I feel somewhat better today. I have gotten some decent sleep and I feel calmer and smoother and less tense and paranoid and defensive.

I am hoping that this means last night’s blog entry helped excise whatever it was that had been bothering me and keeping me from being able to relax enough to sleep.

Of course, more prosaically, I might just have been constipated. Don’t worry, not going into details or anything, just putting that out there. I think the seat of a lot of my emotional problems might well lie in some of my physical problems, and not just the other way around.

In a way, though, for a sedentary philosopher like myself, it is a lot easier to deal with emotional problems and psychological problems than philosophical ones.

After all, physical problems require action.

Psychological problems can be tackled just by thinking about them. Or at least, you can fool yourself into thinking you are tackling them by just thinking about them, and that is what matter, right?

So today has been a pretty sleepy day, but for the most part, it has been the pleasant kind of sleepy. The kind that makes me feel relaxed and happy and lazy and dozy and good. Not the other kind, where I feel tired and miserable and weighed down and drugged and bad.

You can get really tired of sleep after a while, and then you just want to wake up and do something instead of being dragged back to bed by sleep, heavy as an anchor that drags you down to drown some more.

Now why do I think of sleep as being like drowning? It must be the apnea seeping into my consciousness again. I do drown a little in my sleep, or something very like it. I stop breathing. It is like being slowly strangled in your sleep. It is a harsh thing to even think about, let alone imagine.

And yet, it makes sense. I have a terrible fear of smothering and that is where it probably comes from. It is also probably the reason I have been a “fresh air fiend” since I was young. I will keep the window open in my bedroom until the cold of winter absolutely forces me to close it, and even then, I will open it for short periods in order to freshen the air in the room.

Anything to get more air, more air, MORE AIR.

So you would think the CPAP machine would be a godsend. That forces air into my lungs! It even moisturizes it first (otherwise, I assume, it would dry my lungs out, eep!). And it is true, there was a time when I was using the thing that it almost felt like dialysis for my lungs. It felt like it was clearing the bad air out and replacing it with good cool clean air. And that was before I even went to sleep.

Did I sleep better with it on? That is hard to say, and that is part of why I abandoned the thing. I got pretty angry when I would still have really bad sleep days when using it. I figured, if going to all this trouble does not even keep me from having terrible sleep days, fuck it.

That seems shortsighted now. Maybe it just needed a pressure adjustment in order to do its job better. Maybe I just needed to give it more time. Maybe if I had stuck it out, I would be in a much better place in terms of health, both physical and mental, by now.

It is worth a thought, anyhow. But strapping ymself into that machine every time I want to sleep is not easy. Despite what I know to be true, some anial part of me is always sure the thing will actually smother me somehow. It takes considerable emotional control to suppress that part of myself and in essence submit tot he experience, and that kind of thing takes its toll after a while.

As I have mentioned before, I have even resisted wearing an oxygen mask when I was on the way to the hospital in an ambulance because that primitive part of my brain felt like the mask was smothering me.

Never mind that it was doing literally the exact opposite of smothering me. In fact, it was probably giving me better air than I have ever had in my life. (Even better than the awesome air in New Mexico.)

Nope, i just wanted to rip that thing off my face the minute they put it on, and only my disinclination to get into a physical scuffle with two burly EMTs kept me from doing it.

There has to be something to all this fear of lack of air. I sometimes wonder if I have problems that go beyond just sleep apnea. Maybe I have some kind of waking apnea too, something that causes me to not quite get all the bad deoxygenated air out when I exhale, and so it build up over time, taking up space that the new oxygen-rich air want to use.

It is only a theory, and one I have entertained for a long time without acting on it. There are certainly times when I feel short of breath and can’t figure out why when my life is so damned sedentary.

Sort of thing I should mention to my doctor, I guess.

Anyhow, the good news is I feel better today. I think all the brooding is doing me some good. I have decided I like brooding. Brooding processes emotions, albeit as a slow steady burn as opposed to some big raging storm of catharsis.

But I am not a raging storm kind guy anyhow. I am too clamped down. So maybe a steady brooding release is the most realistic and effective way for me to let the bad stuff out anyhow.

I just have to remember to keep the pressure on to push things out and not bury them again.

And remember that I don’t always have to take everything on at once.

I can just let it burn, slow and even.