Today is the first day of my four day between-terms period between Terms 3 and 4 of my VFS education. And already, I am bored and depressed.

Not that I don’t know why, though. For one thing, I had laundry to do, and that meant I had to spend the afternoon naked, and that always fucks up my mood.

Even when school is on, it makes me depressed. But with nothing in my immediate future to focus on, I felt it a lot more keenly.

And here I thought four days wasn’t going to be enough! It should be just right, actually. By the time Monday morning rolls around, I will be rested up and ready to take on the world.

At least, I hope so. One of the things I’ve realized lately was that I was not getting back all I put out over the second half of last term. In fact, I was steadily deteriorating, which explains why the number of academic errors per week kept escalating. I was increasingly mentally checked out because I was just not getting enough of the right kinds of rest.

So I will have to guard against this in the future. Luckily, next term I am only taking five courses, so there’s in theory more free time, but from what we have been told, a lot of that free time will be taken up with production meetings and such.

I hope there’s still some extra time left over, though. I would love to be able to go back to getting to therapy once a week. I think I could use someone to talk to, to be honest. I think things have been building up inside me that need releasing if I am going to be capable of pulling myself together and going in to Term 4 as the competent, organized, alert adult I know damn well I am capable of being.

I know it because that’s who I was at the beginning of last term!

The same thing happened at Kwantlen, too. I would start strong, all organized and ready and determined to not let things slide out of control, then as the semester wore on, I would become increasingly incoherent and all those little “oops” moments started to pile up pretty fast. And so I ended up with way lower marks simply because the mental drain was building up and rendering me exceptionally clueless.

So how do I keep that from happening again?

The first step is to pay close attention to how alert and awake I am feeling. My mind tends to push that sort of thing into the background in order to maintain the illusion that everything is fine and there’s no need to worry.

It’s a nauseating and unworthy state of mind when observed dispassionately. The ship is sinking and I am sitting there pretending nothing is wrong because from where I am sitting,  I can’t see the water rising, and all those potentially upsetting noises, like people screaming and the ship groaning as it is torn apart by the tide, can be ignored as the meaningless static it surely is.

And sure, sometimes terrible things happen “suddenly” and then I have to shout for help and get rescued, but the moment that is over, I go right back to my Happy Place, not having learned a god damned thing.

That’s what it has been like in school. I keep flaking out entirely then going to my classmates to bail me out. It’s patently absurd, and things need not be this way. I am perfectly capable of doing all the things I need to do to keep on track.

But the center does not hold.

Even right now, after having a day where I could sleep all I liked, I don’t feel like I am really here. This disconnected feeling makes it very hard to concentrate and interferes with my executive function, and without that, I am a total fuckup.

Like I have said before, what saves my ass is that I am very good at the actual writing part of the equation. Just like how at Kwantlen, what saved me was actually being good at the academics themselves and so I scraped by.

That’s just plain not good enough.

So I have to start taking this sleep apnea shit seriously, and make a strong effort to get back to using the CPAP machine. If I keep my goal of being well rested and clear headed in mind, I should be able to find the motivation to overcome my psychological block and get back to being able to breathe in my sleep.

I am also pondering getting those Breathe-Rite strips to see if that helps. I know that my sleep apnea is of the obstructive kind, and I am hoping the obstruction is happening in or near my nose. That way, the strips would clear up the problem, especially if I made sure to clean out my nose before I go to bed.

hat’s not the usual kind of fat-guy sleep apnea, though. Usually it’s the kind that involves part of your throat relaxing in your sleep and when it relaxes, it obstructs your airway.

Or something like that.

Oh well. Point is, it’s worth a try. This bad sleep thing is a huge drain on my life and it’s high time I did something about it.

It’s getting to the point where I don’t feeling like I am breathing entirely right when I am awake, either. I think the CO2 builds up in the bottom of my lungs overnight, and  normal breathing does not get it out of there.

So I have to purposefully empty my lungs if I want to breathe properly. And I don’t always remember to do so, so I go around in a fog.

And the fog, of course, makes it harder to remember to do things you should do, like for instance, empty the CO2 out of my lungs.

And let me tell you, I make some god awful noises when I do it. Sounds like I am dying, or possibly that I am already dead and my ghost is trying to haunt someone but can’t seem to get enough breath for a good unearthly scream.

No wonder I am so afraid of suffocating.

It happens to me every time I sleep!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.