That is how I am feeling lately, and it is around time I faced it.

I feel pretty shitty lately. Don’t know why. I don’t think it is because of an external psychological stimulus of any sort. I haven’t gotten bad news or been subjected to unusual stresses or had major blows to my ego or anything of that sort.

The switch from writing to editing is a bit of a letdown, true. Like I have been moaning, editing is a lot less fun. But that is not the real reason why editing and depression on my part might be linked.

The real problem is that editing is the most potent form of examination of my own work, and I have a fragile and unstable ego, and therefore going back and looking at what I have done risks taking the thing I am proud of and exposing it to the starving wild dogs of my destructive self-doubt and turning my work into yet another thing to be depressed about.

That is the real reason I have avoided editing for all these years of writing. I just write the thing, post it here, and forget about it. I might edit some on the fly, but for the most part, it has been Rough Draft City all the way.

That’s no way to become a rich and famous writer. But it is what I have been stuck with for all these years because of this inability to go back and look at what I have done and try to make it better.

I am just lucky that I have enough writing muscle and instinctual sense of story and so on to make anything half-decent without having to rewrite.

So right now, I am facing one of my biggest psychological blocks : that inability to go backwards.

And that might be a bg part of why I am feeling down. I can only hope that with patience and perseverance, I can work my way through this problem and achieve a fresh and more healthy equilibrium.

There’s also the matter of the reduction of my Paxil dose a while back. It is not impossible, I suppose, that this has had a slow, cumulative effect over the month or so that it has been in force, and I am only just now feeling the full effect.

Certainly, I have been feeling things more strongly lately, for better and for worse. Perhaps this increase in emotional pressure is revealing some leaks and cracks in my emotional defenses, and it will take some time before I get my feet under me and balance things out again.

There’s also the cyclical issue that (ha ha) I keep coming back to, over and over. Maybe I just have cyclical moods, and that means sometimes I will feel up and sometimes I will feel down and there is nothing I can do but wait for the Ferris wheel to go around again.

Like I have said many times before, I find this idea very hard to accept. I am a linear kind of person. Being goal oriented and task oriented sort of implies it. I want to go from A to B to C, not be stuck eternally going from A to B and back again.

Besides, I have a feeling that the real issue I am facing now is something physical.

Guess what? We are going to talk about sleep.

I have been sleeping a lot lately, and I am not sure why. I was thinking I was just using it as an escape like I have in the past, and that is what I told my therapist last week. And I still think that is a big part of what is going on with me.

A highly dysfunctional but depressingly dominant part of me likes it just fine when I sleep for most of the time that I am not writing or socializing. Life on fast forward, with none of those awkward bits where I am bored and restless and don’t know what to do with myself.

When I am bored with being on the computer and don’t really need to sleep, but my massive anti-action bias make it nearly impossible to imagine doing anything else.

There are millions of things I could do, of course. Intellectually speaking. I could do the Xmas cards I bought weeks ago, for starters. And hey, how about some invigorating and liberating exercise? Everything says that this is how to get your blood sugar down. Just a little exercise, and poof. The muscles suck up the blood glucose to make glucagen, and down the ambient level goes.

But sleep is easier… not better. Just easier.

And I seem preordained to just follow the path of least resistance, which inevitably leads downhill.

Of course, there’s also the issue of psychological release. For a while, I was getting that from the writing, but now I am back to blogging, and it is not the same.

Or maybe it all boils down to sleep apnea. I don’t fucking know. My CPAP machine continues to sit there, unused, gathering dust. For all I know, the thing does not even work any more.

Or worse, it works just fine, and I am six feet away from salvation, and I have just been ignoring it for two, three years now because it sort of wasn’t working once and I got mad so I stopped without telling anybody and so… there it is.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, and I am finding it increasingly hard to care.

I just get so damn sick and tired of being sick and tired. I want to find the way out, but I feel like when I do, I will be too much of a chickenshit to take it.

Maybe I am just all cramped up inside from holding things in too much. I don’t know.

All I know as I got 99 problems, and riches ain’t one.

Oh, did I forget to mention the depression caused by living so far below the poverty line that it is just a dim outline in the sky?

Fuck my life.