I’ve confirmed it : taking two Gabapentin before going to bed REALLY helps me sleep.
Because I just had another (for me) MASSIVE four hour nap. What’s more,
I definitely feel like I slept well,.
I’d like to get back to it, to be honest.
Because I am still kinda sleepy. If there wasn’t blogging (and eating) to do, I probably would have just gone right back to sleep after answering the phone and emptying my rather full bladder.
Not that those two were related.
The phone was my grocery order. I did it a day early because the cookie levels in my bloodstream were getting dangerously low.
Well I guess I better go get some actual food instead of just scrounging a meal from the stuff I keep here in my room with me,.
Here I go!
And I’m back. My groceries are sitting out in the living room. Normally my wondrous roomies would have put them away by now but Joe’s in a meeting.
He attends this Toastmaster science fiction club meeting via Zoom every Saturday. So does Felicity. They gently exhort me to join them every now and then, but so far, social anxiety has kept me away.
Some day, though, dammit.
Because they seem likie a really great group of people and the meetings seem like the would be a lot of fun.
But when I imagine going the fear rises like an interposing wraith and pushes me back into my cage.
Man am I sick of that shit.
Because what the fuck am I even afraid of? I’m charming, I’m witty, I have charisma on camera. And these are science fiction people. My kind of people Nerds!
So it’s just this mindless phobia holding me back. A stupid and unjustified reflexive shying away from exposure like roaches fleeing the light.
I was originally going to say “like rats fleeing the light” but rats are cute.
So I ask myself, how do I resist, then? Because I am certain that if I can kind the will and the wherewithal, I can overcome these petty restraints and break free.
But do I really want to be free?
That’s what it really boils down to in the end. I could free myself any tie I want but there’s this big part of me that takes comfort in these four stone walls because they shield me from having to face that big bad world out there with all its chaos and overstimulation and the crushing burden of infinite options.
Still working on that.
While I am so very divided on this issue, nothing can happen, which is perhaps the point. Deadlock means my depression wins by default.
So I need to make peace with the fact that the freedom I supposedly crave comes at the cost of having to face that big bad world out there and truly grow up.
And that will mean something tender and delicate in me will have to die. There is no two ways about it.
They say that in order to be free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.
Well I think I’ve found mine.
More after the break.
A thing called innocence
That little part of me mentioned above is something I would have to call my innocence.
And I realize now that I have been protecting it for a really long time. It’s the part of me that fled into the deepest parts of my mind and set up an impenetrable fortress there, one where nobody could EVER touch me EVER AGAIN.
And that’s where I still live today, 45 years later.
It’s the part of me I am protecting by refusing to become a harder, colder version of myself. Which sounds noble on paper until you realize that means never growing up.
For as long as I can remember, life’s been trying to make me “toughen up” and I have steadfastly refused. I instinctively felt that toughening up would cost me something very precious and dear, and I refused to give that up, so I stayed weak instead.
The rape probably figures strongly in this. It ripped away most of my innocence, shattering me, and I have been clinging to the last remaining shred of it and protecting it with my life ever since.
Iin doing so, I was unknowingly fighting the very force that could have made me as strong and tough as I needed to be to survive : adaptation.
Had I not fought it tooth and nail, I would have adapted to my life circumstances and life would have gotten a hell of a lot easier for me.
Gone would be the bristling hypervigilant paranoia it takes to protect yourself when you are so weak and vulnerable. With strength and toughness comes security because you know you can handle whatever comes up.
Right now, I have no faith in my ability to handle anything. Except maybe an argument on the internet.
And even then I might fuck up and take things too far.
I’ve felt weak and incapable and incompetent and unfit for survival my whole life, An d yet I have also fiercely fought the very thing that could have cured me of that.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. I’m afraid to change, A strong, capable, able to handle anything version of me seems so alien to who I am right now.
But that’s not a good reason not to become him., Butterflies must seem pretty weird to caterpillars, and like I have said before, to transform into one must seem like death.
But its only the death of the caterpillar form, not the being itself. We have all radically changed form from a baby to an adult and yet here we are, still alive, still a part of the cosmos, and still answering to the same name.
So if to grow up, my current form has to (metaphorically) die, so be it.
Only the inessential aspects of myself will be lost. That which has been the real me for my whole life with remain, and grow.
Time to shed my skin so I can grow bigger.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.