Well, it doesn’t look like I am going to make it out to McD’s with La Gang tonight because I have been incredibly sleepy all day, and I am pretty sure I am coming down with something nasty.
I have this scratchy and swollen feeling in my throat and it is making it harder to swallow. My lungs feel raw and scratchy too and I think there’s goo in there as well.
But mostly it’s this heavy tiredness weighing me down that has me worried. It’s way more than my usual malaise. I feel positively saturated with sleepiness and concentrating on the screen and my words is very hard.
I just wanna go back to bed and sleep more. But I need to eat n’ blog so here I am.
I’m just glad I don’t have any appointments today. Pulling myself together enough for a medical appointment seems insane to me right now.
Like being drunk out of your mind and having to suddenly sober up enough to perform microsurgery on the President’s brain.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Then again, I suppose letting a doctor or nurse or whatnot see how tired I am might not be the worst thing.
They might have some helpful suggestions. Or prescriptions. Or both.
If they asked if I had any underlying medical conditions that might be causing it, I would just say “Yes, many. ” then take a nap while they read the multi volume epic that is my medical file at this point.
At some point, it will be easier to list what I don’t have.
Under all the sleepiness, I continue to be pissed off and depressed. How I long to slip this skin and go be someone else for a while.
Skip this whole downward slide into oblivion and let someone else deal with the consequences of my self-neglect.
Watch the whole catastrophe from afar, then pick up my bag and move on.
Not physically possible without some kind of Freaky Friday shit going on, but it is a thought I can’t seem to avoid anyhow.
Talk about being an escapist to the extreme. I want to escape my entire self.
But I am stuck being me so I guess I will have to learn to make the best of it. Learn to turn and face the strain instead of always escaping into the fallout shelter of my mind while the world outside gets worse and worse due to my neglecting it.
And I know damned well that I would be better off dealing with things but I just don’t have the courage or the grit.
And of course, the longer I neglect things, the worse they get, and the scarier they get and the harder they are to face so I keep neglecting them instead so they get even worse and the cycle continues until I end up where I am now.
And it shows no sign of stopping. I am not suddenly developing the courage and grit to deal with things properly now that I am nearing the end.
That’s how I know I am going to die.
Because I am just too weak and pathetic to stop it.
More after the break.
Why depressives are night owls
I think it all boils down to stimulation levels.
One of the least discussed hallmarks of depression is what I will call stimulation intolerance. As a group, we definitely strongly prefer low stimulation levels.
It’s why we dress in black, like quiet place with subdued lightning. feel acutely uncomfortable at parties with their high levels of both social and physical stimulation, and why we like staying up at night.
At night time, the world is quiet and dark. Most people are asleep, so even the background subconscious stimulation of other living humans being around an awake is at its lowest level all day, And the air is cool and still as well.
These are the conditions in which we thrive.
You will note that there is heavy overlap with introversion. I am not sure what to make of that. I do not think I have ever met an extroverted depressive, only former extroverts.
But I have known plenty of non-depressed introverts. Make of that what you will.
More broadly, I wonder why some of us are so stimulation averse. I can’t help but think it must go all the way down to the level of cellular neurology. There might be something fundamentally different about our neurons.
Something determines whether a given stimulus is interpreted as “excessive and therefore painful” or not. Somewhere in our nervous system, there is a level set that when exceeded equals ouch.
It probably has both an absolute and a relative component. So if the stimulation exceeds this total level OR increases by this amount over a short period of time, the excess stimulation alarm goes off.
And if both happen at the same time, we begin to whimper.
It’s certainly not how I’d prefer to be. I’d rather be able to take at least the ordinary hubbub of daily life without cringing.
Ideally, I would be able to take even a loud party with tons of people and hard pumping music in stride. On the most basic emotional level, I have no problem with those things, but sadly my neurology does. Big time.
So there are places I can’t go and things I can’t do, and that pisses me off.
Not that I blame the world for this issue. It’s not that the world is too bright, loud, social, and so on. The stimulation levels are perfectly fine for most people.
No, the problem is mine. I am not suited for high stimulus environments.
On the other hand, I am ideally adapted for low stimulus environments which extroverts would find intolerably dull, so I supposed it all works out.
So to sum up, we depressives are night owls because only at night are the stimulation levels low enough for us to relax and feel comfortable.
Hit me up if you need any more of life’s mysteries explained.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.