Just woke up from sleep I wasn’t sure I needed but took anyway as a precaution. Now I feel far sleepier than I did when I went to sleep. Such is the absurd game of Whack-A-Mole that is my life.

I am increasingly discontent with my life. I am getting sick of spending so much time lying in bed playing Android games on my tablet. It is starting to make me feel trapped, like I no longer enjoy it but I can’t stop doing it because I don’t know what else to do with myself.

It’s just too easy. I could get up out of bed to do something, even if that something is just fucking around on this here ancient computer of mine. Or I could stay in bed and play games on my tablet without even sitting up.

I have said it before and I will say it again : the path of least resistance sucks.

I am tired of being water. Water always seeks the lowest level. It has no form of its own, so it takes the form of other things, but weakly, as it has no interior structure. Left on its own, it will always sink to the lowest level with the least strength and structure, and stay that way. It has no will of its own so it stays where where it is put, and whatever happens, it doesn’t resist, it adapts. The only thing that can make it move is gravity.

That’s how I feel about myself. I might cautious begin to take form, but at the slightest pressure I fall apart again. That is my main defense mechanism. Fall apart, dissolve, and spread out as far as I can so I am nothing more than a thin layer of moisture that goes down the drain to escape the moment your back is turned.

And how do you attack that?

The thing is though, I am not under attack by anything but the vague idea called “pressure”. And falling apart is the only way I know how to deal with it. I have an active and very vivid fear of being in situations where I can’t just fall apart if I feel the need. Where I have to maintain my shape no matter what.

That’s one of the seeds of my agoraphobia. When I am home, I can escape into sleep whenever I want. I walk out that door, and suddenly there is no nice cozy bed to retreat to when I need to shut out the world entirely.

Otherwise, I will feel trapped. Trapped by having to stay awake! I think you will agree that this sets the bar very, very low. It’s not like I can strap a mattress to my back so I can take a nap wherever I go.

For one thing, it would make me rather conspicuous.

Admittedly, the desire to nap is less of a problem than it used to be. I am a lot better at taking enough stimulation from the outside world to keep awake than I used to be. The situation that used to haunt me – namely, getting really sleepy in public – doesn’t happen very often.

And thank goodness for that, because that is a nightmare for me. Being out of the apartment and thus exposed is one thing. Doing it when sleepiness has robbed me of my main (only?) weapon, namely my sharp intellect, is a recipe for panic extraordinaire.

Shows how dependent I am on this big ol brain of mine. Even a light impairment makes me freak out. That’s why I don’t like any, shall we say, recreational chemical experience which dulls my intellect, and that’s a lot of them. I need all my my wits just to function. And nobody as paranoid about the world as I am can trust that they will be safe while stupid.

And that is truly the throbbing exposed nerve of my deep, deep neurosis. Feeling unsafe when intellectually impaired make sense if you are dodging bulls at Pamplona or writing a real bear of an exam, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you are just walking from place to place on the streets of a modern city.

And yet, the reaction persists. Only safe when smart. The moment my intellect is impaired, I feel a tremendous sense of danger, as if it was only my wits functioning at one hundred percent capacity that was keeping me safe before.

And that is clearly absurd. If I am safe, it is because I live in a safe neighborhood in a safe suburb of a safe city in one of the safest nations on Earth. My razor keen wits have nothing to do with it.

And it’s not like I am super good at paying attention to my environment anyhow.

And yet, that fundamental lack of trust in the world persists. My childhood bullying did far more than make my childhood unpleasant. It robbed me of my fundamental sense of safety in the world. There is a part of me that will never calm down, never relax, and never feel safe because of what happened to me as a child.

The sexual abuse probably didn’t help either.

Until therapy can reach that part of me, I will remain ill. I am pretty sure no other external solution could help. I could be as rich as Croesus and live in a compound surrounded by a flaming moat with so many security guards they barely fit and cameras covered every square millimeter of space and that part of me would still feel unsafe.

Like I have said before, there is a part of me that is just a scared little animal, a treed raccoon, a cornered rat. It’s the most damaging part of my mind, and the most dangerous. It stands tense and ready to fight with every inch of my being if I come under threat from outside forces similar to the ones from my childhood.

I really hope that kind of situation doesn’t happen before I become more sane.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.