And feeling half dead.
No new sulfur burps today, so that was likely a false alarm. So hard to know the difference between justified concern and raving neurosis. Possibly I simply had a mild tummy upset from something I ate. Or I did indeed have a case of some over zealous gut bug, but a very mild one.
Or maybe it was just a reaction to the Keflex. Who knows.
Either way, I feel more or less normal, or at least the local variable defined as such, today. At the current moment, I feel a little crappy from some poor quality sleep I just had.
Talk about tough decision to make. Before supper, I felt very tired. Cooking supper and eating it was not making me feel any less tired. So I decided that, contrary to my usual routine, I would take a nap before writing. (What a wild wacky genius I am. )
But because my life is inherently perverse and wicked, the moment I actually lay down, suddenly I was not even remotely sleepy. Went from quite sleepy to not at all sleepy in the space between two heartbeats. Dead tired, not tired. Boom.
This pissed me off. So I lay there, angry with myself and unable to decide whether I should just get up to write, and thus set myself up for the gag where the moment I get back up and set to work, I am super sleepy again, or to just lay there and try to get some sleep in spite of myself.
Well, indecision led to choice B, as eventually I fell asleep while trying to decide,
And then proceeded to have some pretty crummy sleep that left me feeling crappy when I woke up, and I still feel that way right now. I have a headache (damn I need to get that giant bottle of acetominiphen soon), I feel sort of sleepy but not in a healthy way, I am tired and irritable and hostile to this cold and jagged universe and everyone in it who is happy.
Seriously, happy people. Fuck you. Gimmie some or fuck off and die.
This is not a characteristic mood of mine, but I am learning to accept that I will just plain feel this way sometimes, and the best course of action is not to push it down and suppress it and thus add more energy to my depression, but to let it unfold and try to understand and learn from it.
After all, my life languishes in the doldrums of depression largely due to lack of motive force, primal energy, the deep fire that pushes people onwards and powers them over obstacles.
And anger is part of that primal power structure. Anger, bitterness, jealousy, greed, and all the other “bad” emotions all have their place in the operation of a healthy psyche, and trying to suppress them completely only leads to depression, anxiety, and darkness.
It takes a lot of shadow to cover that much emotion and make it seem like it has disappeared. So much shadow, in fact, that you end up living in the dark and the cold and not knowing why.
But no matter how cold you feel and how much you curse the darkness, with the slightest sign of heat and light you bury yourself deeper in the dark and the cold, because heat threatens to bring to life all the dead emotions you have buried in the frozen tundra of your soul, and the light hurts your eyes.
That is why the basic therapeutic process of digging up those old frozen traumas is so important. Dig them up, warm them back into life, and deal with them in realtime. The fewer of them you have, the more light and warmth you can let into the landscape of your soul, and the more of the good healthy hopeful positive emotions that you so desperately need can you let in.
The hard part starts when they start to melt and revive and demand to be dealt with on their own. Then you never know when an emotion that has little or nothing to do with what is happening to you right at that moment will rear its head and force you to deal with it.
That can be quite awkward and you might be tempted to push it back down, or at least try. In fact, if something really important is going on, you might not have a choice. We are able to suppress our emotions specifically so that we can still act in our own best interest in times when our emotions might otherwise lead us to act against them.
It is just that when you are a damaged person, you abuse that otherwise necessary system and end up eventually suppressing nearly everything in order to keep not dealing with your emotional backlog… which of course only causes it to grow.
Myself, I am still trapped in that cycle to some extent, but I fight it when I can. I have learned to really treasure those watershed moments when something triggers a grand melting of the ice inside me and a big iceberg of suppressed self breaks off the glacier inside and drifts off to melt in the sunset.
Those times might not be a hundred percent fun while they happen, in fact, they are often quite awful. But I treasure them anyhow, because after the flood, I feel so more more alive and solid and whole that I have no problem saying it was all worth it, and then some.
Perhaps that is my next step. Feel about within my soul for the next glacial fault line and give it a few well placed taps with my hammer and piton to set it in motion, letting its own weight lead it to snap off and float into warmer waters to melt, and free me from its frigid crushing weight.
Enough of that, and I might actually catch up on my emotional backlog and be free.
And then what?