t work the same way for me that they do for everyone else. Nothing I have taken actually helps me get to sleep.

It just helps me stay asleep. Which would be good if it did so at a reasonable level, but no, it has to keep me sleepy for half the freaking day.

So you can bet your buttons that I am not taking either of my sleeping pills tonight. Fuck THAT noise. I can’t afford to not be awake till 6 pm tomorrow because that would give me less than an hour to get my blogging done before I go out to Denny’s with La Gang.

Ergo, I will aschew the medication and go to bed at a reasonable hour and hope for the best. Maybe I will get enough sleep. Maybe not.

But those very recent times when I could barely stay asleep for an hour and a half at a time and the depths of my consciousness were filled with glittering psychosis are starting to look pretty good to me right now.

At least I was awake and enjoying life instead of sleeping the sleep of the dead half the day back then.

I wish I could be mellow about the whole thing. I would love to be able to take this whole thing philosophically. I dream of being able to just shrug my shoulders and says “Well, that;s how she goes, eh? ” and just enjoy the sleep and take comfort for it.

But I want to live, god damn it. I want to live and breathe and think and enjoy and weep and cry and gnash my teeth and do all the other things that vital, alive, present people do without even knowing that the peace of the grave is a thing.

I mean, fuck this shit. I’ll be mellow when I am dead.

So it is going to continue to piss me off solid when I end up in this state for the foreseeable future. I hate all this goddamned sleep and deeply resent the amount of my life it takes up and all the minutes of the day I am missing.

What can I say, I am an ornery cuss deep down and sitting still has never been particularly fun foir me, and I would rather be in pain than asleep.

So suck all this goddamned sleepiness. One way or another I am going to get my life back, even if I have to drag my ass out of bed and force myself to stay up to do it.

And that is super stressful for me to do.

OK, now that I have gotten my rant on. let’s talk about causes.

One might well be the fact that I ran out of antihistamines recently. That might not seem to be related but hear me out.

See, my antihistamine is also the medicine that prevent sinus congestion from my allergies. Without out it, I get nasal congestion, and that restricts my airways even more than my sleep apnea does, and that, in turn, can make my sleep apnea worse, which would lead to my needing way more sleep in order to get the necessary REM time in.

Complicated, isn’t it?

I have also quite recently upped my Paxil dose. I have gone from 40 mg a day to 50 a day. I am not noticing a huge difference but it has only been a week and change since I started taking the higher dose and these things take time.

And while hypersomnia is not a known side effect of Paxil, anything that messes with my fragile brain chemistry has to be considered a suspect.

Which leads me to my final suspect, plain ol depression. I have been more depressed and nihilistric lately and while subjectively it seems more likely that the sleepiness is causing the depression and not the other way around, I could be wrong about that.

Whatever the cause, I am frigging sick of it. I have my antihistimine now, so I can at least test that theory. The bump in Paxil dose will be much harder to rule out (or in) as a contributing factor, and my depression is such a multivarible turbulence-level complexity type phenomenon that any serious logical analysis out it can’t help but turn into such a twisted ouroburous of causation versus effect questions that it beggars the mind.

Even a mind like mine.

And who knows, maybe it’s all due to some unimaginable confounding variable completely unrelated to any of the factors I just listed.

All I know is that it has to stop. And I am incresingly willing to do whatever it takes to get some decent, healthy, relaxing, non-punishing sleep.

Maybe even leaving the apartment and going for a bit of a walk to get some god damned fresh air into my lungs to displace the miasma of my tiny filthy room.

That would be huge for me. Leaving the apartment and going outside by myself without any particular task or goal in mind would be unprecedented. I have enough trouble pulling myself enough to go outside with my friends to a place I already know with the distinct goal of food and pleasant company in mind.

But the fact that it is so crazy a thing for me to do actually makes me a lot more likely to do it because I love doing crazy things.

That’s how I ended up writing a million words in 11 months, after all.

Maybe I should do it again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.