I talk about zoning out a lot. And most of the time, I play it off like it’s just part of my gentle, wacky , dreamer’s personality. Just another one of my lovable quirks.

But it’s a really serious problem, one I have talked about in this space before. In previous bloggenings, I have talks about this terrible inward tide that drags me away from reality and deeper into the world of my own mind and all the things I have built there.

It’s like I generate my own intense field of gravity that is constantly compressing the contents of my mind like a star compressing hydrogen and helium into neutronium. It’s the energy released that allows me to shine bright and hot, but at the cost of tearing things apart inside me and maybe someday leading to a total collapse of matter into a black hole from which nothing could escape.

Not even my screams.

So you see, this crushing gravity is my greatest foe. If I could point to a single force in my mind that I would call “my depression”, that would be it. It’s that force I am bowing to when I retreat into sleep. Sleep allows for dreaming, and when I am dreaming, that is the closest I can safely get to that black hole collapse. I am experiencing zero information from my environment, I am expending very little energy to maintain the state, and my mind is free to use all the mental resources available to process things.

One might say, therefore, that sleep is my natural state – the low energy point where I come to rest when all energy output ceases and I succumb to gravity, and fall… asleep.

Everything else is an effort. It feels like all my energy goes into fighting that gravity. And that is why I prefer quiet, low-stimulus, safe, calm environments. The less I have to deal with in my outer life, the more energy I can spare to fight the gravity well and get further away from my total annihilation.

Or at least, that’s how it seems. Maybe if I truly let go, let my ship crash into the star, all I would lose is who I think I am and from that would emerge who I really am. Who knows?

But I am far too scared to do that. So instead, I dream hard and I dream a lot. I don’t remember a lot of it, but what I do remember is extremely intense and I suspect that it is this hyperdreaming that is the true root of my sleep issues.

I mean, there is only so much that any mind can process in one night, and I am so cerebral that I barely process any emotions at all during the waking hours, so the backlog for dreaming must be ten miles long.

This is the cause of my tendency to zone out at the slightest provocation and why I have to stimulate my mind all day long just to stay awake. It’s a Sisyphean task because it’s precisely this mental stimulation that forces me to stay cerebral and not process those emotions that then lay there, unprocessed, generating gravity.

Maybe that makes unprocessed emotion my dark matter. I will think about it.

Therapy, in this increasingly elaborate and nerdy metaphor, could be seen as an activity designed to stimulate a waking dreaming state where a section of emotions can be processed consciously. This involves actually feeling the emotions, which makes it somewhat unpopular, but when it works, the pull of gravity decreases and the individual needs to expend less energy in order to stay with the world, and therefore has more energy left to live their lives.

And there I go, getting hyper cerebral as I attempt to talk about my deepest emotions. I guess that’s just how I deal with things.

And of course, the drugs help. In my case, the Paxil provides the necessary emotional distance for me to be able to deal consciously and rationally with my issues instead of being at the mercy of the shearing forces of my internal gravitic flux. In doing it, it gives me an island of much needed.stability. The Wellbutrin just gives me more energy to use against that harsh gravity well. I am actually considering asking my psychiatrist to increase my dosage to see if it helps.

And for the most part, I keep up. Most of the time, I can at least bring the minimum amount of focus necessary to deal with my life to bear on the situation. There are very scary moments when I feel like I am going to lose contact entirely. Moments when I scramble to even make sense of the world and the words that are coming at me. Moments when it really feels like I am going insane.

As opposed to merely being insane, like right now.

But I usually can drag myself back into the real world, even if it feels like I aged a year in the process. If there’s a drug out there that specializes in keeping me in the here and now, I would dearly love to be on it. This constant tug of war between situational awareness and inner processing takes a lot out of me and I would love to be able to just relax without feeling like I am going to die inside.

Harsh, but accurate. Mental annihilation is the same as death on the spiritual level anyhow. Except it leaves you alive to suffer.

Again, this might all be illusion. It might be that the fight is completely unnecessary and that I would be a lot better off if I let go, let the worst happen, and deal with the aftermath. Let all these forces in my mind loose so they can sort it out for themselves.

Or maybe I just need to open up my heart and learn to live a little, without feeling the need to question, examine, and analyze everything.

That would sure as fuck speed things up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.