Got another needle in the eye today.
Went to my eye doctor place, West Coast Retina Consultants, and they did the usual tests on me.
My left eye continues to be way, way blurrier than the right. It would be totally fair to say that my right eye is dominant. Dominant as fuck, really.
As in, with just my right eye, I read 8 lines of text of decreasing font sizes and with just the left I barely got through 2.
And the second one only had two letters on it!
So that’s depressing, but oh well. I can still see, knock on wood, and there’s doctors trying to fix that left eye of mine.
Hence the injection. Apparently this injection should firm things up a bit.
It fucking hurt, of course. It seems to be my misfortune to be somewhat resistant to the freezing agent they use on my eyeball, so even though that stuff is supposed to make it so that I barely feel it, I fucking feel it.
But it’s just a moment of (admittedly severe) pain and that is way, way better than going blind when my eye goes kablooey from the pressure.
I’m sure you would agree.
Wake up, little foxy
To the tune of this, of course :
I seem to have cleared the cobwebs of unconsciousness from my mind for now.
Yesterday’s clinging sleepiness has, at least temporarily, retreated. I didn’t have trouble getting out of bed to go to the eye place and I didn’t feel sleepy while I was there.
In an extraordinary (for me) act of foresee, I even brought a book to read because I know these appointments often involve a lot of waiting.
Dang I’m clever.
Anyhow, this recent bout with Mister Sandman has got me once more contemplating my troubled relationship with sleep.
I feel like my mind plays around with sleep in ways that are not conducive to my long term health and best interests. I have a tendency to take naps out of what I am sure would turn out to be merely boredom if I were to really look at it.
I sleep because I don’t know what else to do with myself, and that’s sad.
And my journey towards greater mental health will be greatly expedited if I do my best to remember to actively engage with life. To be interested in things, and to pursue that interest with happy zeal. To feed my mind, not just keep it busy. To be intrepid and go out in search of fun and adventure, even if it’s only through my computer.
The mission is to find things in life that make me want to stay awake and engaged. That’s the opposite of my depression because it’s my depression that I am ultimately hiding from with all my napping.
And even as I type these words of wakefulness, I can feel the old and busted part of me moaning and whining about how all this energetic engagement sounds like way too much work and it’s better to just slink off and hide from the world in sleep for a while.
No, it isn’t. Sleeping is easier but it’s not better. I am determined to learn to open up and embrace life and connect with the soaring majestic firebird of energy within me so that I can climb high into the sky and shine my warmth out for all the world to see… and feel.
I would love the whole world if I could. So much darkness and pain in the world that could be solved by showing people just a little love and kindness.
Mama loves ya, baby. Never forget it.
More after the break.
More about sleep
Being super sleepy then having that evaporate on me has really highlighted the difference between needing sleep and just not wanting to deal with life at all.
And it’s that second thing that worries me. That’s definitely depressive. And it points the way to how much work I still need to do to hook up my id and get my whole motivational system online after decades of neglect.
I think I am still afraid to actually be motivated. I am so fearful of the world that deep down I treat motivation like it’s something trying to tear me out of my smelly little socket and that still seems like the worst possible thing to happen to that deep down scared little animal calling the shots from my deeper self.
I guess I am that scared little animal. More or less.
That doesn’t seem quite right but I can’t think of what’s wrong with it. It’s incomplete.
Anyhow, so yeah, I think I resist being motivated because it seems like it’s going to drag me off to God Knows Where and that means not being fully in control of myself and what I do and where I end up and therefore that is chaos and madness and anarchy.
Or something like that.
The degree to which my inner programming demands control and predictability is appalling. I truly have no trust in the universe. Deep down I feel like the only way to be “safe” is to control my life to the point of total predictability and the only way to do that is to basically have no life at all.
That’s certainly the only way to maintain the tragically low stimulation level I now require. It’s like I slid down a long slope because of my apparent inability to ever choose to raise the stimulation level of my life and now I am stuck at the bottom.
At some point I am just going to have to just be scared. Accept that climbing back up will activate my anxiety and do it anyway.
I can always take a Xanax if I get too scared. Or even beforehand.
I know that I am determined to become more robust and engaged and ready so that I am not in such a weak and fragile state all the god damned time.
Somewhere within me lies a raging inferno of energy that lies like a breeder reactor ready to be tapped into so I can do wonderful, amazing, astounding things.
I just need to have the courage to hook that shit up.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.