I still feel pretty tired.

And the thing is, I can’t just do the obvious thing and keep on sleeping till I am caught up.

Why not? because there is a symptom of depression knows as bed-seeking. and I have been a victim of it many times before.

Because, you see, depression makes people want to hide from the world, and being in bed under the covers is very soothing. And when even that is not enough, there is always sleep. Sleep is the closest thing you can get to being dead and thus immune to all of the scary things life brings.

Basically, to a depressive,  sleep is like suicide without the commitment.

And one’s depression is perfectly capable of manufacturing a false sleepiness to get to the desired goal of sleep. It works the same way a fat person’s food addiction convinces them that they are hungry when, in truth, their body’s needs are amply supplied and all that is really going on is that the mind craves the reward stimulus of food.

But that’s a story for another column.

The really weird thing is that if you go deep into bed seeking, it feeds on itself. You are tried because you haven’t been getting out of bed and getting any stimulation. This is how a depressive can end up staying in bed for days aside from getting up to use the bathroom and maybe grab a snack you can eat in bed.

I know all too well what it’s like to sleep, wake up, think about getting up and facing reality, and being filled with such fear and apprehension than I go back to sleep with a vengeance in order to hit that reality snooze button again.

Maybe that is why it bothers me so much when people say “I love sleep”. Dunno.

On the other hand, I know I have messed up sleep. It follows that I might have a genuine biological need for more sleep than a healthy person, at least part of the time.

And I have noticed something dangerous happening in me lately : moments where I just can’t remember why I do things at all. Total lack of directing force,. accompanied by a feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by life and a desire to flee deep within myself.

That’s clearly the voice of depression. And I am trying my best to listen and figure out what it is trying to tell me.

Other than “get your sleep apnea treated, you ninny!”.

I really wish there was such a thing as a drug that makes you focused and alert. But a relaxed and comfortable alertness, which performance science has known for decades is the state in which we are the most productive and effective. So not a stimulant like caffeine, which can help wakes us up and keep us alert but can also lead to feeling jittery, nervous, and even anxious.

If there was such a drug and I was pleased with my output while on it (and so were others, like say employers), I would become thoroughly and knowingly addicted to it.

Because productivity is the real high, at least for me.

It might be that I simply have to accept that my life runs on a long cycle of expansion and contraction, and that while things contract, I will need to find a way to let myself run down for a while without it wrecking my life and my ambitions.

I’ve long been a fan of surrendering to the inevitable. Perhaps too much of one, come to think of it. But I have always been aware of the dangers of ending up in a position where you are mindlessly struggling against a vastly superior force, like you are trying to fight the tide, instead of just learning to deal with it.

It can get bad enough to put you in the position of forgetting not just why you are fighting but that you’re fighting at all. It becomes instinct, as automatic as peristalsis. All that energy and effort (not always the same thing) wasted on a fight you would instantly recognize as an absurd and hopeless endeavour if you examined it consciously.

But of course, that all depends on your definition of “the inevitable”. And that’s a very slippery and dangerous definition for a depressive. Our depression gets very good at convincing us that action of any sort is futile and that we should just relax into the warm wet womb of despair and stop all that “trying to do things” business.

Maybe I should fall back on my old standby, desire over “need”. Sleep till I catch up and get bored with sleeping and want to do something fun. Work like hell until I am all out of energy. Play my video games till I get sick of them. Let true emotion guide me.

It’s a tough road for a hyper cerebral type like myself who is so used to going places with his mind first in order to make sure they are “safe” and making the rational “smart” choice without my emotions having much of a say in the matter.

And that can be a very powerful thing. There is an enormous advantage to being able to think rationally and make intelligent moves on the chessboard of life.

But no matter how good a strategist you are, you have emotional needs that must be met or you will fall apart inside, like any starving organism.

And you can’t meet those needs if you let the selfish ego lock the id out of the conscious mind all the time.

If that happens, you end up like me, not sure what I even want, let alone knowing how to get it. At some deep level, I have to let my emotions do the steering, and that scares the hell out of me.

Because how do I know my emotions can be trusted with the steering wheel? I’ve never trusted them before. When I try to imagine them doing the driving, all I can see is chaos and anarchy and insanity.

And maybe that would happen… at first.

But if the world and I survived…..

What brave new world would greet us?

Maybe it would be destruction and chaos, but maybe, just maybe…

From that anarchy would arise a living star.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.