Well this is all going super well. Trashed yesterday, felt utterly drained and stumbling around. I spent the evening winding down appropriately: reading, sorting a few minor things, seeking out LEGO parts to build the other Bricktober Adventure Ride sets (not the fantasy one, that’s just a bit cack). Relaxed. Wound down. No fucking sleep. Got back up again, reorganised the tea and coffee cupboard, drank a huge amount of hot chocolate. Read all of Harry Harrison’s Mechanismo which I picked up in a Brighton charity shop. Went back to bed at four. Maybe slept a bit till I jerked out of sleep at six-forty imagining I could hear my alarm. Sank back into some kind of sleep with a Geiger wrapped around my feet until eight. So at least I’ve made sure my alarm definitely works. I’d abandoned the seven am thing because plainly I’m not getting enough sleep to make that feasible; eight’s not looking a lot better. I have done my exercise, half asleep and at least felt the pull of muscles which assures me that I am awake and that I extend physically into reality. The shower helped too.
A few hours later I’ve bashed through a bunch of work things that were critical and now I’m just fucking dead. In fairness, this isn’t actually going quite as badly as I’d feared it might, but I feel utterly eroded. My primary aim in abandoning sleeping tablets is to get a proper range of emotions back and to be functional in the evenings. Right now I’m on the verge of frustrated tears, wrestling with a despair which I know I can defeat just by giving up on my plan. I’m not sure I have the capacity to figure that set of feelings out at present. Never make decisions when wasted! I do feel very disappointed to be falling immediately back into the sleep state of my teens and twenties, despite having a much healthier routine, exercise and sleep hygiene. It’s bitterly frustrating. I want to be here, and instead I’m occluded by this penumbral darkness seeping through my eyes, fingers and thoughts. I have a show tonight too, which I’m gonna have to work extra hard to focus for, in oh – eight hours or something. Come along, see me reach that tipping point into hyper hysteria. Apologies in advance to my team mates…
This feels hard to focus on and write about, but then everything is hard to focus on. I haven’t knocked anything over yet today, and I did fix my table last night, so perhaps that’s conceivable as progress. There’s no point in giving up the drugs to get emotions and me back and end up with emotional erasure and non-functionality through lack of sleep instead. Am I just trading one bag of wank for another? I don’t feel depressed, but the sense of despair vignetting my perception of reality is grim, and I feel like something I don’t want to be. The world is saturated with grey, and I can’t get up early enough to do the creative writing I want to do. I saw an ancient post (2012!) in my Facebook memories and it seems to encapsulate well how I feel right now:
Sometimes I want to explode in a shower of unicorn glitter and cyborg-death-bear sequins while holding the mentally emaciated fists of the lowing morons who so plague me. Together we’ll decorate the world in an orgy of bleeding spikes.
Alas, the lowing morons are all shadow me. I must sleep for a while, and a man has begun drilling into metal outside. Kill me now.