So I wander out to the kitchen at around 7:30 pm to make myself some dinner, and Joe says, “Okay, time to start cooking dinner!”.

I am completely flummoxed, and stand there stunned. He starts going on about how I didn’t read the instructions and we need milk to make the instant mashed potatoes.

Actually, I did read the instructions. What I failed to do was convey to my friends that I knew from experience that the milk was optional and that I did not want to add it because Julian is allergic to dairy.

My bad. Sorry guys!

By this point I have mentally caught up enough to interrupt and say that it is Xmas Eve, not Xmas Day.

Admittedly, I was not totally sure of that. I have been having time problems connected to sleep lately. Namely that when I wake up, I have absolutely no idea when I am. Day, night, time of year, it’s all a grey blur.

That just made this whole thing even more confusing.

But yes, it’s Xmas Eve, and yet somehow Joe thought tonight was the night I was going to cook Xmas dinner for us all.

Problem is, he did not share this notion with me. If he had, I would have been happy to cook our little meal today. No problemo.

But I, quite reasonably, assumed our Xmas dinner would be on Xmas DAY.

Hence the name. It’s not called Xmas Eve Dinner, dang it!

He then tells me he’s going to be at his parents’ place for Xmas dinner.

I said “Um, Covid?”.

He says he’s been self-isolating. Um, no he hasn’t, he was shopping with me at Sav-on Tuesday night. But I didn’t say that.

Then he says he’s going over there tonight.

Then when was this dinner supposed to happen?

Anyhow, it’s sorted now. Apparently we are going to do the dinner tomorrow night, like I thought in the first place.

No real damage done, apart from confusing the heck out of me and leaving rather rattled. And for some reason, sleepy.

I think my circadian rhythms are seasonally confused.

Plus I think I am entering a “catching up on sleep” period. My sleep has been all kinds of terrible until recently. Shallow, restless, broken, and above all brief. Couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour and a half. Sleeping maybe five hours a day.

But in the last couple days, it has improved. I’ve had multiple four hour naps and as a result I am feeling a lot more human and sane.

Ironically, one of those four hour snoozes almost caused me to miss therapy today. I lay down to sleep at 9 am, and the fact that therapy was at 1 pm never even crossed my mind, let alone prompted me to set an alarm.

What were the odds I would sleep for four hours? IN A ROW?

So when I was woken up by the phone ringing, I ignored it. I reserve the right to be officially asleep when I want to be.

But then it rang again like 15 mins later, and I decided to answer it. And it was while getting to the phone that I realized it was 1:15 pm and that was my freaking therapist.

Therapy happened anyhow. But lesson learned. Next time I will set the alarm if I am even vaguely near the appointed time.

More after the break.

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And so on.

Well, here it is, Xmas Eve. Woop de frigging doo.

Not feeling that festive at the moment, I guess. But don’t judge me. I just woke up from a nap and therefore feeling neither holly nor jolly.

Plus I almost forgot that I was not done blogging yet. On Thursdays, instead of doing half of my blogging with lunch and half with supper, I do half with supper and half at like 10 pm or 11 pm.

I do that because in general, therapy drains my mental resources so much that to blog afterwards is unthinkable.

Which is too bad, because otherwise that would be the perfect time to blog, when all the stuff stirred up by therapy is still floating around in my mind and hasn’t sunk back to the bottom of my mind.

In this metaphor, my mind is apparently a riverbed or the seafloor.

Woops, special bulletin, this just in : I remembered what I was going to blog about!

I have this book called the Self-Confidence Workbook. And I opened it up to a random section and read the following quote :

Fear is familiarity’s impostor. It passes off what you dread for what you know, offers the worst in place of the ambiguous, serves up anxiety in the absence of comfort, substitutes assumption for reason. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain.

isaac lidsky

And that so true. The minute I read it, I felt like it had tapped directly into my soul. That is exactly what depression has done to me. It’s made me so timid and cowardly that time and time again I choose a certain negative over an uncertain positive.

This certainty bias is positively crippling. It narrows one’s options down to only the things about which one can be absolutely certain and that’s a mighty short list.

In fact, I will go further and say that it makes you feel like if it isn’t a sure thing, it will be a negative outcome. Those are the only two options.

In other words, if there is any chance of a negative outcome, the outcome WILL be negative. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong – Murphy’s Law translated into a soul crushing personal philosophy.

Clearly, this is wildly irrational and makes no sense. Logically, there is a huge difference between “uncertain” and “doomed”.

I mean, if you had a 99.9 percent chance to win the lottery, you’d go for it, right?

But even contemplating my own absurd example, I feel an all too familiar clutching fear in the pit of my stomach at the thought of that tiny, tiny risk.

So clearly we are not talking about reason here. We are talking about something far more ancient and primitive that was there long before reason showed up.

We are talking about the fundamental feeling of not being safe that comes from childhood trauma like my rape.

When that motherfucker raped me, he shattered my innocence and my trust in the world, and left me in a permanent (so far) state of fear.

No matte what is happening in the rest of my mind, there is still that crying little boy who is freaking out 24/7 and who dares not ever relax or sleep because that’s when the demons that chase him through the night will GET him.

He’s just a scared little animal. And until I can find a way to reach him and comfort him and soothe him and make him feel safe, that scared little animal at the heart of my psyche will continue to drive the rest of my mind unto madness.

It’s going to be okay, little guy. You’re home now, where it’s safe and warm and everybody loves you. The long dark night is over and you are here in the daylight. Your bed is made, there’s delicious and nourishing food in the kitchen, and you can have all the cuddles and petting and affection you need, no questions asked.

You made it, little guy. You did it. You escaped.

Now come here and give me a hug.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.