And turning away from the sun.
Feeling much better today, thank goodness. Still kind of sick, but that’s nothing compared to how miserable and scared I was 24 hours ago.
The secret, I think, is that I finally got some decent sleep. I hadn’t gotten much sleep since Friday afternoon, and what sleep I had gotten was of the crappy, shallow, never actually completely asleep kind.
Luckily, at around 4 am, after lying there for about an hour feeling like low level shit, I was able to drift off and get some good deep sleep.
Woke up feeling a lot better. Got up, ate breakfast, went back to bed. So far I have slept around eight hours total.
It also helps, I would imagine, that Joe and Julian went grocery shopping last night and so there is fruit in the house again. Finally. So my nutritional picture is greatly improved. Things were pretty damned bleak there for a while and I think it was affecting me on many levels both obvious and subtle.
So that’s put right for now, at least. We have bread, too.
Right now, I feel okayish. I am still pretty tired, so I expect more sleep will happen. My lungs still feel stiff and gunky inside, and my breathing is somewhat labored as a result. And I feel a tad lightheaded, possibly from the aftereffects of sleep.
But otherwise, I feel pretty good. Heck, I even look forward to the nap I am going to take after I am don Part 1 of the day’s blogging.
And I don’t look forward to nearly anything most of the time. Most of the time, my waking hours are something I ignore and endure and I don’t think about the future at all, if I can help it, because that tends to lead to a shit storm of anxiety and dread.
People say you should just take life one day at a time. Concentrate on making it through that day and forget about the rest.
But that’s what I have been doing and its lead to the stupid and pointless life I lead now. Clearly, just making it through the day is great for people who have jobs and families and relationships and so on, and therefore have life momentum.
But for someone like me, who has languished in the doldrums for decades, just making it through each day isn’t enough. Not any more. I need a sense of purpose, direction, and progress. I need to feel like I am getting somewhere. I need a source of validation. I need affection. I need love and joy and all the rest.
I need a life, basically.
Problem is, I have trouble imagining how I would get one. That is, I can imagine many paths to the destination, but none that I would actually take.
I still have way too much pure, toxic fear in me. The kind that makes it impossible for me to do anything that involves dealing directly with reality. The kind that freezes me in place if I so much as look outside my cage.
The kind that makes me hide in my own shadow by turning away from the sun.
And until I escape my own shadow, nothing else will matter.
More after the break.
Resuming : so how do I get rid of all that fear and dread and terror and anxiety and rage and probably a whole lot of other emotions that keep me frozen in place?
I can’t help but wonder if I would know or be able to come up with an answer if I had been raised in some kind of religious or spiritual tradition.
It’s become abundantly clear to me that there are major advantages to having a sort of escape hatch installed into one’s sense of reality. It allows the mind to perform the operations needed to restore its balance without the need for logical justification or indeed, to go through the rational mind at all.
After all, reality might just plain not give us what we need, emotionally speaking, and then the choice is between generating what we need ourselves via said escape hatch or doing without and emotionally starving ourselves for no good reason.
Sometimes, reality ain’t enough.
It gets me thinking about how I never had an imaginary friend as a child. The more I think about it, the more I feel the terrible wrongness of it. There is a reason most children have one at a certain stage of development. It is, in effct, their practice run for religion and all other “escape hatches”. The child’s mind generates the companion they need and said companion is therefore a perfect fit for whatever is missing in the child’s life. And while most people outgrow their imaginary friend, the mental machinery that generated it remains in the mind and can be repurposed for use by religion.
But not for me. I was too logical for that. Too logical for my own good. I knew the friend wasn’t there, just like I knew stuffed animals were not real animals and that there was no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.
I mean, they weren’t even plausible.
It can be argued, then, that I never had my age of wonder, where everything seems magical and it’s possible to believe that dragons are real and fairies live in your garden and your stuffed animals all have their own personalities, likes, and dislikes.
I skipped that step, or at the very least, I have absolutely no memory of it. As far as I can tell, I never believed in things unseen. From the earliest I can remember, I have been sensible, logical, and very very broken.
I think it’s safe to say those things are related. I guess when I retreated into the icy clarity of my rational mind as a response to being raped, that capacity for self-healing was lost to me forever.
Now the only way I can think of to access it is to write and see what pops up.
I should probably do that more often.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.