Well, once more it is time to write again, and once more, I feel like crap.

Spent most of today asleep. These sleepy days are just a part of life for me, it seems, although I am filled with lingering doubt as to whether going back to bed because I am still sleepy is really always the best policy. Maybe if I got up and did something at least a little active, I would wake up and perk up and feel energetic and not need more sleep at all.

On the other hand, maybe it would just make me more tired. And then I could end up in a situation where I have to stay awake and cope with things even though I am incredibly sleepy and therefore I have a lot less mental energy available for coping, and therefore feel vulnerable and slow and scared as hell and extremely stressed out.

That is a great deal of why I am so addicted to my bed, so to speak, and why I get nervous in situations where I can’t just sleep right away when I need to do so. I am afraid of getting stuck in that psychologically vulnerable and incredibly stressful state. Afraid to the point of it becoming its own phobia, or possibly just a sub-phobia operating within my social phobia. As bad as I have felt in social situations before, it is nothing like the active misery I feel if I am very sleepy and yet have to deal with the real world and social situations.

Obviously, sleep is the central issue here. If I had a solid, regular, normal sleep pattern, eight hours a night and no need to nap during the day at all, ever, this would not be an issue. Ideally, this would also lead to greater powers of concentration and focus, something I sorely lack.

I know that if I could just focus my considerable intellect and various talents onto one thing and do that thing the best that I could, I would be far more productive, and therefore I would feel like my life had some meaning because I had all this something I had made out of nothing, and might even get, like, MONEY from it or something.

That would do wonders for my self-worth. Right now, I feel like I have a lot of potential that is just not going aywhere because I am so unfocused and messed up. And I have been giving myself a lot of grief over that, angry that I continue to waste my life when opportunities abound and I just have to do something with them in order to make life better for myself.

But perhaos what I am blaming on my own lack of character and pathetic nature is actually at least in part due to sleep issues. I have a legitimate medical issue (currently untreated) called sleep apnea, and it is known to cause problems like inability to focus and feeling kind of sleepy all the time, and I have been blaming my character for something entirely outside my control.

Well, somewhat outside my control. I have not actively tried to get my sleep apnea treated lately, and in the past, I have had a lot of trouble making the appointments. But then again, with my lack of ability to concentrate due to lack of sleep, that is hardly surprising, is it?

So maybe this sea of fog I seem to live in is not entirely the fault of me just being lousy at being a human being, but the medically valid symptoms of a condition I already know I have, and which I have been trying to get treated for some time, but the condition itself (as well as my other medical issues) have complicated that process prohibitively.

This at least partly takes me of the hook for my failures in life, which is somewhat of a relief. I have been struggling against the effects of not enough oxygen to the brain while sleeping (not to mention the resulting massive deficit in the powerfully regenerative deep REM sleep), for such a long time that it is a wonder I have a single wit left to me.

So instead of beating myself up for not getting anything done with my life, I should be patting myself on the back for making it as far as I have despite the challenges I face.

After all, I wrote a million words in 11 months. I wrote a 50,000 word book in 25 days. I write 1K words a day on this blog just to keep in practice. Way back in college, I wrote a play in 24 hours that got rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. Everybody said it was damned funny, which is rather the point with comedy.

So it is not like I have done nothing. There have been signs of life, so to speak. I might not do all I wish I could, but I have to forgive myself of that because I am playing the game with considerable handicaps holding me back.

And I have to stop torturing myself with “If only… ” scenarios, where I flog myself brutally over how great it would be “if only” I could pick an avenue of expression and dedicate myself to it, or “if only” I could get out of the apartment more and do more things in the outside world, or “if only” I had a part time job that brought in the money to do more things, or any of that bullshit.

Like my friend Felicity says, “You can only do what you can do”, and so I need to just accept that I have limitations, and judge myself solely by what I can accomplish given those limitations.

Perhaps the real issue underlying all of this is the inability to truly accept my limitations. The creative mind balks at accepting any kind of limitation, even those of nature and reality itself. And it is a sad, sad thing indeed to truly accept that you are a cripple.

But it is worse than hating yourself for not doing things you are actually incapable of doing?

I will have to give this some serious thought.

Meanwhile, I am going back to sleep.