And by this shit, I mean being sleepy all goddamned day.

It was bad enough when I would not really be awake until 3 pm. But now it took until 6 pm, and I am still kind of sleepy even after sleeping all day AND drinking a liter of Diet Coke with my dinner.

Don’t even get me started on why I don’t seem to be able to get the same alertness boost from caffiene that everyone else gets.

I feel like it must be related to why sleeping pills don’t work the same way for me that they do for everyone else. Nothing I have taken actually helps me get to sleep.

It just helps me stay asleep. Which would be good if it did so at a reasonable level, but no, it has to keep me sleepy for half the freaking day.

So you can bet your buttons that I am not taking either of my sleeping pills tonight. Fuck THAT noise. I can’t afford to not be awake till 6 pm tomorrow because that would give me less than an hour to get my blogging done before I go out to Denny’s with La Gang.

Ergo, I will aschew the medication and go to bed at a reasonable hour and hope for the best. Maybe I will get enough sleep. Maybe not.

But those very recent times when I could barely stay asleep for an hour and a half at a time and the depths of my consciousness were filled with glittering psychosis are starting to look pretty good to me right now.

At least I was awake and enjoying life instead of sleeping the sleep of the dead half the day back then.

I wish I could be mellow about the whole thing. I would love to be able to take this whole thing philosophically. I dream of being able to just shrug my shoulders and says “Well, that;s how she goes, eh? ” and just enjoy the sleep and take comfort for it.

But I want to live, god damn it. I want to live and breathe and think and enjoy and weep and cry and gnash my teeth and do all the other things that vital, alive, present people do without even knowing that the peace of the grave is a thing.

I mean, fuck this shit. I’ll be mellow when I am dead.

So it is going to continue to piss me off solid when I end up in this state for the foreseeable future. I hate all this goddamned sleep and deeply resent the amount of my life it takes up and all the minutes of the day I am missing.

What can I say, I am an ornery cuss deep down and sitting still has never been particularly fun foir me, and I would rather be in pain than asleep.

So suck all this goddamned sleepiness. One way or another I am going to get my life back, even if I have to drag my ass out of bed and force myself to stay up to do it.

And that is super stressful for me to do.

OK, now that I have gotten my rant on. let’s talk about causes.

One might well be the fact that I ran out of antihistamines recently. That might not seem to be related but hear me out.

See, my antihistamine is also the medicine that prevent sinus congestion from my allergies. Without out it, I get nasal congestion, and that restricts my airways even more than my sleep apnea does, and that, in turn, can make my sleep apnea worse, which would lead to my needing way more sleep in order to get the necessary REM time in.

Complicated, isn’t it?

I have also quite recently upped my Paxil dose. I have gone from 40 mg a day to 50 a day. I am not noticing a huge difference but it has only been a week and change since I started taking the higher dose and these things take time.

And while hypersomnia is not a known side effect of Paxil, anything that messes with my fragile brain chemistry has to be considered a suspect.

Which leads me to my final suspect, plain ol depression. I have been more depressed and nihilistric lately and while subjectively it seems more likely that the sleepiness is causing the depression and not the other way around, I could be wrong about that.

Whatever the cause, I am frigging sick of it. I have my antihistimine now, so I can at least test that theory. The bump in Paxil dose will be much harder to rule out (or in) as a contributing factor, and my depression is such a multivarible turbulence-level complexity type phenomenon that any serious logical analysis out it can’t help but turn into such a twisted ouroburous of causation versus effect questions that it beggars the mind.

Even a mind like mine.

And who knows, maybe it’s all due to some unimaginable confounding variable completely unrelated to any of the factors I just listed.

All I know is that it has to stop. And I am incresingly willing to do whatever it takes to get some decent, healthy, relaxing, non-punishing sleep.

Maybe even leaving the apartment and going for a bit of a walk to get some god damned fresh air into my lungs to displace the miasma of my tiny filthy room.

That would be huge for me. Leaving the apartment and going outside by myself without any particular task or goal in mind would be unprecedented. I have enough trouble pulling myself enough to go outside with my friends to a place I already know with the distinct goal of food and pleasant company in mind.

But the fact that it is so crazy a thing for me to do actually makes me a lot more likely to do it because I love doing crazy things.

That’s how I ended up writing a million words in 11 months, after all.

Maybe I should do it again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.