I think I may have taken my sleeping pill twice.
Hard to be sure, of course, but it’s a possibility. This morning, when I was taking my post-breakfast pills, I hit a point where I had taken the other morning meds (Rampiril for blood pressure, Lipitor née Atorvastin for cholesterol control, Claritin for allergies) but could not recall if I had taken my Mirtazapine or not.
Normally in this situation I play it safe and don’t take the pill. But this morning I was feeling bold and scrappy and told myself, quite confidently, that I had no recent sense memory of handling the pill bottle or one of the tiny pinhead sized pills and so there was no way I had already taken one.
Now I’m not so sure.
The shocker came when after getting up to pee at around 10:30 am, I went back to sleep and woke up at 2:30 pm.
Making me both a) an hour and a half late for lunch and b) astonished to find out I had slept for four hours in a row.
Did not see that coming.
But this might be much ado about nothing. I might be overreacting to what amounts to a slightly above average sleepy day where I only took the one pill.
Either way, I am very sleepy at the moment and it is taking a hefty effort of will just to stay awake enough to eat and blog.
Guess it’s time for me to pack up my bedroll, fill my canteens, and head off into that rusty red prairie sunset over yonder.
I wonder how long I’ll sleep this time,
It isn’t human
And by “it” I mean “me”.
Been pondering my own inhumanity lately.
Not that I think I am not a human being or that I am somehow less than human. I’m as human as the next naked beach ape.
But I know that I am not like the others,. That’s something I have known (on some level) since my first day of school. From day 1, I was calmer,less impulsive, more focused, and above all more autonomous than the rest.
And I wasn’t interested in typical kid things. I didn’t want toys, I wanted books. I didn’t play with toys in any traditional sense of the phrase,i.e., I didn’t makeup stories while manipulating them as play-actors in said stories.
From academia to pop culture, the consensus is that said play-acting is what normal kids do. That it is, in fact, a vital part of their social developments because it allows them to create virtual social experiences for themselves that prime the pathways for later social experience to then energize and guide.
I didn’t see the point. Toys didn’t do anything. What I wanted from the very start was mental stimulation. That’s why I wanted books and video games and why I watched so much television as a child.
All three provide a steady stream of mental stimulation.
So I had no interest in toys, and various other forms of “play” like hopscotch or sports held no interest for me either.
From that point of view, it really seems to me that there was next to no chance that I would ever have a normal, socially integrated, healthy childhood.
Even if I had never, ever been bullied at all, I would still have been one very weird kid and the only way I could see me having friends is if I met other kids who were just as weird and nerdy as I was.
That, sadly, wouldn’t happen till I got to college.
What happened was a profoundly socially isolated childhood and that is extremely unhealthy. The path that most people start in kindergarten didn’t really start for me till college and that got cut off at the knees half way through.
No wonder I am so fucked up.
And all of this makes me somewhat inhuman. I don’t relate to my fellow human beings on the human – in other words, social – level. The social information others absorb like oxygen in their lungs is unavailable to me.
I have the necessary empathy, but that’s it. There is a universe of information and experience missing because I was so isolated.
So I grew into quite an exotic hothouse flower indeed. Things grow strange in the dark, as I like to say, and so on a psychosocial level, I grew into something not quite human.
And yet, it didn’t show. Not on a superficial level, at least, and that’s the only levelon which anyone wanted to deal with me,
And my fear aided them in this. In social situations the panic would rise in me and whatever I had been trying to accomplish when I started the interaction would get replaced by the terrible urge to escape.
So I was an unwitting accomplice to my own neglect.
And it hurts to know that,. Like a lot of victims, I have invested pretty heavily in the narrative of my own innocence, and while of course I don’t consider myself morally culpable for my childhood abuse and neglect, it still cuts way too close to the bone for comfort and gives me the feeling of something unpleasant “touching” me.
But I am leaning into it. This is exactly the kind of painful, wrenching, uncomfortable revelation that brings on the most spiritual growth, and I am all about that kind of growth at this point in my life.
The mind is strong but the spirit is weak.
That needs to change.
And being devoid of any religious software (or even hardware, possible), I am forced, as usual, to make up how to do it as I go.
And you know what? That shit gets tiring after a while. Just once, I would like to be able to use someone else’s prepackaged solution to fix something in my life.
It would be a refreshing change to find something in the world of the soul that fits me.
But whether it’s clothing or spirituality, I am never going to be able to buy off the rack.
I’m just too weird.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.