Well, as I (think I) predicted, I am going through another sleepy period.
That’s what lack of Diet Coke does to me. Without my source of artificial wakefulness my general lack of decent sleep catches up to me and I slide into the Pit of Sleep and can’t really dig my way out for a while.
So I have been sleeping a lot. Which as usual gets on my nerves a bit because it makes me feel like I am missing out on life.
I’d rather be awake and having fun, and all that.
But whatever. I know I need the sleep pretty bad, so it’s not a bad thing that I am finally getting it, albeit reluctantly.
Of course, in a perfect world, I would sleep for eight hours at night like a normal human. But I haven’t been able to do that for a long, long time.
The best I can do is 3 to 3.5 hours at a stretch. Then either my bladder wakes me up or I wake up spontaneously feeling highly disoriented.
The usual sweaty, dizzy, confused, mentally messed up awakening. You know the drill
And I wonder why that is. Why I can’t sleep any more than that in a stretch.
First off, I think it might be an illusion. I think I maybe could sleep more if I just went right back to bed after I wake up and pee.
But I can’t do that. I need to stay awake for a while to cool down and catch my breath. And that too easily leads to getting involved in the computer for hours.
So maybe a baby step worth taking towards better sleep would be to keep in mind that my bladder waking me up should be seen as a mere brief intermission between Act 1 and Act 2 of sleep.
After all, I am pretty sure even healthy sleepers get up to pee once a night. Presumably they can go right back to sleep though.
Not I. Between overheating in my sleep and my sleep apnea, I need that intermission. Pretty sure the overheating started somewhere in my mid teens.
Man, puberty complicates everything. Even sleep.
Another angle on the sleep thing, though, is mental overstimulation. It’s not something I like to think about because I am so addicted to a constant stream of it, but it’s entirely possible that if I learned to enjoy more relaxing, less stimulating types of fun it would not be so difficult for me to get to sleep in the first place.
Often, trying to sleep feels like I am trying to close a book with far too many bookmarks in it. Or like when you’re trying to close down Windows but it pops up that list of “These are the programs preventing shutdown.”
Only in the case of my mind, there’s thousands of them.
Too bad I don’t have a “close down anyway” button.
Well, that’s my words. Time for me to go back into the pit.
Who knows, maybe I will even dream this time.
More after the break.
Because I’m crazy
Time to try to close the loop on thoughts that have been chasing their own tails for a long time now.
Because I’m crazy…. I do things that don’t make sense and that I can’t justify except by saying “Well, crazy people do crazy things, and I’m crazy, so…”
Because I’m crazy… moreover, I can’t do things others can do easily and that look just as easy for me – but they are not, again for reasons that don’t make sense and can’t justify because all my justifications are crazy too.
Because I’m crazy… I walk around in chains nobody can see, ridden by invisible demons and tortured by the flames of my own personal Hell.
Because I’m crazy… I live in a radically different world than most people. I look at this world full of mostly sane people and I wonder if any of them know how good they have it with their chemically competent cerebellums.
Probably not. Nor should they. They are better off not knowing the darkness at all.
I am not so bitter as to want to deny them what I do not possess.
Because I’m crazy… I can’t cope. At all. There are times when just opening my eyes and facing the world seems like far too much. Days where all I want to do is hide from reality in sleep. but I get up anyhow because I get too restless to stay dormant.
Because I’m crazy… I’m a cripple. Just as if I had a terrible physical injury. I have been carrying around a massive psychological wound since I was 4 years old and I am 48. Like any other crippling injury, it dominates every aspect of my life and leaves me helpless, weak, and frail, and unable to deal with reality in any normal way.
Because I’m crazy… I’m sick. I’m a sick person. And that means I should not ever judge myself by the same standards I would use for healthy people.
There’s a reason people in wheelchairs have their own Olympics.
By all logic, and by the standards of most sane humans, I should be extremely forgiving of myself because I have a lot of medical and mental problems and it’s amazing that I can even function enough to do this blog every day. And I should be proud of that. But..
Because I am crazy…. I’m not. I continue to judge myself with razor-burn harshness and all the fairness and impartiality of a fascist show court.
And because I am crazy… I don’t know how to stop. I can’t even imagine being any other way. This cold and corrupt court in my head has been in charge for so long that I can’t remember any other regime.
It really feels like if I was to truly ease up on myself and forgive myself and relax, everything would fall apart.
Like if the icicle piercing my heart was to melt, I’d bleed out.
Like the terrible tension I am always under is the only thing keeping me together.
And I have no idea how to fix that. I’m not sure I even can.
I’m not sure of anything at all, really.
Because I’m crazy,
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.