Even more so than I usually do when I wake up.
But here’s the thing : I know that I, as a person, have not changed. Or at least, I am beginning to know that.
And I am also beginning to see how believing that you are how you feel kind of simplifies things. In a horrible way.
It is actually easier – not better, just easier – to believe that you feel horrible because you are horrible than it is to think of yourself as a perfectly good person who feels like crap because they are not well.
It takes a certain input of energy to maintain belief in one’s own worth and merit when you feel so bad. Or at least, after decades of depression, it does fore me.
For healthy people, I am sure it does not. Loving themselves is their default state, not some bizarre and alien state of mind that they can only maintain by sheer force of will.
Protip : never make plans that hinge on you being able to maintain such an artificial state of mind indefinitely.
You laugh, but that’s exactly what people do when they go on a diet or otherwise work to overcome a bad habit and never think about what they are going to do when they run out of willpower.
And then they do runout of willpower and relapse, and because they have been starved for pleasure for so long they relapse hard as their body races to restore the balance and doesn’t give them much of a say in it till the job is done.
And then they beat themselves up for their lack of willpower. By which they mean their finite quantity of the stuff.
You have to replace the pleasure, people!
Food is helping me to feel a tad more human. Ditto for my meds. Perhaps I need to remind myself to withhold judgment on the day, the world, and my own worth until I am full and medicated.
Low blood sugar alone is enough to make you hate the world. I can see why both my brother and my father were such grouches before they had eaten.
When my blood sugar is low, everything hurts. Every sound, every light, every action. The world is made of pain.
The difference, though, is that I take responsibility for my emotions instead of taking them out on others. As patient readers know, taking it out on others is something I will never ever do, even if the alternative is being destroyed by my own pain.
It dies in me. I will not dump my pain into others. I will not spread my sickness. I take responsibility for the pain I have received and know that it is within my power to either pass it on like everyone else or keep it contained within me.
And, like in the cinematic at the end for the original Diablo, I have chosen to keep the evil in me in order to protect the world from it.
It is a noble and thankless job.
But I refuse to ever bend, even if it means I will break.
Took a nap. Got up. Took a very long pee. Sat down. Still sleepy.
I have gone almost entirely nocturnal as a response to the heat. I am only truly awake and alert after the sun goes down. During the day, I am never more than two steps awake from sleep.
Three if I am drinking my Diet Coke.
And it sucks. It’s stressful to keep myself awake when my body wants to sleep. It takes a constant input of energy to fight the drowsiness, and I hate those.
I like things where a single, intense, brief input of energy is all that is needed.
I rock at those.
I suppose part of the problem is that I can’t accept being totally nocturnal. I don’t want to be asleep all day. I want to be awake and doing things. If I was to sleep all morning AND all afternoon, I would feel a huge sense of loss and something sort of like guilt.
But not the moral kind of guilt. The personal kind, where you feel like you have failed yourself or done something dumb.
So I sturbbornly refuse to listen to the urgings of Mister Sandman to get into bed with him and surrender to his embrace.
Great, now I am eroticizing sleep. Whatever.
The thing is, that Sandman asshole is an abusive lover. I often feel a lot worse after having gone to bed with him. He cuts off my air supply over and over all the time I am with him, and nothing can stop it.
And the sad truth is that this only makes me spend even more time with him because the sleep I get is of such poor quality that I need a lot of it just to function.
Man, that guy’s an asshole.
Sorry, got lost in one of my own metaphors again. Where was I?
Right, not sleeping in the afternoon. Well, honestly, I usually end up sleeping half the time anyway, in naps. I don’t want to do it, but I have little choice.
Every now and then I ponder trying to kick the napping habit. Traditional sleep science says that napping too much screws up your sleep schedule and can mean you do not get enough of the all important deep REM sleep.
So it’s distinctly possible that if I could resist the urge to nap all day and only sleep in one long session at night, my circadian rhythmns would finally be able to match up with the actual day and night and I would be able to get eight hours a night and wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go.
But as patient readers know, I use sleep to regulate my mood. Without them, my background anxiety level builds up past the point where the meds can hold my anxiety back and then I end up in any one of dozens of possible negative mind states.
Maybe if I stuck with it, I would get over that. I dunno.
What i do know is that I need to get some more sleep.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.