OK. No more of that link share shit. It’s blood on paper time.

I have undergone a deep shift lately. On the one hand, I am doing quite well in my war against self-hatred and negativity. I have been feeling its pull lately, but so far, knock on wood, I have been able to resist it. If those emotions want release, they are just going to have to find a new path.

Like this blog, for instance. Grr.

On the other hand, now that I have put up this wall to protect and support my self-worth, I am increasingly aware of just how much time I spend each day feeling like crap.

I mean, seriously. It’s like, before now, the physical ills and the psychological malaise merged into one continuum of crapitude, and now that I have walled them off I can really focus on feeling like shit a lot of the time. Yay me!

But as the song by Suicidal Tendenceis says, I’d rather feel like shit than be full of shit.

And it’s not like I feel deathly ill or anything, just that overall crappy feeling where you are tired and burned out and vaguely ill, with a headache and a bad taste in your mouth.

And it’s not like I don’t have a lot of potential explanations for feeling crappy. Sleep apnea alone is a serious bitch and something I really should be paying attention to treating. Throw in the diabetes and its resulting blood sugar instability, and the lingering and unavoidable biological aftereffects of the purely chemical aspect of depression, and the real wonder is that I ever feel good.

Oh, and one thing that is new : I am getting acid reflux symptoms now and then. At first I didn’t recognize them and thought of them vaguely as heartburn, but once I really examined it, I realized it felt exactly like acid reflux.

I have had acid reflux before, so I know what it is like. It’s this burning sensation that starts in your stomach, but extends up into your esophagus from there. It’a accompanied by a churning, bubbling sort of sensation in your stomach, like your gut is boiling. Very unpleasant.

And nothing to ignore, either. Your esophagus has no defense against the powerful acid in your stomach. Over time, you can end up with lesions of the esophagus (bad), a complete loss of esophageal sphincter function (very bad), and even heart trouble from the acid burning into your chest cavity (way badder than the baddest thing ever bad).

So if it persists, it will definitely be time for a trip to my GP, who will probably put me on yet another pill, this time an acid blocker. I will resent taking another fucking medication, but it sure as hell beats the nasty consequences of ignoring that kind of thing.

Hopefully, though, the whole thing will pass. I think it might be from my slowly and gently applying the brakes to my caloric intake lately. I have been cutting back here and there in order to try to bring myself to a state of sensible portion sizing, and it might well be that my stomach is producing enough acid to digest bigger and more carb-laden meals and hence, producing too much.

If so, hopefully that will fix itself over time. That assumes I manage to develop a higher degree of regularity (in more than one sense) in my diet, which is a dubious proposition, sadly.

Among the many contradictory axes of my complex persona is the one between planning and organizing, and more or less improvising my way through life.

I value both spontaneity and organization, and which one of those is dominant in a given situation depends a lot on the sort of situation it is.

When it’s the completely personal, I more or less wing it. I develop certain routines but they are not very rigid, although it still upsets me if they are seriously disrupted. Even within spontanaiety, I required a certain amount of predictability and order. Go figure.

But the more it involves others and especially the more it involves actually getting certain things done, the more my drive to organize and schedule and arrange comes into play.

In fact, sometimes I think that the main reason I am not a control freak of the classic mold is that I am just too lazy and averse to large amounts of responsibility and the restrictions they bring.

So I am an odd blend of free spirit and control freak. I suppose that would make be a pretty good liberal community organizer, especially if combined with my skills of verbal expression and vision.

Some day, perhaps, when I am strong enough.

Overall, though, I feel my mood has been pretty good. The freedom that I get from being able to feel bad physically without it dragging me all the way down emotionally is very refreshing. In fact, I had not even realized that this is what has been happening until I got outside the phenomenon to see.

That is often how it is with recovery. I did not even truly grasp that I had a disease called depression until I got some medicine that brought me partway out of it. Only then could I look back and wonder “What the hell was all that?”.

Since then, even little bit of recovery has meant waking up just a little bit more. All depressives self-medicate, and the most common way to do that is to withdraw from the world as a way to sedate yourself and keep your demons quiet.

Recovery, then, has to be the process of waking up those demons and dealing with them, one by one, and then in larger and larger groups, until there is no more separation between you and them, and you are whole once more.

Because you are they, and they are you. That can be extremely hard to accept because it means that you have to accept all the ugliness inside you as part of you as well, but wholeness and sanity are basically the same thing, and you have to accept the entirety of the contents of your soul before you be a whole, healthy, sane, stable, happy person.

Be who you are. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.