Que La Fuck?
Well, I'm not dead. Yet.
Christ. On a pony. This week has been so long I thought I would never see the end of it.
Do you even know what happens when you have insomnia so bad it keeps you from sleeping even though you have taken four sleeping pills? Oh. My. God.
I slept for about three hours on Tuesday night, then hung out in a hospital for most of the day while a friend had minor surgery. It was something I really wanted to do for her, but on coming home I discovered that it had taken more of the mickey out of me than I thought. This was actually a good thing: one would think I could have slept after that. Not so. I staggered around in an insomniac haze until midnight, then tried twice to bed down beside Sargon. Every noise from the street, every movement, every breath, every twitch, every snore, every movement of the sheet, kept me awake. I had to get up eventually and still couldn't relax enough to rest even after downing another pair of sleeping pills.
I was quite literally hallucinating. Tripping out of my gourd. Everything I saw looked like something else. A tee shirt looked like a folded black bird about to jump off of the top of the dresser. A hat became a tiger's face. There were arms, hands, eyes, poking out from under furniture. Things were moving around in the corners of my eyes. Everything startled me. Each time I turned around something scared me. I was twitching in terror every few seconds, just a hair from screaming like a rabbit. I finally had to lay down just to make it stop. The room was not spinning, but the bed was rocking slowly. The roof of my mouth was numb. As I lay there trying to sleep beside Sargon, it sounded like about six televisions had been turned on in the other room. I heard snatches of conversation in my head, clips from movies, nonsense words strung together in familiar voices, a veritable Babel of infernal disembodied voices. I didn't find it that disturbing at the time, as I often hear phantom noises as I'm drifting off to sleep, but now I'm just a little worried about it. That's some unnerving shit, let me tell you. I think it was the sleeping pills on top of everything else.
I fetched up on the floor of our downstairs room: industrial low-nap carpet over freezing-cold concrete. Stuffed with earplugs, blindfolded against the light (it was eight in the morning by that time), cocooned in blankets to eliminate all sensation, I finally slept for another three fitful hours. A part of me believed that if I tried to sleep somewhere I knew I'd be uncomfortable, I wouldn't try to stay awake getting comfortable. Seemed to work.
Then I got up and did the last thing I wanted to do: went with Sargon to the doctor. I wound up with an hour-long case of the shakes even though the doctor never even touched me.
I still feel scraped down to the bone. Too tired to eat, even. But not sleepy.
This is normal. I keep telling myself that. This is normal for someone who has been through the parade of shite that has been the last year of my life. This is normal, because it is not normal. There can be no "normal" when it comes to grief -- I may act normal, but I know deep down that I am not. I must simply accept this as the only visible symptom of grief that has yet occurred. I don't feel particularly connected to the pain any longer, I am not positive that's what is causing it, but I can't imagine what else it could be. It's like the mental equivalent of experiencing the adrenal rush of a cut or burn without the actual hurting. And I don't know why it's bothering me so much, still. In the past three months, my life has overwhelmingly changed for the better. I feel good most days. I feel great sometimes.
So why does it come out at night to bite me?
It's almost impossible to talk about, even here, where I'm at my most articulate. I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling. I don't know where the pain is. I don't feel it, but I feel what it's doing to me.
Que la fuck, people; que la fuck?
Ugh. On the bright side, my friend has hopefully taken care of an annoying-ass medical issue that's been plaguing her for longer than it rightfully should. I have mostly completed another box commission, and nearly worked my way through about $300 of porn-for-pay; a nice starting deposit for the retirement account I'm opening sometime next month. And Sargon and I have a date by which one of us will be sterile: he's going in to get fixed on the fifth of next month, the kindly fates willing. Provided there are no hitches, I will never again have to discuss birth control with another hatchet-faced doctor bitch who is secretly bent on either screwing me over and selling me for glue makings, since I'm obviously just an unfeeling piece of meat without the intellectual capacity to feel fear or the physical apparatus to feel pain.
That's enough good news for me.
I'm going to try to sleep now, and hope that I don't hear things all night long, or have more nightmares. I'll be around over the weekend, but I'm not making any promises about updating. I said I'd be taking a break, and I pretty much have been.
