8 November 2009

 I wrote this on November 8, 2009, a few days after I got out of UNI (the psych ward). I showed it to a small number of people back then, but I've decided to publish it for all to see now. Granted, I am holding on to a more recent one, but it will come out in it's own due time...

Nights are always the worst. This is nothing new. Though the constant trend seems to be the need for some sort of release before I can go to bed. If I’m lucky, I’ll be super tired and I’ll fall asleep regardless of what I may be thinking. But that is hardly, if ever the case. The real problem though, comes in finding a release that is healthy. There are many unhealthy releases I have used in the past; cutting, throwing up, punching hard things, hitting my head on hard things, etc. Though none of these are healthy, they all seem to get the job done quite effectively. But that is usually only temporary. I find that things with more lasting consequences, are a much better form of release, or at least self degradation. For example, instead of doing any of those releases, I just stay up all night because I know I shouldn’t and that I will regret it in the morning. The pain from those other things will be gone in the morning, but the fact I’m running on no sleep will be with me the rest of the day and quite possibly the rest of the week. But even better perhaps, is the feeling of guilt, usually caused by Not doing something. Most things you feel guilty about doing are these unhealthy releases, but they don’t seem to last very long. However, missed opportunities have a way of sticking with for a very long time. Sleep deprivation however, is just a minor example. Sleeping pills do a good job of making me drowsy, but they aren’t going to make me fall asleep. They just help. I can force myself to stay awake after I have taken them, though counter intuitive to even taking them, it is still a viable choice. Mostly, this is because when I take my sleeping pills I am busy and don’t have time to think about much. But when I actually try to fall asleep, I have plenty of time alone with my brain; and that doesn’t usually end well. Or at least not in any productive way anyhow. Curiously enough though, a lot of these aforementioned “missed opportunities” seem to come back in my dreams. Most of them aren’t current, they are things I didn’t do a while ago, as far back as a few years. There are only so many that I can remember, but this does appear to be a running theme. So while I’m not only thinking about them before falling asleep, my brain is getting no reprieve once I am actually asleep. And that pretty much sucks, because my brain needs that time to be sleeping and resting, not worrying about past events. But I think they still stick around because they are things the I purposely did. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of the situation. I simply chose not to do something because I knew I would regret it at a later time. And that later time seems to come and go as it pleases. It usually just depends on how busy I am though. So while it seems to come and go as it pleases, I’m sure there is some underlying pattern to it. And I suspect that pattern has a lot to do with how busy I am at the time. Which brings me back to nights and trying to fall asleep. It is impossible, so far as I know, to be busy and still fall asleep. The only exception that I can think of, being the point of total exhaustion. But that is neither healthy, nor very useful because odds are, whatever I am doing to stay busy I am doing a terrible job at because I’m so tired. But again, perhaps that would be the goal of such an endeavor to try to fall asleep. I know I would feel bad about doing bad work, thus prolonging the regret. I was once told “Live your life with no regrets.” This is a great piece of advice, though I find it an easy way to be miserable as well. It basically tells us that if we live our life without regrets, that we will be happy and content with our lives. The converse however, is also true. If we live our life with many regrets, we will be depressed and wholly unsatisfied with the direction of our lives. Which I guess goes to one of those glass half empty, glass half full kind of arguments. But I think that would be grossly over-simplifying the matter. I don’t think it’s a mere question of optimism or pessimism, it goes to the root of who we are and what we want out of our life. Throughout the last few years, that goal simply seems to be unhappy, to put myself down, and to have many regrets. I guess the real question, and perhaps the point to all of this rambling, is why I want this? Why do I not want to be happy? I should want to be happy, right? Isn’t life so much better when you’re happy? I like to think so. But I think I am so out of practice from being truly happy, that I really can’t even comprehend what that would even be like. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I don’t know what it is, or maybe I don’t think that it is even possible? Perhaps I have resigned myself to believing that life as it currently is, and has been, is really the best that it is going to get, and that there’s not much I can do about it. That’s rather short sighted, because of course, there is plenty that I can do about it. But I just keep asking myself, why put forth the effort? Why even try? I’m getting through things alright, perhaps even good. Which reminds me of another quote, “Good is the enemy of Great.” Further, I may have become complacent thinking that good is enough, and great really isn’t worth it. Who am I to complain about “good”? Who can really define “good” anyhow? It’s all relative and subjective. It’s not like there’s some special equation to quantify all of this. I really wish there was though, because that kind of stuff makes a lot more sense to me. Then I could just run some numbers through a program and figure out what variable to change to optimize the results. That would be the nicest thing in my opinion, but alas, that is not really realistic at all. But such is life, right?