Have I used that title before? I’m too lazy to check.

Anyhow. I have been getting impatient with my proclivity for napping.

Patient readers know I nap a lot. My sleep is broken up into one and a half hour naps distributed more or less evenly throughout the day.

This is not healthy. Normal sleep is eight hours in a row at night (minus occasionally getting up to pee) for a reason. We need sustained deep sleep in order to truly refresh and renew ourselves in both body and mind.

And most people don’t even reach deep sleep for at least an hour.

What bothers me even more, though, is my emotional dependence on napping. Patient readers also know that I use napping as a somewhat crude way to regulate mood vis a vis using my naps to reset my always rising background anxiety level.

And it works. But at what cost?

Because the need to nap influences more than just how much I sleep. It weighs on my entire day as the thought of having to go more than, say, three hours without sleep fills me with dread and doing anything that takes me away from my bed for too long makes me very anxious.

It’s like sleep is the hidey hole I dive into when I am feeling freaked out and need to hide from the entire world for a while.

Because, like I have said before, sleep is like death without the commitment. It’s the closest thing we have to being able to die and come back.

When you are asleep, you don’t have to deal with anything. You are safe from the world and all its pressures, demands, emotions, and stimuli.

It is therefore the ideal refuges for those of us who are so fragile that even the very low stimulus life of a reclusive shut-in can be (and often is) too much for us.

But I don’t want to be that way any more. I want to be robust and healthy and strong. I am sick to death of being deathly sick and timid and fragile and weak. I want to be strong enough of will and fiber and wherewithal to face the world and handle it instead of hiding from everything like a victim of shellshock.

That kind of cowardice is unworthy of me. I am a god damned wizard, Harry, and my great powers demand respect. I am, by any reasonable standard, an amazing human being, and I have no good reason to cringe in shame and scurry into the shadows like a startled cockroach whenever struck by the light of day.

Fuck that, and fuck YOU if you think I deserve to feel that way.

I am magnificent. I am incredible. I am supreme.

And I can do whatever the hell I want to do because I have the power.

I have the power, the ability, the courage, and the confidence to rock this crazy old world and show it I mean business.

I don’t have to hide from the world.

The world should hide from me.

Cause I am coming for it, and I am going to shake. Shit. UP.

More after the break.

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Kickstart my heart

Still think there might be something up with my heart.

I am still getting occasional attacks of feeling very ill indeed when I stand up,

Heart pounding, head throbbing, stomach churning, room spinning, palms sweating, no good, very bad feelings abounding attacks of some sort.

And the bad feeling lingers on. Not at the same intensity, thank God, or I would probably die (or at least call for help), but I sat down after getting food half an hour ago and I still feel fairly ill.

My appetite sure as fuck disappeared in a hurry.

If it wasn’t for the pounding in my chest, it could all be attributable to my chronic low grade sinus issues plus whatever it is behind my temples that gets squeezed by the sinus pressure and makes me feel just awful.

I should probably mention that issue to someone medical some day. It’s just that I have so many issues that it’s hard to remember them all.

But the heart palpitations are new. I can feel them in my chest and head them in my ears and feel them pulsing in my head during these attacks and it worries me.

It’s true that the people at the ER gave my heart a good check. Chest X-rays, EKG, two rounds of bloodwork. All aces on that front.

But they were looking for the sort of things that might kill me right then and there. They were not looking for the more subtle things that warn of future badness.

Or that might be my latent hypochondria talking. I dunno.

But for very good reasons, I am quite paranoid about my cardiac health. I am at just the right age for things to start going boom in my ticker just like with all my male relatives, so the phrase “ticking time bomb” is not necessarily hyperbolic.

I get prolix when I’m nervous.

Luckily for me, I don’t have a lot of the risk factors they had. I don’t have a lot of stress or pressure in my life, I don’t have an unhealthy diet full of cholesterol and salt and fat and excess carbs, I don’t drink alcohol at all except on Christmas Day.

On the minus side, I barely move. I spend most of my time either lying in bed or sitting in front of this computer. There are people with desk jobs who move more than me.

At least they have to get to and from their cars and to and from the vending machines and the break room.

Me, I toddle back and forth from bedroom to kitchen three times a day and that is the closest thing to exercise I get.

And one of those times involves me sitting down and watching TV with J&J for an hour to and hour and a half part way through.

And I want to change that. I want to move more. But I am afraid.

Afraid that moving more will actually make things much worse. That it will set something off in my muscles or my heart or my blood sugar or whatever.

So I am not going to start pushing myself more than just a little without having something who knows about these things supervising me.

Basically, I need physio, or something a lot like it.

Maybe then I can get my legs back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.