I swear, I am so goddamned sick and tired of this runny nose that I have half a mind to buy some tampons and shove one up each nostril.

And hey, if I drip a little vodka on them first, I can probably convince the news media that this is the dangerous new way to get high that literally all children between 10 and 18 are doing.

“They call it Smelling the Dragon, and it could be coming to a high school near you. And now, an interview with a teenager willing to say or do whatever it takes to get on television and who will be tweeting about what a lame bunch of morons we are to believe her during the interview. But why should we care if it’s true or not? It fills air time and gets you to click. ”

Hmmm. That ended up being a meatier bit of snark than I had intended. I really should get back into comedy writing. I obviously have a severely impact snark gland that needs to be expressed.

Aaaaanyhow, snot faucet aside, I feel better today than yesterday, and yesterday was better than Wednesday, so the trend is clearly that I am on the mend.

The feeling of being drained of my energy is mostly gone, and boy is that a relief. As I have discovered during my occasional “sleepy periods”, sleeping all the damned time gets pretty depressing pretty quick.

Sure, I can tell myself that my body and mind need the sleep and that the more I sleep, the more I will heal, and all that jazz.

But the fact of the matter is that when it is hard to stay awake, sleep becomes a trap, and you feel like you are locked away in a dark cell while everybody else gets to go on with life.

Sounds ironic coming from someone who has used sleep to fast-forward through time as much as I have, but that just proves that I know whereof I speak from both sides of the cell door.

I still use sleep in order to avoid having to deal with life in too large a chunk. The idea of having to stay awake all day (you know, like a normal person) still freaks me out. I am heavily reliant on the refuge of sleep as a way to zero out my anxiety levels and escape from reality for a time.

It’s the closest thing to not existing for a while outside suicide.

It is hard to describe what I am so afraid of, though. It is tempting to say boredom, but that would be wildly misleading. It’s not being bored that scares me. If it was just that, it would lead directly into the motivation to find other things to do.

What I am really afraid of are the things that come crawling out of my mind when I am bored. With insufficient mental occupation, all kinds of demons and skeletons emerge from my mind and start pushing me towards freaking out.

So I hit the snooze button on that alarm, so to speak, and sleep.

I keep telling myself that I have nothing to truly fear and that I should try staying awake all day just to see what happens.

For all I know, I would go through some sort of eye of the needle crisis point and emerge on the other side a far saner and more emotionally stable person who is more awake than I have been in decades.

That is one possibility, sure. But it’s also possible that I would just lose whatever bare strands of sanity I have left and end up in a rubber room somewhere banging my head against the wall and drooling.

Granted, that is not the most likely option. In fact, that is the exact sort of thing that scares a lot of people but almost never actually happens.

But it is hard to get over the feeling that you are barely keeping your marbles together and that any additional amount of jostling will send said marbles everything like you just scored big time at Ker-Plunk.

It is a matter of faith, in a sense. You have to be willing to just let go and trust that your internal defenses will save you. You have to ignroe everything your emotions tell you about terror stricken emotional conservatism (and the resulting lifetime of eternal inner fleeing from even the slightest fear stimulus) is the only way to stay “safe”, whatever the hell that means.

In many ways, suffering from anxiety-driven depression is like being one of those soldiers from a long resolved war who ends up hiding from “the enemy” for no reason for decades because they become so good at avoiding all human contact that they have no chance to ever learn that the war is over.

Their anxiety about getting caught makes them hyper aware of the slightest out of place stimulus that might indicate that “the enemy” is in the area, and they become expert at moving completely without detection.

That is how I have lived my life as well. When the depression truly ruled me, the simplest and most normal of household sounds (I lived in a bachelor suite in a large house) could make me whimper with fear.

So I just strapped on my blinders and ignored the world outside my computer screen, and only did what was absolutely necessary for survival outside that, and even that not without considerable difficulty.

I look back at that time now and I am amazed that I survived it. I guess I was too scared to do anything rash. It’s absolutely true that we depressives are at the highest risk of suicide when we are on an upward mood swing.

Because we really, really, really don’t want to go back there,

Anyhow, I must be getting better, because I am back to being wrist deep in my own navel and talking about my depression again.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

Love you all!