You know what is worse than spending a whole day asleep?
Spending a whole day trying to sleep.
I have seriously spend the vast majority of the day’s hours trying to get some damned sleep, but never quite making it there. I am getting both tired of it and tired in general. It is getting to be somewhat of an issue.
This is the problem the Zopiclone was supposed to cure, and now that I am out, it is back. As previously mentioned, I will be giving my therapist a significant portion of my mind about casually abandoning me to this hellish (well OK, heckish) fate.
It really sucks to be laying in bed for hours and hours trying to sleep but unable to get any deeper than the sort of shallow sleep where you are still aware of your surroundings and are really only slightly asleep. Does not really count at all.
And the most irritating part is that just when I would be getting somewhere near real sleep, my bladder would be full and I would have to get up and take a piss, which then set the clock back a couple hours. And yet, I could not ignore my bladder either, because of course I am not going to be able to get to sleep with a full bladder, am I?
So today has been very frustrating and tiring. I am hoping that after I am done writing, I will be able to finally get some sleep once it gets dark and hopefully quiet. And this time, I will not leave music playing. That is clearly not helping, and I need to change shit up a bit.
At first I thought I was not getting to sleep because my feet were cold. Sounds trivial, but I have had that problem before. I am all tired and sleepy and really need sleep, but I can’t get to sleep, and it turns out that it is because my feet are cold and I just cannot sleep when my feet are cold. My body just will not let me. Presumably it figures if my feet are cold, there is danger of some sort.
But no, today I made sure I had warm feet and yet I still could not get to sleep. Just hovered around sleep’s waiting room, listlessly pawing through the ancient magazines and staring at the clock.
And that cannot be healthy. I mean, I know I said I wanted to cut down on the napping, but that was within the context of a normal sleep pattern, not this god damned feast and famine bullshit.
I get the feeling that my life is chaotic because I have many overlapping biological cycles of varying periods and intensities creating complex harmonics via constructive and destructive interference.
And as I have mentioned many times before, I think one of my problems is that my mind is excessively linear and wants to find or impose order and predictability, rather than becoming more flexible and adaptable to whatever conditions come along.
Learning to surf that waves, rather than curse the tide. Learning to accept the circle as well as the sword. Not always trying to cut through everything.
I am still struggling with the whole not hating my life bit, and progress is slow, but still happening. I have come to realize that the main problem is boredom and frustration. If I was better at finding constructive and interesting things to do with my time, I would not have so big of a problem.
But I am stuck in this rut where it is sit at this computer wasting my life on video games and chat, or read books till I fall asleep, and that is just plain not enough any more. I get so damned bored and frustrated with those options that I want to scream, and yet my depression still leaves me too paralyzed to be able to even think of what else to do, let alone get the willpower together to do it.
That is my journey right now, I suppose. Crossing that dead cold moonlit plain to find the courage and strength to throw off my burden and learn to do more with my life, and hence get more out of it.
That is what all this introspection is about, and that is what the therapy is all about. Getting to the pint where I can rid myself of this enormous heavy weight of depression that I carry with me and in some ways cling to like a security blanket, even though it is killing me.
As the old story meme goes, it will disappear when I no longer need it. And I will stop needing it, presumably, when I heal enough of the deep wounds inside me that I feel strong enough to face the world without its poisonous protection.
Because even though it is a burden and a killer, it is also my protector. It keeps me from having to deal with the world directly. It is the void between myself and others that I created when I withdrew into myself at an early age, and then further into myself as life got worse later on, and it is vast and cold as space, but it protects me even as is isolates me and freezes me inside.
So recovery, for me, kind of looks like orbiting closer to the Sun and getting closer to its warmth and light and maybe even some day finding a stable orbit at a distance conducive to life, instead of wandering the solar system like a comet.
Or maybe find a bigger planet to orbit as a small moon, content to be controlled by its gravity in return for not having to be at the mercy of the wider cosmos any longer.
Or what the hell, maybe it is just ever so slightly possible that I would find a hospitable planet, and land there, and learn to be a human being after all.
With that warm thought, I bid you adieu.
so you want to sleep at a normal time. but you spent the abnormal time (daytime) trying to sleep and not sleeping. And being upset that you can’t. When you’re not supposed to anyway. o.O waitwhat? Why don’t you take the perspective “ah, I can’t sleep because I’m supposed to be awake doing things” or “I’ll be able to sleep after I get some stuff done” rather than “I can’t sleep because the evil doctor didn’t give me a refill on my medicine”. Aren’t they just as valid a response to the symptoms and situation as each other?
Is it ever possible to know how hard something is or isn’t for somebody else? Maybe its easier for you to think up interesting and productive things to do than it is for me to think them up – you just haven’t put in the required effort to actually think them up yet. Which may well be less than mine.
In the end its just ‘the effort required for myself to do it’ – which is not relative to anything at all pragmatically – and the harm and damage comes in the very assumption that somehow you have done action sufficient to get the result, when you haven’t gotten the result yet. Logic would dictate that had you done sufficient action, you would have gotten the result – therefore, more action is inevitably required.
So to get past the emotional “oh I don’t want to” or “don’t feel up to it” or any of that malaize, don’t make the decision based on it. I know it may be hard to even consider making a decision *external* to the process you *may* perceive it takes to get to a result, but you CAN do it. The chances are the process is not exactly what you preconceived it, and definitely not as bad as a depressed mind will predict!, but you’ll never know if you don’t try to get to the result. Decide some result you’d like to see entirely independent of concepts of difficulty or method in getting it. Like, say, “clean windows” as something to randomly off my cuff.
Rather than perhaps whining “I don’t like to clean windows because I have to reach and climb and the cleaner makes me feel sick and makes my hands icky”, which is all about preconceptions of process and excuses, focus on how much nicer each portion of, and eventually all of, each window looks when its sparkly clean, and how much more light it brings into your life as a result. The process to get there? inconsequential bullshit. The result? Awesome. Focus on the awesome, and you set yourself up to find every action satisfying.
Its much harder to stay depressed when engaging in satisfying actions.