Here I am, at an all too familiar juncture : I need to write, but due to my health problems, I am so tired and sleepy despite almost an entire day spent sleeping that I am completely incapable of deciding what to write or coming up with something new to tackle. My tide is at such an ebb that it truly feels like instead on brains, my skull is filled with warm, wet, heavy sand that wants nothing more than a chance to settle back down into sleep. I have spent all day in deep, dream-streaked sleep, and apparently, that’s still not enough.

I call these my “sleepy days” and I am slowly and painfully learning to just accept them and work with them instead of railing against them fruitlessly and getting upset and depressed every time they occur because of how limiting and frustrating they are. It’s slow going and I am not there yet…. just tonight, when I woke up at around 7 pm, I had a significant panic attack simply from the confusion and low emotional resistance caused by the sleepiness coupled with a sudden and irrtional conviction that I had to write my column RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT or something TERRIBLE WOULD HAPPEN.

Needless to say, that kind of thinking is not productive, and after sitting in front of the computer hating myself and freaking out for five minutes, I recognized the futility of it all,and went back to bed.

Now it’s 10:15 pm and I am out of grace period. Time to get something written, even if it’s just another dreaful and tedious “I am so sleepy!” column.

It’s not an easy life, this coping with depression and other ailments. It seems easy from the outside, because I don’t do much more than play Wii games, watch Netflix, and use this here computer.

But inside my skin, it’s a different story. My emotion state is unstable, I almost always feel sick in one way or another, and a lot of the time, despite how unchallenging my life is by any objective scale, it’s all I can do to hang on to the few marbles I have left and make it through the day without descending into screaming blithering drooling madness.

Or at least, that’s how it feels.

I think the key to it all is acceptance, something I have yet to achieve. I have been thinking a great deal lately about the idea that my personality, my psyche, may simply have a cyclical nature. My natural psychological state might be a cycle of expansion and contraction, up and down, energy gaining and energy losing, peaks and troughs. If that is the case, if such changes are natural to me and not the result os something I can fix or fight, then my smartest move would be to simply accept this cycle and learn to deal with it as a fact. Fighting it would be like fighting the tide. Far better would be to get used to taking advantage of the tide when it’s high and resting and relaxing when it’s low instead of bitterly complaining about the low tide, acting like the tide will never be high again, and blaming yourself for it being low.

But I don’t handle the cyclical very well, at least not yet. I am a goal-oriented and hence fairly linear kind of person. I am the sort of person who likes to plan things out in advance, and I very much resent anything that disrupts those plans. You would think I would learn to adapt over time, but so far, no. I don’t handle the unexpected very well. It’s a serious weakness in my functionality.

And because these boom and bust cycles of my internal economy are not predictable, you can’t plan for them in the traditional, linear, time-bound sense. The desired state of mind would be one which is low on expectations and high on preparations, ready to go either direction at a moment’s notice.

Problem is, that’s approximately the exact opposite of my actual personality. To develop that sort of free-flowing ready-for-anything approach to life would require a serious rethinking of my basic mode, and that’s no simple task.

I suspect, though, that learning to take things less seriously and go with the flow a lot more would be good for me on a lot of levels. The universe routinely punishes inflexibility and rewards adaptability. Standing there in pain and confusion because things did not work out as planned is no way to go through.

And I plan on changing that.

And I am sure it will go exactly how I have planned.