But I’ll get over it.

Today was the day my feature script for my movie (which is linked here) was workshopped by my Feature Script class, and it was nasty.

Not that anyone was mean to me. Mean is easy to deal with, especially for someone with highly combative nature that is always bubbling just below the surface like me.

So there was no battle, no war damage, and no coup de grace. Instead, it was the death of a thousand cuts as my prof and my classmates listed all the flaws they could find in the darn thing. And that takes its toll.

But that’s how this thing works. I have scads of notes for the eventual day I rewrite the darn thing and actually produce a SECOND draft. I am thinking I might type them all into a text file in bulleted form so I can go through one by one and decide which ones have the highest priority versus which ones deal with something I just plain don’t care about.

That would go a long way towards alleviating the enormous amount of anxiety that I feel at the prospect of trying to apply all those notes. While I know I could apply them one by one, in order, if I wanted to, my brain insists on trying to assemble them into a logical plan of action despite their being simply too many variables for conscious thought.

That reminds me of an issue that came up today. The fact that people give me a ton of highly useful notes but I never use them,. Many of my classmates have complained that they have told me about something over and over again with no result. Teachers too. It’s like nothing they say penetrates, and I think the above is why.

I just can’t face a ton of notes. And I don’t seem to retain instructions. It’s a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it.

I have been having trouble concentrating lately, and I know why. I don’t get nearly enough sleep. I give maybe five hours a night, and that’s just plain not enough. The reason we sleep for around eight hours a day is that it takes that long for our minds to reach the really deep kind of sleep which restores and refreshes us. Add in my sleep apnea, currently untreated. That insures that the sleep I do get is of poor quality and quite low in the kind of sleep that leads to alertness and codifies memories.

So no wonder I can’t remember anything. My brain is full!

I will try to catch up over the break. I have tried getting back into the habit of taking naps, which would at least be a kind of solution. But it’s hard for me now, at least on a school day. I find it very hard to relax. I want to be doing stuff, and yet, I get caught between that and depression’s fucking inertia so I end up just depressed.

Al least while I’m awake, I’m breathing properly. More or less.

It would be amazing to have a clear head for once. I think I have forgotten what that is even like. I feel like I have been fighting to focus for my entire life, in all senses of the world. I have always known what it would take to get my excrement in formation. I know the steps. I know what’s wrong.

But I am starting to think that I may not be able to fix it due to the nature of the problem itself. Hard to fix a broken mind with that selfsame mind.

But there are simple things to try. Like finding a quiet spot and just letting my mind go slack. Give myself permission to do nothing but process that big backlog of mental processes that need to be run in order for me to finish processing things.

That’s what meditation is all about, by the way. Most people are walking around with a high persistent cognitive load from incomplete thoughts, repressed emotions, and other mental garbage. Meditation lets you clean that stuff out of your mind by stilling your conscious mind in order to leave as much mental CPU as possible for processing what is already in there, just waiting for a chance to finish.

Most meditation experts make it sound like something complex and mystical, when really you can skip the mystic bullshit and just train yourself to relax the mental muscles that hold all that stuff in, and finally let your poor mind dump its waste processes.

I think it’s especially bad in this heavy stimulation era. That adds a kind of sensory exhaustion to the mix. With the Internet at our fingertips, we all can feast on an unnaturally rich amount of stimulation and I think that has long term effects we don’t even perceive yet, let alone understand.

And the thing about stimulation in complex mammals is that we hate any sudden change. Especially us introverts. So when you go from the unnaturally high stimulation level of the Internet to the much lower stimulation level of real life, you will instantly want to go back to the higher stimulation level as fast as you can.

And that, children, is why the Internet is addictive. Now you know.

So far, I have found no ideal cure for this. Obviously, the solution is to taper off your stimulation levels. But it’s not like there’s a pre-made series of gradually decreasing stimulation level tasks.

Incidentally, I am pretty sure the stimulation level issue is why so many people I know bitch about not getting enough sleep because they keep staying up till the wee hours of the morning even though they know they have work early in the morning.

If you want to get to sleep at a decent time, you have to unplug, as hard as that will be.  And do it two hours before your bed time.

That sucks, but it’s worth it for decent sleep.

And now, I need a NAP.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.