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An Order
September 23, 2022 •
20:40
I called my friend a couple nights ago. I need to do that more. I'm trying to, that's why I called her.
Conversation got kind of in depth about some difficulties I have, even though I've been more guarded about talking about that stuff. But she got me to let my guard down. Talked about how every day it's like I can grab hold of one thing, temporarily, and then I lose it by bedtime and nothing I accomplish stacks or leads anywhere.
She suggested I try some spiritual weird person. Because of how weird I feel when I have friends and they notice me as a real life person who exists. How that could be something to do with having an absent self image or something. Not sure what. But it sounds like it could contribute to why I feel pain when I hear about how great other people are. Like anything good about me isn't there, like I'm the absence of a person.
Lately I have been trying to get out of the house in daylight and get things done. But I keep sleeping late and it's either the afternoon which i hate because the cars on the road make it all feel frantic and threatening.
I brought this up last night with my mom's tenant who experienced a workplace persecution and firing and has been helping me with my own similar experience. It seems like a blessing because she has all the paperwork and things I need to potentially get out of this situation on top. She said she was so depressed and taking care of the animals got her out of bed and she was thinking of suicide. It was almost midnight when we spoke, and I was there to walk the puppy, and I remarked on how I experienced similar to her. And she said, "yeah youre depressed". She talked about the anxiety that followed. It's been this way for decades so I guess it was hard to recognize as a response to workplace hell. Because it was
just a more extreme version of my life.
So back to my conversation with my friend. I said I want to stay up all night to hold onto the good from the night. I want to also wake up at six am. I want to go to bed at four a.m., sleep for ten hours, and wake up at six am. She suggested getting up in the morning because that is when the world is best and then using my ethnic heritage to do what I do best, which is nap around the same time every day, like four pm because it sucks. I always hear people talk about naps ruining their day, which is totally unfamiliar to me. I nap and I feel better, less frantic and it doesn't really seem to disrupt my night sleep. she said yeah it messes her up. so i should take advantage of my heritage and use those naps.
her saying that was like turning a massive key in a heavy door's keyhole, though it didnt necessarily seem it at the time. But I tried. The next two nights I slept weren't great but once I was able to wake up without feeling completely drowsy and delirious, I took some batteries and started doing stuff. Both days I failed to leave the house on time, but around four o'clock, I was like things suck and napped briefly and then got some things done and went outside. so I don't feel awesome because I still haven't gotten a great amount of sleep but just sleeping once, in this ordered sort of way, where i'm not just blindly navigating and feeling burnt out and debating if i want to sleep or not, and just treating it as a part of my schedule, helps with contextualizing it. It doesnt feel chaotic like when I typically don't get enough sleep, debate about when i can sleep again, be frantic all day, then either push through it or take a nap maybe. The way she put it just made the nap seem like a rational and constructive use of the afternoon. Whereas before I just felt so much stress about never getting enough sleep and not being confident in naps to help. and having no sense of structure to it. like maybe i nap maybe i don't. she made me think, at four pm when I started feeling like shit, "this is a good time to take your nap".
She made everything
make sense to me.
My mom would get on my case about sleeping too much so I always
felt
chaotic when I woke up and didnt sleep enough. I felt tyrannized by sleeplessness and exhaustion. like maybe I can nap i hope i can but maybe i can't and should i really or should i stay up, and i never knew if the nap should be just rolled into the morning or taken later. like isn't it better to sleep more but then i lose the morning.
I think this is the
first time I ever heard "you should probably rest at that point in the day" instead of feeling like a piece of shit for not being able to tough it out or sleep normal. She put it into an assigned slot in the day that makes sense to me when so little of my life does. I didnt necessarily plan to take it the same time both days but when I
noticed I wasn't feeling great, it made sense because it was a good time
to rest, and I never got to think of any part of the day as good for rest. I'd feel badly about not sleeping enough and then badly about either sleeping until one pm or pacing anxiously all day until succumbing to sleep and being surprised that it somehow made me feel better and I actually didnt end up sleeping for hours, I just became rested.
so she took this weight off. About never getting enough sleep. and the guilt of feeling lazy because i'm
so tired in the afternoon and don't want to work nonstop. She told me I'm not supposed to, that I should rest and that I'm not a loser for it.
She showed me how to use this thing that I've used recklessly,
without realizing it has a real utility, that wanting a daily nap isn't a shortcoming, or something to be guilty about because I fucked up at sleeping, or something to be agonized about whether I should take it or not. She made me feel like this thing I like is actually important for me and is helpful when used constructively, that the moments between waking up and sleeping don't have to be somewhere between tyranny and chaos.
She has such a great mind and it's a miracle I get to know her.
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