Sure glad I didn’t take the Quetiapine I was going to take this morning because I am being brain smooshed by bad sleep enough as it is.

I’d hate to be experiencing this at a higher intensity level.

Which, like I said, is the main thing that keeps me from taking my sleepy pills even though I know my sleep has been crap for a long time and I desperately need to get some serious sleep really soon.

But I know that in order to get to a state of restfulness, I would have to use one of my sleeping pills and that would trigger a period of incredibly intense REM-laden sleep that would leave me in a very deoxygenated state in those brief but extremely unpleasant periods when I was awake.

The sort of thing that makes the bad sleep I am recovering from now seem like the best nap I have ever had.

And I am not sure I can take it. Both physically – my diseased heart might not be able to handle the extra strain from the radical uptick in my sleep apnea. I could nap my way right into a heart attack.

That would suck.

And psychologically – I am feeling rather fragile lately. Overall I am feeling better than before when I was despairing and sure I was about to die, but it’s brittle and I could end up right back in that ark dark place if things got worse physically.

So, no sleeping pill for me. Which means I need other means of getting sleep.

I bet a good, deep down massage would do wonders for me. I am a mess of knots an cramps. Getting them professionally treated would not only feel amazing and get ri of a lot of tension, it would improve my circulation as well, and I need that.

And I could afford one or two sessions. Maybe more if the results are good enough.

I will think about it. Check out some massage clinics online, compare rates, etc.

Worried about this wound on my leg. I can’t stop thinking about how much packing went in there. The wound is much deeper than it looks and I am worried that it, too, will never heal, just like the ones on my left leg.

I’m dying by degrees.

Oh, and I have a fresh and terrifying complication : to the right of my wound is this area of rough red skin that I haven’t paid much attention to.

Seemed like a minor issue next to the big gaping wound.

But yesterday this patch began to itch a little, so I gave it a little scratch – and it immediately started to bleed.

Like my fingernails were razor blades.

So that’s pretty fucking scary. What fresh hell is this? I think it might be some kind of leftover scar tissue from the infection, when the skin was lobster red and tender from my knee to my ankle,

Sadly I won’t be seeing Doctor Kwok (tee hee) till Thursday. I just hope it doesn’t get super itchy before that.

Resisting the urge to scratch could be a special kind of hell.

More after the break.

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So very quiet

It’s always so very quiet when Joe and Julian aren’t here. ^[1]

And that can be nice. I am, in general, a peace and quiet kind of guy. It probably improves the sleep quality of my naps.

But it’s also kinda lonely. Having grown up in a family of six who lived in a fairly lively family oriented neighborhood, I am used to their being a certain amount of background noise in life and when it isn’t there, it feels unnatural. Like there’s something wrong.

Like a scene in the movie where the main characters suddenly realize that the forest has fallen silent around them.

But there’s another factor : when you are a shy, depressed, broken little kid, the sounds your family makes as they go about their lives is the only contact you have with them.

Which, I realize., is brutally sad. Poor little me, sitting all alone in my room despite their being two parents and three siblings in the house, being comforted by the ordinary everyday sounds of what they are doing because it makes him feel less alone.

Holy crap did my childhood suck.

It sucked so bad that it’s taking me a very long time to wrap my head around how bad it was. I feel like a big part of my current path to wellness is simply trying to mentally encompass all that midnight tundra.

There’s the acute traumas, like being raped at kindergarten age, various episodes of bullying, getting taken out of college, and so on.

But then there is the many years of total social isolation and a lifeless, joyless, loveless existence that ground me down day after day.

That’s where the tundra comes from. All those days of being friendless and bullied at school during lunch and recess and bored out of my fucking skull in class and then dismissed and ignored at home really took a toll on me.

No wonder I was so depressed that I lay down in a snowbank one day and willed myself to die. What did I have to look forward to?

Just more of the same grind.

So my world became brutally limited to just media consumption. Books, TV, magazines, and so on. I ignored everything else and my world got so small.

But media consumption is great at creating the illusion of being part of the world. After all, you see so much of the world on your mental travels and seemingly have all kinds of (virtual) life experiences. It’s almost as good as the real thing, right?

Totally. Except actually, completely not. At all.

And I still live in that tiny, colorfully painted cell. Here, I can control my stimulation levels, filter what gets through to me, and thereby feel like I am in control.

But I’m not in control. It’s all bullshit. I drift helplessly through life and I am rapidly approaching a waterfall and the rocks at the bottom are hard and jagged and yet I still can’t motivate myself to steer because part of me wants to go over the edge.

In control? Not hardly.

In life you have to give up the illusion of control before you can have true control.

You have to let go of the toy steering wheel you have been using to satisfy the need for control without having to take responsibility for anything, and take true control of your life and all the responsibility and accountability that comes with it.

That’s the only way you will be able to change your life for the better.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.