Forgive me if I am a little off key and out of phase tonight, but I seem to have hit the drought phase of my sleep schedule and I have not slept in almost 24 hours.

Luckily, I went to the pharmacy and got a refill on my Zopiclone today, and I will take that after my midnight snack and hopefully get some normal sleep.

Normal for me, anyhow.

It disturbs me to imagine that I am going to be stuck on this long mood/energy wave function for the rest of my life. It is so unstable and unbalanced that I just cannot trust it and if I cannot trust the personal universe in which I live, I despair. How can I get anywhere if it is going to be like that?

Of course, I know the answer. Life does not have to be a flat straight road smooth road in order to be worth living. I am never going to be able to control things that much. Certainly not without a heck of a lot more money in my pockets. I know that I would be better off if I simply learned to accept the cyclical nature of my reality instead of expecting straight lines and always being battered to pieces by the waves. Can’t control the weather or the waves, just my little boat. Got to be a better pilot instead of only taking my craft out on the calmest of waters. And so on.

But I am not there yet. Letting go of the illusion of control is harder than anything I have ever done. Ditto for learning to accept unpredictability, spontaneity, the free full flow of emotions into action, acting on inspiration, taking more chances, and all the rest of that good but difficult stuff.

I can only hope that I find my own kind of stability and safety some day, out there in the world. Something unique to myself, something that maybe requires a lot more input of energy and will than my current slackluster life, but is so much more rewarding and suited to my personality that it is far, far, far more than worth it.

Until then, I will have to keep walking into the deep dark woods without compass or map, trying hard to convince myself that I have the faith in my own ability to handle things and survive that I have lacked for my entire life, and find my own path through the darkness to the light.

Certainly, I will continue to stretch open my emotional aperture and learn to accept that life is turbulent, not regular, and that you cannot get anywhere on this ocean without getting a little wet.

Today has been pleasant, lack of sleep aside. Went to Costco with Joe and Julian, which is something I enjoy. I have always enjoyed grocery shopping. I am not sure why. Perhaps I am satisfying some deep “gathering” urge from my feminine side. I just find shopping soothing. I even enjoy the mental challenge of sitting what I want into a budget and making the priority calls involved.

What can I say… I just love process. It makes me sound like the dullest person in the world, but it is true. I sometimes wonder if I would have been happier following my original plan to take business in college and become an accountant. Sure, the work seemed very dull, but that was paper bookkeeping, not real accounting. All that stuff is done in spreadsheets on computers in this millennium, and I definitely think I would have been happier as some kind of entrepreneur.

Maybe start my own chain of very quiet, conversation-friendly restaurants. Restaurants for introverts, more or less, and/or intellectuals.

People who actually want to talk to the people they are with.

Oh well, my life is as a writer, director, and all around creative type and intellectual at (very) large now. I might end up in business some day via the entertainment biz, but I am a writer over all.

Tomorrow, I will be playing host(ess?) to some friends, and making supper for them. Well, baking up some mini pizzas for them, anyhow. Not exactly from scratch, but I still will enjoy cooking for people. And I will try not to get all emotional about it like I usually do.

That is the problem with cooking for people with all the love in your heart. That is putting a lot of emotional pressure on food. You cannot help but take rejection of your food as rejection of your love, and hence, of you. And when you are a big ball of soppy sentimental sensitivity like me, whiskers aquiver with vibrations real or imagined, you are so sensitive to rejection that all it takes is a slightly disappointed look and you are a wreck.

I will attempt to steer around these rocky shoals and just bake my pizzas, put them out for people to eat, and try not to take anything personally.

See, this whole learning to live with emotions is tricky. Feeling things is not optional… you will always feel something.

But when you suppress the free flow of emotions, you just strand yourself in a land where you experience all your suppress emotions in slow motion forever. And the longer you practice this non-coping mechanism, the heavier this burden becomes, until you cannot even move for the weight.

And you have borne this burden for so long, and it has grown in weight so slowly, that you think that this is the nature of the Universe, and not just your own version of it.

And that if you just turn and face all these demons who follow you and drag you down, you can deal with them one by one, and free yourself of that massive burden.

And with each demon dispelled, you get more of yourself back, parts of you connecting to one another and merging and coming to life for the first time in decades.

And you get big pieces of yourself back from the Devil.

And that is why they call it recovery.