Nocturning

My psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I've been in my standard winter useless-lump-slump. Every year I forget that it happens every year and I fight it tooth and nail, or at least "fight it" as much as I can without leaving the house or accomplishing anything and really just fight my own sense of self-worth. But every year I try new drugs and new therapies and new resolutions to not be generally miserable and this year has been no exception. So far it's been a sun lamp and that horrible, horrible Ritalin experiment and lots of yelling at myself to be fucking positive and get off my fucking ass and accept my health and my family and get on with it already.

It's not working. At all. Which is much of why I'm not writing. I don't feel like doing anything, writing included, but I also am trying so fucking hard to be positive and I don't feel positive so I can't write positive so I can't write. Hell, most of the time I can't feel because it's feel crappy or feel nothing. We're messing with my medications again or still or more or however you want to look at it. The migraines have been so much better, I don't know why The Sads have been so much worse.

But in the past 9 hours I've gotten more done than I've been getting done in week-long stretches, and without stressing or straining; just quietly working and accomplishing like I do when I'm not in depression mode. Like I said at the beginning, my psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I was trying to explain to him my listlessness and days of foggy nothingness, migraine or no migraine.
Is it cognitive? Motivational?
I don't fucking know, probably because I'm having too much in the middle of it to have a clear understanding of what it is.
So is it a medication? Does it get better or worse at different points of the day? When I've taken things?
I'm clearest at night. Always have been. I wake up at 9 or 10 and can only start to think then...which is right around or after I've taken my night dose of the same crap I take in the morning and feel like a fuzz-bucket.
So maybe not the medication...

BUT!

If I'm naturally nocturnal and am clear at night, what if I actually allow myself to be nocturnal? Get shit done at night when I can get shit done and sleep during the day when I'm a grog-monster? I can still see my friends in the evenings, when I see them  anyway, and spend some portion of business hours awake so I can make  phone calls and go to stores and things.

It took me about 24 hours to get over the idea that staying awake all night and sleeping during the day made  me an automatic freak of nature and quite possibly bad person who just couldn't make it in society. But why? Other cultures have different sleep patterns than ours, anyway. It's just when the sun shows up that tends to dictate the most popular times for productivity, and even that's BS as proven by the existence of Cleveland where the sun never shines yet at least three companies still operate (though I hear one is in talks with Miami).
I'm still adjusting and figuring out what works with my biological, medication, dog-walking, hypothetical social, and errand-running schedules, but today started to feel right. I slept hard from 5-10 PM and it's now 7:15 AM and I've done all kinds of Etsy stuff, written this, worked on a BS time-wasting project I enjoy (in which case maybe I should be nicer to it and stop calling it a BS waste of time), did all the dishes, researched prices on printers and contact lenses, talked to my brother and Aural Girl on Facebook, and walked the dog twice. Maybe the return of the bitter self-hate is an indicator that it's bed time again. Also I'm itchy, another good sign. I'd wanted to write a bit about The Boy, but I'll give the extremely condensed version instead:

Boy. Talked hours and hours of IM pre-Christmas. Then didn't hear from him between Christmas and New Years. Heard from him New Years Eve, ended up talking to him on the phone for a long time, now no sign he's alive for a week. He's on vacation and working on his own stuff (and getting a shitton done, it sounds like). And I had a fear it'd be like Love in the Time of Cholera or something...passionate love letters curdling when faced with actual proximity...but he comes back in a week and I'm trying to play it cool when we all know very well I'm a giant dweeb whose unsure about everything in the entire universe, worst of all myself and second-worst-of-all Boys.

7:30 AM. Sounds like a good bed time to me.

shoot me in the head

Can't sleep. I crashed last night just after 8 PM and woke up just after 10 PM and have been awake ever since. It is now 8 AM. Not cool. I was stressing out about stuff I have to write for school, but I've now done all but the profile of SUC (it's refusing to write itself) and a 500 word piece for my magazine writing class that requires me to do an interview tomorrow night. Or technically tonight now, since I guess it's officially Wednesday. I've even written all the questions for it already. And I read everything I'm supposed to have read for all of my classes up through the end of the week. And I still can't sleep. The back of my throat is all itchy and now I'm getting a little sniffly, too. Perhaps I am allergic to being awake all night. I'm giving in and taking a half-dose of generic NyQuil. I should have done my 30 minutes of cardio like I was supposed to, but the gym is oh so far away and it seems silly to go down there just for a half an hour's worth of activity.

La la la shoot me in the head please. Maybe if I print up my papers and pack my bag for school and pick out clothes for the day I will be able to fall asleep in time to wake up again. SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD.

Soylent Green

Today I will be spend knitting in a hospital waiting room. My friend is having a procedure that is not in itself scary but does require some major slicing and dicing and should tell us (though not immediately) if it's something much worse. I'm scared, and I'm not the one being chopped up. Isn't there some rule against young, spry people having terrible diseases? There's so much else to worry about when you're a 20-something, and almost everything is a beginning. At least, the things you have to choose are about beginnings - careers, significant others, babies, where and how to live your life. And we act like it's all within our control, simply a matter of deciding and finding and doing. But whether it's fate or God or random variation or a powerful malicious monkey, there's just so much mortality thrown in there, mocking our choices and making them for us. Things our bodies do and don't do that we not only failed to take into account, but that make all our accounting seem silly and frivolous. We try so hard to explain and justify and ignore our mortality because we need to cope. The Unknown is terrifying. I am terrified. Part of me wants to "take the blue pill" and ignore such mortality and complete lack of control, but how can I? It's the choice to pretend it's all a choice, and I'm not even sure I wish it was a choice.

All this and more will remain unresolved. Frustrating.