You know what I am talking about. The sleepiness thing.

Ended up sleeping a lot, but it was not the good, healthy, relaxing, restorative kind of sleep. It was the harrowing, uncomfortable, tortuous kind of sleep that leaves me feeling like I have run a marathon while sustaining a heavy beating.

And so, in a small way, I decided to fight back. I got up and moved around a little, and that made me feel a little better. But I still ended up feeling really depressed this afternoon.

So evidently, the problem is not yet solved. I am not surprised, and that is not just the depression talking, it’s science. A small change in Paxil dosage would take a lot longer than a few days to have any major effect.

That said, that leaves me wondering what I did right that had me feeling better for a few days.

Well, what did I do lately that was unusual? Easy… I went out on Sunday to pick up my meds. And I had lunch at White Spot. These two things helped make me feel more together and adult and capable, as well as getting me a little exercise and lots of fresh air. That is probably what did it.

So why don’t I do that more often? That’s the million dollar question right there.

Part of it is money. I have had it financially rough this month, and while the GST refund cheque was an enormous help, I still feel shaken and it is making me all weird about money again.

For a while there, I was making progress in giving myself permission to go do something fun now and then, even if it costs $. But that was when I was feeling more prosperous. The financial shocks of the last month have left me feeling vulnerable and helpless and poor again, and that makes me go into Scrooge mode, or at least, my variant of it.

I’ve always identified with ol’ Ebeneezer.

So the fact that I did something that wasn’t “necessary” while I was out there also probably helped my mood. You need to have joy in your life. Pleasure. Fun. Something to look forward to. Mere survival is never enough.

But walking out that door doesn’t have to mean spending money. I know this. There is no reason why I couldn’t just go for a short walk around the block, or go window-shopping in Richmond Center, or just go explore via the Skytrain, once I get my bus pass renewed for this year.

That’s another thing tugging my mood downwards, financially speaking. Having to come up with the $45 for my yearly bus pass. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful as hell that I get this amazing deal on mass transit. $45 a year? That’s $3.75 a month for unlimited access to the entire transit system. Not frigging bad.

But you still have to be able to pull it together. Cashflow knows no mercy for the poor. You have to have it to spend it.

It’s not that big of a deal, realistically speaking. I have $115 now. Take $45 out of that and I still have $70. That’s enough to get me through the next week no problemo.

And yet, it feels like this big burden. It’s ironic, I have all this excellent mental hardware for handling money. I am not afraid of numbers, I have an intuitive understanding of finances, I have a good mind for the kind of calculating thinking required for that kind of thing. I am good at logical thinking.

But none of that is a sure fire method for overcoming a disordered mental state and distorted emotional reasoning. I know exactly how little a problem it is. And yet, the feeling of it being a huge burden remains.

Thus we see the limitations of using rationality to conquer one’s emotions. No matter how logical you think you are, in the end, the emotions always win. We are emotional beings who can use logic, not vice versa. You either deal with your emotions or become their slave. Even reason must negotiate.

This is, I suppose, the long lesson that I am learning : to deal with my emotions, to be emotional, to remove the straitjacket of supposed rationality and reasonableness from my starved and sensitive soul and just allow myself permission to be human and fallible and unreasonable and emotional and alive.

I can say all I want about knowing that emotion is king, but to truly take that step into the darkness requires a faith in the universe that I have never had in my emotional repertoire. The idea of just trusting that you will be okay when you can’t use your massive mental machine to know you will be okay is still utterly alien to me.

I can only remind myself that most of humanity does not life within this cage of reason and gets along just fine. They have that faith in the universe I lack, and that does not mean they are constantly suffering from preventable traumas. The world is not nearly as treacherous and harsh as I think it is… that’s the disease talking.

Those people with faith they will be okay when they clearly lack sufficient evidence for such a conclusion are not broken. They are the healthy ones. The happy ones. I should be striving to be more like them, or at least, learn their lessons.

I’ve spent too much time as a somewhat smug and superior outsider to be able to hack actually trying to be normal. Ick.

It all devolves back to that fundamental sense of security variable that is set in childhood and is seemingly constant after that. All the traumas of my childhood, the sexual abuse, the bullying, the parental neglect… all that left me with a shattered sense of safety, and in the wake of that shattering, I developed this over-reliance on what I did have, namely an excellent brain and a highly flexible yet strong set of logical tools for discovering the truth.

But as powerful as it seems, that kind of think is a lousy substitute for actual emotional development.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.