A Shot of Nostalgia

I’m still sleeping a lot.

Partly this is that I’m legitimately tired, my sleep schedule is extremely messed up with staying up late and staying in bed late, not wanting to miss anything. Part of it is meds making me tired, I think. But part of it, a part that’s hard to admit, is that I’m at the bar of memory and bitterness, night after night. ‘Bartender, I’ll take another shot of nostalgia’.

I dream of my long gone grandmother, of chosen family, of people who I would have called parents if I could. Of friends that took me free and easy and I didn’t have to explain why. Places where I used to laugh and walk tall.

This way of sleeping is, on the bright side, not as bad as it was this winter, where I’d only be awake for a few hours in the day. I’d get up, eat breakfast, and immediately after that, start swaying with exhaustion, both of a literal kind, and also of a ‘I just can’t face being alive’ kind. I’d fall asleep, wake up briefly in the afternoon maybe, but only get going when the sun went down, where I’d be morbidly relieved, in the back of my mind, that the day was done. It was then I could be productive, and I could creep around. I felt like Batman and Joker’s lovechild.

So, this way of not being able to sleep in a healthy way is not entirely malicious. Not healthy, obviously, but not malicious.

I have been sitting around a lot as well. I’ve paid for it. My back is in dire pain. I don’t know what to do to fix it. I have the want to eat healthy and to exercise healthy, but it’s that eyeballing a huge pile of homework (full of calculus problems) I don’t know where to start, I don’t know what to do. I have tried yoga, but (I know it’s stupid) it makes me dysphoric as hell. I want rugby. I want a gym.

I have felt more like my mind belongs to me again. The gel is receding more. The positive side to that is that I can know more of what I’m doing when playing with my cousins. I am still not jumping from thing to thing, I have to think about it, but I am fully within it, and it’s completely natural. Before I’d be a little dissociated. I loved and love my cousins to the moon and back, but before I was mentally all elbows and high strung. Now, if I don’t know what to do next, I can say calmly, ‘I don’t know’ rather than my throat being blocked and ashamed that my brain didn’t work anymore. I still wish it was easy, that I had all the answers (I felt like I used to, and I used to be a whirlwind around kids) but now at least I feel human, which is an improvement.

The negative side to that is that it’s like my brain is spluttering. Completely cold before, now there’s some warmth in the engine as I try to kick start it. I mean, that’s a positive in that it’s better than being cold, but the spluttering is embarrassing! I wish I were smooth, and cool and svelte, and handsome! – well, okay, I am handsome =P – As a result of this spluttering business, it’s like all of what I’ve wanted to say that I’ve been storing for months is coming out at once. For months, for one thing, the only people I’ve been talking to are therapists. I’ve been talking to some normal people lately. And it’s like, the basement is where you store your horrors, right, and the attic is where you store your pretty things? Well it’s true my ‘basement’ has some nasty things down there, but my attic has some lovely things too! And I haven’t been able to help it, I’ve been like dragging all these normal people up to my ‘attic’ and showing them all my pretty things that have been dusty for so long, and I dig through all the suitcases and boxes. Hats, scarves, necklaces. Ideas, thoughts, memories. But they’re coming out all spluttery and fast, because I’m excited to show someone else the attic (months, mind you!) It’s like I’m going ‘look at this! No, wait, look at this!’ It’s so embarrassing. And I think I’ve completely overwhelmed them.

It’s hard learning how to human.