I have been feeling sad today, for no obvious reason.

I figure this must just be another part of the long grieving cycle that I live in. Like I have said so very many times, I am processing a lot of latent emotion and that is not always an easy task.

It means feeling a lot of things that people don’t like to feel, like sadness, frustration, and rage. It means thinking thoughts I don’t wanna think. It means never know just how I will feel at any time.

But it also means recovery, and because of that, I gladly accept it.

If anything, I would make it go a lot faster if I knew how. I crave the freedom and strength of self that comes from such catharsis. I want to spread my wings and fly high above this impoverished life of mine.

I am so talented and so brilliant. And yet, here I am, mired in the malignant miasma of myself.

No wonder I am so frustrated.

Speaking of craving, an interesting thing happened earlier. I was watching YouTube videos and came across one that looked like it was going to be sad, and suddenly I felt this extremely strong surge of wanting to be sad. Of seeking something that would make me sad.

This is a new thing for me, but I welcome it. I see it as another sign that I am growing as a person and becoming, for lack of a better word, more human.

My psyche is taking baby steps into the world of actively seeking what it needs instead of just passively suffering all the time. I am slowly learning to believe that I can do things to make myself happier, that I can get what I want sometimes, and that I have a lot to offer the world.

It’s early days yet, but very encouraging ones. I feel parts of me coming alive that have been dead and numb for a long long time. And as more of me comes online, I feel more balanced at the center and hence less vulnerable and weak.

Recovery, for me, has been a very long process of waking up. I look back even just a couple of years and it feels like I was half-asleep then.

And that gives me great hope for the years to come. How much more alive, awake, and aware will I be this time next year?

It would help if I could stop abusing sleep, though. I have fallen back into the old habit of sleeping in order to silence my growing anxiety and hit fast-forward on life, and fallen hard.

Irrationally, it was Joe’s shift change that really kicked it into high gear. Somehow the days just seem longer and the hours seem to stretch on endlessly now that I am alone in the apartment during the evenings. It’s the same number of hours in a day as before, but now it feels… different.

And I still feel a clutch of panic when I think about making it through all those lonely, empty hours. Hence my need to separate the hours into manageable chunks via napping.

I don’t even truly know that it would be awful to be awake all those hours in a row. I was doing OK with the not sleeping for a while and it did me no harm. I had at least gotten it to the point where I did not sleep between the hours of noon and midnight-ish. That was real progress for me.

And it was going on Wellbutrin that really kicked that off. It has a stimulant effect so strong that you are advised to take it in the morning, otherwise it will keep you up all night.

But it seems like my problems just swamped the drug after a while. I learned to nap despite it, and so here I am, back in my sleep addiction and trying to find a way out.

My limited life has a lot to do with it. I do three things : eat meals, do stuff on the computer, or sleep. Part of what I am afraid of is that if I stay up long enough, I get bored with the computer, and it is either sedate myself with sleep or try to find something else to do with myself.

And sleep provides such a warm, inviting security blanket. I am beginning to think that my coping strategy when it gets this bad is really to just never go very far from sleep. To literally never be entirely awake. To live a bedroom life (quite literally) where the safety of sleep is never more than five feet away and I can go hide there whenever I want.

It’s like my whole bed is a security blanket.

And because my sleep is so disordered, I never know when I will suddenly get sleepy and that makes me nervous whenever I am in a position where I could not just go to sleep for more than a little while.

I have no confidence, in other words, of my ability to remain awake and alert for more than, say, three hours, even though I have done so hundreds of times without giving it a thought.

I guess that’s the addiction talking, trying to justify itself. I want to be able to just throw off sleep like I throw off my blankets and greet the day with a lusty roar, leave the bed, and never look back for eighteen hours or so.

But I’m not there yet, and it might be that I have to feed the addiction for a while, until I get over this sad phase and am on the way up again.

I guess sometimes, it’s just time to be sad.

And you are better off just wading in and getting through it even though you are perfectly capable of going around it.

You won’t get anywhere trying to stay in the thin thing margins between the swamps.

Might as well finally learn to swim.