Today has been another of those sleepy days. I have slept all of the morning and afternoon, and I have a distinct feeling that after I am done blogging here, I will be going back to sleep again.

Sleep is a major issue in my life, as any reader of this blog will know, and I really do wonder what the heck is wrong with me sometimes.

The thing that has been bothering me lately is the fact that I do not feel that I can trust myself to make the distinction between “I genuinely need sleep” and “if I sleep now, I can fast forward through life to the next meal, and avoid reality for a while longer. ”

And when your reality consists of eating and sitting in front of a computer amusing yourself, finding that you can’t handle that and have been retreating from it into sleep is quite humbling.

Humiliating, to be precise.

But I have made no secret of how unhappy with my life I am. Mental illness has me trapped in this tiny pathetic box, and I have been there since I was taken out of university at the age of 21.

So this box has held me inside it, and away from real life and all that comes with it, for my entire adult life, and maybe that is why it is so hard to let go of it.

It is the only world I have ever known, and even if it is a crappy, dirty, pathetic, tiny, grotesque world that is slowly killing me in many, many ways, it is home.

Sleep is no way to go through life, though. No wonder the days seem like they are whizzing past in a formless blur. I am sleeping my life away. In terms of hours of consciousness, I am probably getting five days on the week from everyone else.

Times like this, I really miss my hypomanic periods from last month. Sure, I had trouble sleeping and I was worried about that, but at least I feel perky and happy and content and confident. I wish I knew what I did to bring that on. I could use another one right now.

Because right now, I feel tired and deflated and deeply melancholy. I feel like crying and feeling sorry for myself, and I will probably at least do the crying later on, in bed, where I usually do it.

Feeling sorry for myself is another matter. I have never been very good at it. You have to care about yourself and feel that you deserve better than what you are getting out of life in order to feel sorry for yourself. You have to consider yourself worthy of pity.

And I am not there yet, at least… not all the time. Not even half the time.

I have my good days and my bad days. Today has been fairly bad in terms of mood, at least for what little time I was awake. Right now I feel very sad. It is no fun.

But whatever I am going through will end, and I will come out the other side of it a little bit stronger, a little bit more solid, a little bit more able to cope.

It is called recovery, and it sucks, but not nearly as much as depression does.

I would rather burn in Hell then rot in peace any day. Hell, at least, is stimulating. Pain reminds you that you are alive, that you can still feel something, that you are not a numb dumb hunk of flesh trying to live at little as possible, riding a gurney down the hill of life, not even bothering to steer because you are going to end up in the grave at the end anyhow.

Fuck that shit. If I am going to die anyhow, I might as well enjoy the trip. Steer for a wall, dart into traffic, whatever it takes to wake yourself the hell up and show you that life is something to be embraced and enjoyed, not avoided and endured.

That is another thing which makes me suspicious of my motives for sleeping. I could get a lot more done if I could just be awake more, and more awake. Even when I am awake, I feel like I am always sort of sleepy… like I always have one foot in the bed. I am sure that must be part of my own life-avoiding self-sedating self-medicating strategy, but I do not, as yet, have sufficient life energy to escape from this deep harsh gravity well.

Right now I feel so cold, so alone, so fragile, so sad. And yet, not really depressed per se. As low as I feel right now, I know I will feel better later, and that keeps me from despair or self-loathing.

I am just another broken person, and there is no shame in that. There are so many of us, it is not like I am alone in my being just plain not functional. Just not able to cope with life. Raised without the emotional nutrients needed in order to grow into a healthy and functional adult. Wandering the world in pain and confusion, looking for something to cling to for warmth, draining people like vampires of their motive force because we cannot (or dare not) generate our own.

Or, for safety, just basking in the glow of strong personalities, willing to do whatever it takes to stay near them because only the brightest of glows can generate enough warmth to pierce the chill around out hearts and our spirits.

Or shining ourselves, with a light so bright it is blinding, but without being able to feel our own warmth at all. So we seek others to reflect it back at us, and shine as hard as we can for them, because the harder we shine, the brighter the reflection and the greater the warmth we can, at last, feel.

Broken people everywhere.

We are getting something seriously wrong in this society, in this world.