It’s the middle of the afternoon and I feel like crap. What a coincidence.

I feel very lost right now. I often feel lost. Lost is sort of my default state. But right now, it’s worse than usual.

In addition to feeling lost, I feel dizzy and disoriented. And I don’t think that this is a purely existential feeling. As you know, I have been getting nasty earaches lately, and that has caused me to focus on my ears a lot more than I usually do.

And that has got me thinking about these periodic spells of feeling very disoriented and dizzy that I have had for my whole life, and wondering if there is a physiological cause. Maybe there is something deeply wrong with my sinuses that causes them not just to fill up and get clogged, but for those clogged sinuses to put enough pressure on my skull to warp the bloodflow and give me these periods of disorientation and confusion.

It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s entirely possible that I have been suffering from a form of mild, chronic brain trauma for my whole life. The pressure coming on then going off would certainly be enough to throw one off balance in more than one sense. The dizziness could easily be a product of fluid pressure in the inner ear.

Then again, the answer might not be so dire. It could simply be that I am so goddamned sedentary that I am prone to staying in the same position for so long that I experience blood pooling in various parts of the body, and then when I move, its like standing up too fast… too much blood moving at the same time causes a purely vascular form of disorientation.

And then there’s the chronic abuse my poor battered cardiovascular system gets from my untreated sleep apnea and my semi-treated type 2 diabetes. In many ways, it’s a miracle I am still alive and kicking.

I credit my love of fresh fruit for that, and my lack of drinking and smoking and drinking coffee and so on.

Always be grateful for the bad habits you do not have.

Low blood sugar can also cause dizziness and disorientation, of course, as can dehydration, both of which can happen to me on a summer afternoon. I am ninety percent certain that I don’t feel nearly as bad in the afternoon during the winter months, so heat is probably a big factor. Not in the lifelong issues with periods of disorientation, of course, but with the very modern problem with afternoons being the worst time of the day for me.

Basically, I am a fairly unhealthy person. I have a lot of things wrong with me, and those are just the problems that I have diagnoses for. And the older I get, the less forgiving of my self-neglect and general inattention life is going to be. This big fat meat robot I pilot around is not a very well maintained machine.

Of course, I can’t let psychology completely off the hook. I have felt lost at sea emotionally for a long time too, probably ever since I started school without having gone to kindergarten first, and my world got much harsher and colder as I got bullied and harassed and the school didn’t seem to give a damn.

Hence my feelings of abandonment. School was a real fall from grace for me. Before that, I was something of a golden child. Adults were amused and bemused by me and I spent each day with a babysitter to pay attention to me. People treated me like I was special because I was so bright, and in my own way I really enjoyed that.

Then school came, and everything went to hell.

And as we all know really, really well by now, I reacted to that by turning my back on a cruel and senseless world and retreating into the world of books and TV and video games. This is a not uncommon defense mechanism and in more healthy people, it simply forms the bedrock of their bookish personality.

But I fear that my utter social isolation left me with very little to use to resist this eternal inward plunge. There was (and still is) so very little actual real world content within me that it leaves a soul very vulnerable to the slightest breeze, a ghost on the wind.

And that, of course, just makes you retreat inside yourself all the more.

I have also been thinking about my own lack of structure and how it comes from a lack of anyone giving me structure as a kid. Sure, there was school, and if I had been a more normal kid, just getting my shit together enough to pass my classes might have forced me to develop my own life structure.

But I was not a normal kid. I got great grades without ever having to even crack a book to study. So school imposed no structure or discipline on me… and neither did anything else.

And so when you have no structure and no real experiences and very little in terms of emotional development inside you, you are then free to retreat very far into your own mind indeed. And while this offers a certain kind of protection, it also leads to such a high degree of isolation that you lose the vital inputs from the extra-mental world that regular, healthy folk use to remain connected and oriented relative to their position in the world.

And you end up feeling lost at sea.

I think it is this sense of being lost that is speaking when I talk about not knowing what to do with myself or not knowing how to get from point A to point B in my life. It is never that I literally do not know how to get there. I always know. Knowing things and/or figuring them out has never been hard for me.

It’s always that this sense of being lost, and all my other mental issues, that spring up to block my goal from my view and make it feel like I have no idea how to get there.

My dreams are just lights on distant hills to me.

And I am forever lost at sea.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.