Feeling kinda mentally wiped right now, dunno why. Kind of like I just completed a fairly rigorous exam on an empty stomach.
I have been sleeping a bunch, maybe that did it. I decided I was going to make a conscious effort to catch up on sleep. So I have been deliberately going right back to sleep after I get up to pee.
Normally I don’t like doing it. I prefer to stay up for a while so I can “dry out” from my usual sweaty, troubled, semi-drowning kind of sleep and get back to something more closely resembling normal before jumping back into the pool.
Because frankly, my sleep is so tormented that I am kind of afraid to go back.
But I know from experience that I am better off in the long term getting right back to sleep. That helps compensate for the fact that I can’t sleep for more than two and a half hours at a time by letting me get right back to REM sleep.
It’s that damned REM sleep that is the bane of my existence. Both my damnation and my saviour, it is my inability to get enough of the very deep REM sleep in which the brain finalizes the transfer of memories from medium term (daily) storage to long term storage that messes with my mental state.
Meaning I always have a lot of half-processed memories floating around in the undercroft of my mind, taking up space and slowing me down.
Explains a lot, dunnit?
I would be way better off if I could sleep for a minimum of three and a half hours at a time. That’s how long it usually takes people to get to the truly deep phase of REM.
But between my psychological issues, my constant intake of fluids leading to frequently waking to pee, and oh yeah, my smothering dozens of times an hour in my sleep, being able to sleep for that long seems almost impossible.
I tried to compensate with sleeping pills. Took me far too long to realize that they would either not work or work but make my sleep apnea way way worse, resulting me in waking up feeling like I had been lucky to wake up at all.
And that’s pretty fucking scary, So, no more of that.
Doc Costin says that I should try a half-dose and see how that works. Might get the good without the bad that way,
But I am scared of the pills now. So, I have yet to do so.
Right now, the prospect of a nice long coma is appealing. Get conked out for six months. Wake up refreshed and alert, REM backlog finally cleared. Get to start over with a fresh and stable psyche,
Kind of like this :
Sounds good to me. Maybe the world would even be a saner place by then.
Hey, it could happen.
Still haven’t heard from Doc Chao about my x-rays. Really should have called and made an appointment today but I was too busy sleeping.
Monday it will be, then.
Oh. And the “cramp” has mostly left me alone today. Knock on wood.
Could end at any second and never go away again, but I am nevertheless grateful for having some time with only my usual level of slow acting agony when I walk.
Funny how sickness can make you grateful for what you once took for granted.
More after the break.
Up and down
As patient readers have no doubt deduced by now. I spend most of my days either sitting here at my computer (up) or laying in bed (down).
It just struck me that this is, uh….. not enough.
It’s too limited a life. Even sedentary office workers move a heck of a lot more than I do just by moving around the office getting files, making copies, and so on.
No wonder my spirit is so weak. I never feed it! The spiritual strength I crave has to come from the body and the body doesn’t get stronger without being put to work.
This fear of effort I have is extremely toxic. It is life-destroying, or whatever the opposite of life-affirming might be. It makes me shy away from all that is good and pure and bright and wholesome and right like I’m Dracula and it’s sunlight.
Maybe deep down, I feel like I don’t deserve it. That I am such a horribly toxic monstosity that contact between me and the goodness of the world would result in me poisoning it and destroying it rather than it purifying me in any way.
There’s no such thing as a clean turd, after all.
In another way, it’s also about a vastly maladaptive response to my anxiety. My system is hostile to its own adrenaline, and clamps down hard with an antisympathetic response that goes way beyond merely scrubbing the adrenaline from the anxiety from my bloodstream but all the rest of it too, leaving me cold and lifeless.
Honestly, nine times out of ten, I would rather be anxious. At least then I would feel alive, instead of like one of the walking dead.
I would love to know what it is like to be fully alive. To view life with open-armed enthusiasm and see each new day as an exciting opportunity to have fun and do great things, as opposed to my current deathmarch mindset which sees life as a long painful grind that only ends in death.
When I was talking with Doc Costin today, it came to me that almost never look for happiness. In fact I rarely think about making myself happy at all.
Instead I am stuck in this bunker mentality where all that matters is safety and survival and such frivolous concerns as happiness or enjoying life are wasteful and heretical and can only lead to utter ruin.
Like I said to Costin, it’s like I am trying to survive a long dark winter.
But there is no winter. No famine. No cruel deprivation. I am safe and warm and housed and have plenty food and water and other necessities of life. This absurd austerity is completely unjustified by my actual circumstances. I could stop any time and be fine.
“That’s just what they want you to think so they can GET you!” insists the paranoid lunatic that lives in my head.
God damn it, the war ended decades ago. Come home already.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,