Feeling very sleepy and derpy today.
Must be one of my sleep days when my sleep debt comes due and my brain wisely makes me shut the fuck down so it can get some maintenance work done.
I was going to comment on this Healthy Gamer (with Doctor K) vid, which is all about dysthymic depression (hello!). I had this whole set of comments I was going to make relating the content to myself, but meh.
Maybe later. Maybe not. Whatever. I am too tired to think about it.
Let’s see what I can remember. He talked about dysthymic depressives like myself not having depressive episodes per se but feeling kind of rotten all the time.
That syncs with my observations. There are bad days and better days with my depression, but I don’t have episodes where it gets far far worse like people with major depressive disorder (MDD) do.
Instead I cling to the baseline. The amplitude of the waveform of my mood is quite low. Never very high but also never very low either.
That is changing as I tear down that wall inside me and open myself to the full range of human emotion. That baseline shit comes at the cost of muting all your emotions, good or bad, in order to create that artificial calm.
The concept is that this omnipresent muting is worth it because it keeps you out of the severe lows and thus keeps you “safe” from things like self-harm.
That’s well worth eliminating the highs as well and thus living a sad but stable life doing not much of anything.
Or so the reasoning goes.
But there are worse things than being really depressed. I am more than willing to risk serious lows in order to destroy that wall of numbness inside myself and find out what it’s like to really feel something.
I want to feel everything. Everything there is to feel. The entire smorgasbord of human emotion, from anger to zealotry.
And I am pretty sure that I am very well armed against self-harm. I know that no matter how bad I feel, it’s only temporary. If I hang in there until it passes, I will be happy that I didn’t do anything permanent to myself.
And what the hell. I’d rather feel bad than feel nothing. Pain and sadness suck but at least they tell me that I am alive, god dammit.
I have not felt truly alive for a very long time. All that “stability” came at the cost of being dead inside for thirty fucking years.
Thirty years I won’t ever get back. And that hurts so bad. All that time alive and in my prime wasted playing video games and blogging and nothing much else.
I could have completed a college degree and maybe a masters in psychology and gone into private practice somewhere and really helped people while living a comfortably middle class life.
At the end of the day, that’s all I really want. A comfortable middle class life. One like my childhood back in good ol’ Summerside, Prince Edward Island.
More than that would be nice. But even then, my aspirations remain middle class.
Just middle class with nicer stuff.
That’s probably how I would live even if I was rich. I don’t want a mansion or a castle or a huge penthouse apartment someplace chic.
I just want a cozy middle class house that I can share with my Man of Life which we would turn into our own cozy little nest to make our home.
Something in a nice, quiet, leafy neighborhood. Like the one I grew up in.
I guess we really do return “home” after all. Even is we have to build it ourselves.
More after the break.
Beat up and beat down
That’s how I am feeling right now.
Going to the kitchen to make supper was a real slog. I’m so body-tired right now. And yet, mostly all I have done is sleepy.
Starting to worry that I have something viral.
You know, like a funny meme, or bad news about Trump.
Ha ha. But seriously, I might have some kind of bug. A flu, or the like. The telltale signs are that I feel sore all over, and like my energy is being drained away by something.
My throat also feels a little swollen and sore, and weirdly enough, so does the area just inside my ears.
That’s a new one.
So the evidence is pretty strong that I have caught something nasty. Yay.
I will, of course, continue to monitor the situation in case things take a turn for the worst and I need to get to the good ol ER or whatnot.
God, even just getting up to get water from the ensuite leaves me breathing hard and feeling like I just ran up a hill and down again.
But it had to be done. Dehydration is a bitch at any time but it’s especially bad when your body is trying to fight something off.
I hope I don’t end up in the hospital again. This time I won’t even have my tablet to keep me entertained because I still have not gotten around to buying the new battery for it.
I’ve been putting it off partly because of the expense ($35 CDN or so) but mostly because I suspect I am actually better off without it.
I sleep better without it. No more lying down to sleep and immediately picking up the tablet to play games until I am sleepy enough to actually sleep.
Yeah, that doesn’t work. I just end up overstimulated and that drags me away from sleep, not to it.
I am much better off listening to a podcast or a YouTube video in the dark before I go to sleep. That drops the stimulation level down to just my ears and my mind, and it is way easier to go to sleep from there.
I suppose I could get the new battery and then just stick the damn thing in the closet by the door where we keep our jackets.
That way it could be there when I am definitely going to need a smaller version of Mister Computer here (Computer Junior) somewhere, but I won’t be tempted to use it all the damned time any more.
Besides, a lot of those games were really stupid.
I miss doing crosswords on it, though.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.