I just wish I could tell if it was doing me any damn good.
Christ. On a pony. This week has been so long I thought I would never see the end of it.
Do you even know what happens when you have insomnia so bad it keeps you from sleeping even though you have taken four sleeping pills? Oh. My. God.
I slept for about three hours on Tuesday night, then hung out in a hospital for most of the day while a friend had minor surgery. It was something I really wanted to do for her, but on coming home I discovered that it had taken more of the mickey out of me than I thought. This was actually a good thing: one would think I could have slept after that. Not so. I staggered around in an insomniac haze until midnight, then tried twice to bed down beside Sargon. Every noise from the street, every movement, every breath, every twitch, every snore, every movement of the sheet, kept me awake. I had to get up eventually and still couldn't relax enough to rest even after downing another pair of sleeping pills.
I was quite literally hallucinating. Tripping out of my gourd. Everything I saw looked like something else. A tee shirt looked like a folded black bird about to jump off of the top of the dresser. A hat became a tiger's face. There were arms, hands, eyes, poking out from under furniture. Things were moving around in the corners of my eyes. Everything startled me. Each time I turned around something scared me. I was twitching in terror every few seconds, just a hair from screaming like a rabbit. I finally had to lay down just to make it stop. The room was not spinning, but the bed was rocking slowly. The roof of my mouth was numb. As I lay there trying to sleep beside Sargon, it sounded like about six televisions had been turned on in the other room. I heard snatches of conversation in my head, clips from movies, nonsense words strung together in familiar voices, a veritable Babel of infernal disembodied voices. I didn't find it that disturbing at the time, as I often hear phantom noises as I'm drifting off to sleep, but now I'm just a little worried about it. That's some unnerving shit, let me tell you. I think it was the sleeping pills on top of everything else.
I fetched up on the floor of our downstairs room: industrial low-nap carpet over freezing-cold concrete. Stuffed with earplugs, blindfolded against the light (it was eight in the morning by that time), cocooned in blankets to eliminate all sensation, I finally slept for another three fitful hours. A part of me believed that if I tried to sleep somewhere I knew I'd be uncomfortable, I wouldn't try to stay awake getting comfortable. Seemed to work.
Then I got up and did the last thing I wanted to do: went with Sargon to the doctor. I wound up with an hour-long case of the shakes even though the doctor never even touched me.
I still feel scraped down to the bone. Too tired to eat, even. But not sleepy.
This is normal. I keep telling myself that. This is normal for someone who has been through the parade of shite that has been the last year of my life. This is normal, because it is not normal. There can be no "normal" when it comes to grief -- I may act normal, but I know deep down that I am not. I must simply accept this as the only visible symptom of grief that has yet occurred. I don't feel particularly connected to the pain any longer, I am not positive that's what is causing it, but I can't imagine what else it could be. It's like the mental equivalent of experiencing the adrenal rush of a cut or burn without the actual hurting. And I don't know why it's bothering me so much, still. In the past three months, my life has overwhelmingly changed for the better. I feel good most days. I feel great sometimes.
So why does it come out at night to bite me?
It's almost impossible to talk about, even here, where I'm at my most articulate. I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling. I don't know where the pain is. I don't feel it, but I feel what it's doing to me.
Que la fuck, people; que la fuck?
Ugh. On the bright side, my friend has hopefully taken care of an annoying-ass medical issue that's been plaguing her for longer than it rightfully should. I have mostly completed another box commission, and nearly worked my way through about $300 of porn-for-pay; a nice starting deposit for the retirement account I'm opening sometime next month. And Sargon and I have a date by which one of us will be sterile: he's going in to get fixed on the fifth of next month, the kindly fates willing. Provided there are no hitches, I will never again have to discuss birth control with another hatchet-faced doctor bitch who is secretly bent on either screwing me over and selling me for glue makings, since I'm obviously just an unfeeling piece of meat without the intellectual capacity to feel fear or the physical apparatus to feel pain.
That's enough good news for me.
I'm going to try to sleep now, and hope that I don't hear things all night long, or have more nightmares. I'll be around over the weekend, but I'm not making any promises about updating. I said I'd be taking a break, and I pretty much have been.
I just wish I could tell if it was doing me any damn good.