Oy. Just took me almost an hour to get my ass out of bed.

I kept drifting in and out of sleep, never fully entering either state. It was a strange twilit world where what remained of my conscious mind felt like it was trapped in a whirlpool that was pulling it down into the depths of consciousness itself.

Which kinda sucked.

Even sitting up didn’t fully release me from the whirlpool’s grip. I was still floating in and out of consciousness, although I was at least not going as deep into sleep as before.

Eventually I actual pulled a quorum of my marbles together and was able to get up and go put my lunch together then come back here to type to you lovely people.

In local news, the sheet and the blanket are now on my bed.

So yay, I did a thing.

And I have taken one nap in their embrace and as you can see by what I have written above, it went well (?).

One of the many paradoxes of my bizarre existence is that really good sleep usually leaves me feeling really messed up because of all the REM activity is suddenly trying to catch up on now that I am actually sleeping deeply enough for it to happen.

So like I always say, it leaves me feeling like some kind of seer or mystic that has just had their mind hyper-activated by having a vision.

That kind of thing can take a lot out of a fella. You end up burning through a hell of a lot of brain calories all at once.

But what the hell, I’m down for this. Go ahead, brain, burn through all those latent dreams. Throw them onto the inner pyre and let them blaze.

I am perfectly willing to suffer like this, or worse, if in the end I actually reach a well rested and rejuvenated state.

I barely know what that’s even like. For most of my life, it has only happened by accident. The random forces of tension, anxiety, paranoia, and sheer neurosis achieve some state of equilibrium in my mind, like different sine waves just happening to converge into harmony now and then, and I wake up feeling great.

But who knows. Maybe with my wonderful new bedding, I can make it happen more often, and actually live a much calmer and more restful life.

That could be huge. Or at least, very nice.

Now that I am digging into my history with sleep, I realize that even as a kid I had a hard time getting to sleep and my sleep was anxious and troubled. It was nothing for me to wake up to sweat soaked sheets wrapped around me in knots, or to be awoken by falling the foot or so from my bed to the floor.

Like I said before, I’ve never been very good at sleep.

Gee, you’d almost thing something massively terrible happened to me at a crucial stage of my childhood and that trauma completely derailed my growth and kept me from completing many important stages of development.

No wonder I can be such a toddler. No wonder I completely failed to develop normally. No wonder I never had an imaginary friend nor did I play with toys.

I retreated from reality into the world of my burgeoning mind and so I became a highly intelligent and articulate man-baby who despite his prodigious abilities can’t pull himself together enough to actually do anything with them.

And it’s all because of that crippling psychic injury I refer to as the Wound.

It’s hard to deal with life when you are crippled in a way nobody can see. I bet it wold not even show up on an fMRI scan of my brain.

All I can do is feel as much of the pain as I can take at any moment, and work my way through it that way.

God knows how long that will take.

But it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

More after the break.

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It’s not my fault

This is something I need to remind myself on a regular basis because I tend to forget.

It’s not my fault that my life has turned out the way it has. I have done remarkably well given how very psychologically damaged I am and have almost always been.

Too well, perhaps. Never letting the world see my pain. Always pretending everything is fine when other people are around. Always presenting the same cheerful, lovable, engaging, funny face to the world.

But let’s try to stay positive.

I have done nothing wrong and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah, my life has not gone the way I would have wanted it to, and it hurts to think of all my peers that have gone on to have actual lives, some quite successful, without me.

But I ain’t dead yet. Not quite. And I am determined to overcome this massive mental injury deep inside of me no matter what it takes.

Maybe I should be looking into deep spiritual practices. Shamanistic stuff, even. But it would be very hard to get past my knowing that it’s all bullshit.

I fear what would happen would be that it brought out that dark rage in me and I would just end up screaming at some poor well-intentioned practitioner about how they can’t help me because they’re not even remotely strong enough.

The darkness inside me would eat you alive, kid. Best leave it alone.

I guess that, as usual, I am just going to have to figure out how to do it my own way. If neither secular nor spiritual aid can reach me, what else is there to try?

So I guess I have to do everything by myself, as usual. I don’t even know what it is like not to feel like I am completely alone in my fight against my problems.

Doctor Costin tries, but he’s not strong enough either. And he is in his seventies. If I was to truly let loose with the “real me” it could literally kill him.

Maybe if I was in some kind of institution, I could let it all out. Some quality time spent screaming in a rubber room might do me some good.

Or make me worse. I don’t know.

I could try to learn to channel it into my writing. That could lead to some amazing and disturbing stuff that could rock the world.

If anyone read it. Which they would not. Because first I would have to share it with the world and I am too chickenshit to do that.

But, um. It’s not my fault.

I guess positive was just not in the cards for me tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.