Been pretty depressed lately.

But I am trying to keep a positive attitude about it.

The problem is that I am still sick. And it has moved into my lungs. I had a very scary incident earlier today where I woke up from a nap to find that there was a distinct rattle to my breathing. Every breath felt like I was breathing through water and I could feel the goo inside my lungs bubbling as I did so.

That is a very scary sensation in any situation, but it was especially bad in this household because poor Julian had bacterial pneumonia not very long ago.

And a chest rattle like I had is the top symptom of that kind of pneumonia.

So now I am freaking out some. Getting pneumonia is bad in any situation, but it’s especially bad for a person with sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is already displacing my lung capacity and causing a low blood oxygen level in me in the first place.

I don’t have any to spare for fucking pneumonia.

In fact, pneumonia is one of the things that can kill a sleep apnea sufferer like myself. Sleep apnea is one of those diseases that is not, in and of itself, fatal, but it can easily team up with something else to kill you.

Pneumonia would be a perfect example. So would obesity and diabetes,. for that matter.  You know, just to pick two random examples.

So I am feeling pretty scared right now. Not being able to breathe is like my worst phobia. Even my claustrophobia bows down to it. When my claustrophobia triggers, it always does so by making me feel like there is not enough air where I am and that I am going to smother to death.

Physiologically,. this is caused by an adrenaline response that triggers the muscles in my throat to constrict and rigidify, thus causing an actual drop in oxygen intake capacity at the exact same moment when adrenaline is also signaling my bodyh to take deeper, fuller breaths in order to load up on oxygen for fight or flight.

It’s terrifying, of course, and might well be part of the cause of my fear of smothering, along with other breathing and cardiovascular issues of mine.

So I feel like I am on some mighty thin ice, health-wise, right now. I am doing what I can to stay hydrated, eat plent of fruit and veggies, and stay calm about stuff.

That last one is, of course, the trickiest. One of the cruelest ironies of stress is that the smartest thing to do about it is to calm the fuck down, and that is pretty tricky when you are stressing out.

But like anything, you get better at it if you practice it. Part of my dragging myself out of the pit of madness I fell into in my early twenties was learning to not freak out when my IBS started causing problems because that only added fuel to the first and made the whole thing so much worse.

So I had to learn to, in a sense, force myself to calm down. To move in the opposite direction of the one the pain and fear and stress wanted me to go. So instead of grabbing my sword and holding it tight, I let go of absolutely everything and go totally limp and visualize hot metal being dunked into cold water, or similar.

It solves the situation, and that’s fantastic. I will always be grateful that I found this escape hatch through which to escape one particularly bad form of madness.

But I do wonder sometimes if I have gone too far in the other direction. It’s possible that a lot of my problems stem from that big and well-developed emotional override muscle being far too quick on the trigger and suppressing any kind of adrenaline-provoking response, even the good kind, like happiness and enthusiasm and feeling love.

If so, I really need to teach it to calm the fuck down.

Honestly,. the best thing for me would be a democratic revolution against the harsh facist state inside me.

An inner coup, if you will.

But that would require surrendering a lot of my precious and fragile feeling of safety. And I am not ready to do that yet.

But I am getting there.

What really bugs me about still being sick with whatever infection I have is that it is robbing me of productivity. I would prefer to be writing stories for the text app and working the music video gig, but being sick is making it really hard to concentrate and robbing me of my energy and focus, and that makes things so much harder.

Still, there has got to be a way. I am super bored a lot of the time. My usual distractions just plain are not enough any more. I need to reconnect with my slender thread of feeling like I contribute to society, and so I am going to have to force myself to get some god damned work done.

EVen if it’s really hard. Even if it would be soooooo easy to keep letting the days go by (water flowing under). and watch my life go down the drain… this time with a vaguely plausible excuse, even!

Well clearly I can’t do the things that actually move my life forward, give me a much needed self esteem boost, and justify my entire existence.

After all, I’m sick.

Well if I waited till I was healthy to do shit, I would be waiting forever. In the war that is this life, I am one of the walking wounded and no matter what happens, it’s either fight wounded or never fight at all.

And not fighting is no longer an option for me. Resistance is life. I no longer accept life as one of the walking dead, moving but not truly alive.

So bring the pain. Bring the fear. Bring the dread. Bring it all.

Anything is better than feeling dead inside.

And it is through pain that I will live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.