Today has been kind of crappy.

Crappy in the usual ways. Slept a whole bunch, and as usual, the sleep got more unpleasant in the afternoon.

The morning sleep, aided by Quetiapine, was pleasant enough. Some dreams, some restlessness, but overall it was solid enough sleep.

But after lunch, I was still pretty sleepy, so I went back to sleep and sure enough, it was the worse kind of sleep, the kind with hyper-vivid dreaming, waking up soaked in my own sweat feeling disoriented and dissasociative, and frankly, not finding it restful at all.

More like I had been keelhauled on the Dead Sea.

So I woke up all groggy and fucked up around 4:30 PM, and honestly what I wanted most was to go right the hell back to sleep, but no, I forced myself to get up and mess about on the computer for a bit because I knew that if I went back to sleep, I would likely sleep for at least three hours and then I would wake up with really low blood sugar and my eat/sleep schedule all fucked up.

And I have just barely gotten back onto my usual schedule from last weekend anyhow.

So I forced myself into consciousness. My plan was to stay awake long enough to eat supper then go back to sleep and do this writing when I got up.

As so often happens, though, the act of keeping myself awake woke me up, so by the time I ate supper, my sleepiness had mostly evaporated.

And that’s where things start getting a little tricky, and highly idiosyncratic to myself.

The sane and logical thing would be to then say “Oh, I am not sleepy any more. Great! Time to go do that writing and then see what else the evening brings. ” Right?

But as I have talked about before, I have this strange problem where once I plan to do something, it is very hard for me to change or scrap than plan merely because it has become obsolete and no longer makes any damned sense.

Ergo, I tried to make myself sleep after supper anyhow, and thus spent a stressful and futile hour and a half or so trying to sleep when all I really wanted to do was get up and do something.

Since then, I have been pondering just what the fuck is wrong with my soggy brain.

There is definitely something wrong with the machinery of motivation and reward. Besides this strange inability to change my plans when circumstances change, I have also noticed that I do not get the right amount of reward when I do something that takes a lot of effort.

Example : say I finally finish a difficult level in a video game. You would think that I would then feel really great. Triumph! Victory! Celebration!

But it just does not work that way. Most often, the most I feel is a cold sense of accomplishment and an overwhelming feeling of depression instead. As if I wonder why I put all that effort into, or at least, the amount of effort it took has drained me to the point where it is impossible to summon up the energy to feel the kind of powerful reward that I should.

Now it is not hard to imagine how that would mess up your motivational structure. Your efforts go unrewarded in a very deep and intimate way. Even if you put in your all and triumph over the forces of evil, you do not feel like you have won. No joy, no exultation. Just grim satisfaction at best.

The tendency to bull through and complete plans no matter what might, therefore, have developed as a way to get things done despite this. The plan, such as it is, gets lodged deep into my intentional machinery, and part of me is so happy to have a sense of purpose for once that my mind resists going back to the unfocused and purposeless state even when that is the sensible thing to do.

If only this lead to the kind of useful, highly determined action plans that lead me to do great things, or at least things that would improve my lot in life.

But no, they tend to always revolve around two simple animal needs : food, and sleep. And that provides a further clue as to what is going on, I think.

Food and sleep are both high reward activities. They satisfy primal needs and they are highly reliable and low effort ways to secure pleasure.

So these weird plans that form in my mind and can’t change are, I think, about more than just the joy of having a sense of purpose for a time. They have to do from the depressive’s deep pleasure starvation due to the anhedonia caused by low serotonin levels.

That is why I am increasingly certain that all depressives are addicts. Only our pleasures vary. One depressive might drink, another might eat way too many high reward foods, still another might use the rush of purpose and self-righteousness from anger as their medication.

Life is so unrewarding to us because of the chemical imbalance that we are forced to cling to whatever provides a strong and reliable enough source of reward to cut through the anhedonic fog and give us some kind of sense that life is worth living.

And for me, those are food, sleep, and video games, in roughly that order.

And here I am, nearing the end of my daily writing, and feeling the urge to slow down and do more other things in other windows because deep down, I don’t want this sense of purpose and focus to end either.

After all, this damned blog is the only vaguely worthwhile thing I do most days, and even it is not exactly going to lead me to fame and fortune.

But if gives me something to look forward to and something to do with my energies and helps me get through every day with just a tiny shred of hope.

And that means the world to me.