Other than that, not sure.

Coming to you earlier than usual because of things.

Right now I feel very cold inside. Especially in the middle of my chest. God I hope I am not developing heart problems. (Hello, hypochondria. It’s been a while. ) Both my weight and my radically untreated sleep apnea can lead to heart problems once you hit middle age territory, so it’s not out of the question. My blood pressure and cholesterol are good, so at least those risk factors are not active. But I am still very worried.

You see, I have been having…. oxygen issues lately. There are times when I have trouble breathing and times when I feel very weak. Usually, the solution to both conditions is to deliberately empty out my lungs so that the used air which seems to accumulate in the bottom of my lungs is expelled, and good clean air can replace it.

So maybe I am suffering from sleep apnea related lung damage. I only recently learned that damage from sleep apnea can accumulate in your lungs and reduce lung capacity. I don’t know if that’s permanent or not. But I could not stand to live in a future where I have tubes down my throat 24/7.

They would have to keep me knocked out, or I would kill myself.

Today was a therapy day (surprise!) because my therapist will be out of town come Thursday, so it was Tuesday or nothing.

Works out perfectly, because I also will be going out of town come Thursday. As you all know, I will be going to Vancoufur come Thursday, and I am pretty excited about it.

Not just for the convention, but just the chance to escape my life for four days. Being semi-agoraphobic, I don’t exactly get many changes in scenery, and it will be nice to stay in a good hotel room with fresh bedding and hopefully an excellent AC for a while. A chance to spend some time somewhere a little more civilized than the bedlam I tend to live in.

I have a taste for order, cleanliness, and neatness. I just don’t seem to be able to provide it for myself yet.

Therapy was meh. Not a great session. Mostly, I talked, and while I love to talk, I can talk for hours and hours about my bulging bouquet of neuroses and nothing really gets done except for a little catharsis. I need some pushback in order for therapy to be worthwhile, and today, my therapist did not have much that was useful to say.

These things happen.

Then again, I was in a somewhat sorry state myself. See, last night I made a teensy weensy mistake.

I took my sleeping pills twice. (That is to say, I took the required pills then took a different, identical set of pills later. Taking the exact same pills twice would have to involve something extremely disgusting. )

And at first, I was pretty scared. Who knows what that could do to me? And with me having therapy the next day! I pictured myself sleeping to a coma-like level of deepness for like, a day, and missing therapy entirely.

Of course, that did not happen. In fact, I barely noticed any difference from a single dose at all. I was a little sleepier than usual at therapy, and it took a little more energy to get out of bad than usual.

But as someone who regularly has days where he is sleepy as hell, I guess I have developed a resistance.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I thought something big and dramatic and possibly quite trippy was going to happen, and instead, it was business as usual.

About that resistance, though : I have joked before about thinking I only got the mentally overactive part of ADHD.

But looking back on my life, I don’t think I have ever been all that good at sleeping. Even as a child I would wake up in the middle of the night either scared or cold, and it would take me a while to get back to sleep.

And as such, I think I had to get really good at keeping myself awake. Maybe too good, because I started having a hard time turning that off at the end of the day.

And according to one theory of ADHD, the problem is that the brains of ADHD sufferers do not produce enough of a keep-awake brain chemical to actually keep themselves awake, and so they have to develop a deep habit of constantly stimulating themselve with fevered activity or they will fall asleep.

No wonder so many of them say that forced inactivity makes them feel like they are dying. In a sense, they are.

Turning now to my steady diet of mental stimulation, I can’t help but wonder if something similar is going on. Certainly the worst times in class for me were the times when I was sleepy and had to keep myself by sheer force of will.

Actually, those situations are hell for me no matter when or where they happen. Makes me afraid to go too far from my bed, because what if I suddenly need to nap?

And that does happen.

So in the big picture, I really wonder if I have ever had what you would call normal, restful sleep. I think something went fundamentally wrong during that period where you learn to sleep through the night, and I have been living with that for at the very least all of my life that I can remember.

So maybe me and that prick Mister Sandman have never really gotten along. And that makes me wonder what effect that had on my life. Have I been sleepy all the time, and never known it?

And how, with the high level of mental stimulation available to me 24/7, would I be able to tell?

Actually stop doing anything to stimulate my mind and see what happens?

But that would be so BORING!

It would feel like dying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.