Feeling kinda crappy right now.
Which is actually an improvement over when I first woke up around 45 mins ago. I felt like day old crap then.
Sleepy, but not in the relaxing wholesome way. More like the kind of sleepiness you get when you are sick and your body is using all its energy and resources to fight the infection and there’s precious little left for such frivolities as consciousness.
Tired, but in a tense and fitful way, like I am trapped in a bad dream and I am groping around in the dark looking for the exit.
And confused. Always the confusion.
So I clearly have entered the part of my “getting caught up on sleep” cycle where I start whining about how I am sick of people sleepy and I want to stay awake and have fun and do things.
I knew this would happen back when I began this journey. The first part is always all nice and relaxing and warm and even downright snuggly, but eventually I end up in this wretched state and I start to regret taking the pill that started me down this path.
So then I don’t take the pill for a long time, as if it’s to blame, and I end up in the equal and opposite wretched state where I can’t stay asleep for 90 minutes and that blank white space in my mind keeps growing and I end up anxious and overstimulated.
Then I take the pill and it starts all over again. Sigh.
I could probably escape the cycle if I just took my sleeping pill once a day, like I am supposed to, and stuck with it until I got totally caught up on sleep instead of wimping out when I reach my current sleepy-sick phase.
Admittedly, if I have been taking my sleepy pills, this stage is way worse. To the point where it kind of feels like I am dying.
So hmmm. Probably not going to be able to just bulldoze my way through that.
Speaking of dying, I have a heavy, scratchy feeling in my lungs that has me worried. Being in an immuno-suppressed category, I am especially vulnerable to all kinds of nasty shit, Covid definitely included, and so I am justifiably paranoid about absolutely any flu-like or respiratory symptoms.
So I will be watching this chest shit very carefully, as well as being alert for other symptoms and/or bodily weirdness.
There’s things I need to get back to. Like those eye measurements I was supposedly to get done like a month ago but didn’t because I was sick.
Not going to get my cataract surgery without them. And I am pretty curious about what the world will look like when I have TWO functioning eyes.
Right now, my right eye is fine, but my left eye is super blurry. All I have to do is close my right eye to understand how messed up my left one is.
I try not to do that very often. It’s scary.
Then there’s the stress test I was assigned to try to figure out why I am so damn weak and tired lately. I had to cancel that because my foot was all fucked up by the ulcer. That’s about 80 percent healed up now, so as much as I dislike the entire concept of a stress test, when I think it’s fully healed I will arrange the test again.
And of course, I will keep grinding away at my psychological scar tissue and doing my best to melt the iceberg on my heart.
At least I keep myself busy.
More after the break.
Inside versus Outside
Note : not about agoraphobia. This time.
While making supper, I got to thinking about, in a way, schizophrenia.
My basic definition of schizophrenia is that it is a malfunction of the part of the brain that determines whether a psychological phenomenon is coming from the outside world or is self-generated by the brain.
Terrifying thought, n’est-ce pas? Things you imagine seeming real? Real things seeming like you dreamed them up? Never knowing for sure which is which?
I got a lot of scary shit in my head. I want it to stay there.
Anyhow, I bring this up because it occurred to me that all mental illness has some aspect of the same phenomenon, just at a much lower level.
Take my own sub-psychotic lunacy. Granted, I don’t hallucinate in the classical sense. I don’t see things that aren’t there or hear voices or anything like that.
But I, in a sense, hallucinate on an emotional level. I spontaneously generate conversations in my head that I completely understand to not be real, but I process them emotionally as if they are.
So all my negative self-talk, internal persecution, and imagined judgments have some of the same impact as if they had actually happened.
It’s kind of like how seeing a murder on TV has a tiny fraction of the impact of seeing a real one. Things you know are not “real” can still have an impact.
And when these negative thought patterns are deeply ingrained, the negative thoughts feed almost directly into our emotions with only the barest of flickers of awareness in our conscious minds.
This means our ability to stop and correct these irrational thoughts with the conscious mind is highly limited.
They just move too fast for us to catch.
Still, forewarned is forearmed. In the future, I will know to question the source of emotions. In particular, I want to seriously audit the part of my social anxiety that tells me what other people think and feel about me.
Pretty sure it’s been lying to me for a very long time, falsifying my empathy and telling me that people hate me and think I am a vile disgusting thing that should crawl into the sewer and die ASAP.
I’m beginning to think that might not be true.
I mean, all the evidence supports the opposite conclusion.
I wish I could debug my brain.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.