A Long Sleep

Post Type: Short Excerpt

I've been having sleeping issues for the last couple months, regardless of how I try to adjust, I'd be good for a day or a few days, then jump back to the routine of sleeplessness.

My sense of norm quickly adjusted to perceiving sleeplessness as the usual norm. Now-a-days, I anticipate myself not being able to sleep soundly each night. As a result, I became a hungry vulture, hungry for peace of sleep. A good night's sleep seemed to become an extravagant luxury. When I do get a night's sleep, I worry, the next day, that if I will get another night's good sleep.

It's bad. It feels awful the next day when you don't sleep well. I feel so tired, worn out and down right don't want to do anything. The worse part is it takes a toll on your mental balance.

If I don't sleep well, my state of mind is on the severe depressive side than my usual norm. My thoughts become jumpy. My alertness and perception hikes a million octaves up, and my self-awareness becomes so sharp that every action I do, every sentence I carry out with another human being, waves of possibilities hit me.

'Does what I say make me weird', 'Am I saying this simply for attention', 'I am hiding my inner motives', 'oh look, I'm looking like a lecturing person, giving advice again. Who am I to take leadership in front of others? I am nobody,"... and other guilty, self-hatred thoughts urge through me, and I cannot hear myself think.

As such, last night I did not sleep well. Tonight, on the way walk back from REV to MC, I keep listening to melancholic songs (I normally listen to very melodic songs in minor keys anyways) and feel my mind drop into depressive, almost tearful cycle of imagining stories, but with vivid cinematics.

I imagine myself, or some unknown figure, standing in a field of golden wheat, with a lake in the far distance, sun setting away, casting a red glow through the mountains. The figure rises slightly taller than the wheat, with a gun pointing to their head. And the next scene, there were many birds (crows) flying away at the sound of a gun shot.

I imagine that must be a cinematic way to die. The sound of the gun shot with birds flying away at the sound of it seemed especially appealing.

But then I feel guilty, even thinking about death and suicide, I think of sound. Loudness, something that will grab others' attention, because I am just so hungry for the attention of others, that I am ungenuine even to death. Getting a lot of attention for my death is a vital reason for death itself.

I wish I was a better writer, able to articulate the depth and sensation of my thoughts with words. I am angry that I cannot talk through words the scattered, clustered thoughts and murky feelings in my mind.

Sometime during the night, I thought about parenting. Some people should not be parents. They are not made for being (a) parent(s), or they weren't ready when they became their child's parental units.

My parents probably should not have become parents. For my mother's terribly low emotional empathy and lack of sensitivity reflects too much the upbringing of a Chinese child in her generation, with no care for emotional growth and mental health. She is always in a bubble, unaware of all her surroundings. Everything my father says is handwavy, procrastinative or downright lack of weight of meaning. Often times I feel that he's never deeply processed anything about the depth of others' emotions nor does he have emotional sensibility, or that he actually has this kind of awareness but his own laziness makes it too tiresome to make an effort to care, dig that out, and make an effort to process it.

I wonder where I get the emotional sensitivity from. Looking back, the parenting household that I grew up in worked out terribly for me, because I happened to be an extremely self-conscious and perceptive person. Yet I never had another human being that could unconditionally talk with me and listen to me, make an effort to discover my turbulent thoughts throughout my childhood. Since I can remember, my parents were always minding their own business - career, schooling, immigration, and did not understand nor saw a need for especially nurturing a strong, mature mind. Their upbringing was the uninsightful, lower-level-materialistic fulfillment type of upbringing that was typical of cultural revolution time China, and their parenting style reflected just that - unaware of the complexity and development of the human emotion, unaware of the complexity of information that surrounds and influences our state of mind everyday.

As you can probably see, the downward spiral as a result of lack of sleep continues. My mind is overly emotional and hypersensitive that I just want to write on with no regard to time and schedule, even though I know that if I achieve some kind of daily sleep/wake routine, my body and mind would be much healthier.

A lack of sleep fuels strong emotion which fuels my passion. The rationality tells me to have self-discipline, yet heart tells me to write, procrastinate onwards, and screw rules and discipline - do what makes me feel momentarily euphoric, but consequentially devastating.

I am trapped between the self - the rational reasoning, the inability to self-control, and the euphoric sensation of carrying through with my passion and live in the moment, and regret and self-hatred as a result.

Will travelling help me get over depression and shine a light into my shallow world? I am wishy-washy that things will cure themselves without me making an effort to do so, because making an effort to overcome difficulties is painful.

Thinking about what the future holds, I feel insecure and incapable already. My passion and motivations are always temporary because I was highly energetic at the moment. I have no confidence in myself that I will make myself happy nor a capable, diligent person in any situation.

Perseverance and self-discipline. Two things I'd abandoned all too often just to feel good to live in the moment.

But maybe I just needed some sleep, go party hard, let the energy flow, and tomorrow will be just fine.