Feeling crappy and low again, although I figure I will get over it once I have been up and about for long enough. Have to put some miles between me and all that mad, bad sleep.

So yup, spent most of today asleep. Yaaay. And each time I awoke to eat and/or eliminate, I felt like I had been slow roasting on a spit in the fires of Hell. And now that I am awake, I feel like shit.

No wonder I often succumb to the desire to go right back to sleep wen I am in this state. I feel like crap, why be awake for that? But especially if I am dehydrated, that will only make things worse in the long run.

Or maybe not. It is possible that I genuinely need all this sleep and I should not be berating myself over it or pitying myself for this sleepy senseless life.

Perhaps when I “go to sleep when I am not all that sleepy”, what I am really doing is acting on my lack of deep sleep and trying to fulfill that need, despite the fact that the rest of my sleep needs are met.

And I should just relax and do what I gotta do to get enough REM sleep points to keep the sleep debt at bay, and not worry too much about the hours spent dreaming.

But it just bugs me to spend mst of a day asleep. I am a middle aged guy and I don’t really want to waste what time I have left sleeping.

But then, when it comes to figuring out what the heck else to do with my life, I tend to come up empty. Or rather, when it comes time to motivate myself to do other things.

I am stranded on this lonely little island of a life for now, cut off and confused, and I will stay here till I find the motivation to get into my little boat and row, row away.

Or at least work to make the island bigger, dammit.

I keep nudging myself to at least download some recipes and bake desserts for myself. That way I have an activity to do to keep myself awake and active and moving.

Plus, I get the sense of accomplishment of having made something for myself, and of course, I get the desserts themselves as well, and the little happinesses they bring.

All very logical and sensible reasons to do it. But if the motivation is not there, it’s just plain not going to happen, and all the logic and reason in the world can go disappear up its own asshole, for all the fucking good it will do.

There are no logical motives. Only emotional motives pursued via logical means.

Logic is method, not motive.

So what I really want next is to connect with my emotional self better, and release my grip on this intellect-heavy paranoid mistrustful world-view in which the world is a hostile entity just waiting for my guard to drop for just a second and then it will get me.

That shit done drive me crazy, mama. There has to be a path to a more relaxed, accepting, positive, harmonious, and peaceful being. Something that can make it through the ferocious guardians of my internal self, the giants of my intellectual rigor and suspicious nature, and yet which can provide the sort of soul solace that my parched and pockmarked intellectual landscape cannot.

I just think too damned much, and feel too damned little.

But of course, just realizing that does not solve the problem. And the idea that revelation is the solution to everything is the exact sort of illusion to which the overly intellectual types like myself fall prey in droves.

We act like all our problems are just puzzles to be solved, issues to resolve, problems to fix. Like if we think long enough, we will hack the password to ourselves and be able to just go in there and repair ourselves. But it just does not work like that.

The pleasure of revelation plus the emotional release that occurs when the revelation is of true psychological impact fools us into think that it is the thinking which got us there, and that this pleasure is the point of a whole process.

But that revelation came just as much from feeling and emotional (and spiritual) growth as it did from any act of thought, perhaps even more so.

That is why standard advice which we evaluate as being quite probably true does nothing for us. All the usual advice for depressives just freezes in midair and shatters at our feet, and we just look at it dying there and shrug.

Because until you are at the right place emotionally, all the words in the world will be absolutely useless. It is not a problem accessible via the rational mind, the left side of our brain.

The left brain is powerful but very cold. The right brain is diffuse and lives entirely in the present, but it is also the seat of all emotional warmth and renewal.

So by being such left-brained intellectual types, all about the logic and the rationality and so on, we think we are being sensible and smart, but we are are actually leaving ourselves freezing in the dark.

I am not sure how to escape that. But I think it starts with trying to remember who you were before you constructed this massive set of armor out of the cold steel of intellect for yourself, and to reconnect with that person, and start the process of convincing yourself that you can be that way and still be safe.

That is why helping a depressive is such a crapshoot. All you can do is try to say things that might be what they need to hear at that moment to start the emotional healing process. You can say the truest, wisest things in the world to a depressive, and if it not exactly what they need to hear at that moment, it will be completely useless.

Same as these words, right now.