Saturday, October 04, 2008
For most of my "young" life I watched others crumble when the crunch was on or when their personal "overload" light was flashing incessantly in the corner of their eye. Somehow, someway I found myself to be of another breed. The breed of man that took some of life's large and small obstacles in stride and regarded them as a constant challenge to succeed in spite of everything.
While others were thwarted by every unexpected turn of events, I took solace in knowing that life happens and the daily irritances and bullshittery was part of that life and how I dealt with it placed me in that box that was labeled "Only the Strong survive."
One would have to be strong nowadays. With the economy on the brink of snapping, the leader of the free world and his cabinet without a clue on how to pull out of the quagmire that is the mess in the middle east or even more domestic issues such as health care reform, loss of jobs, the mortgage crisis and the like, we my fellow bloggers are on the cusp of disaster. Yet, some of us find a way to make it to the next day with our mental faculties intact.
But lately, extricating myself from the fodder that is found on CNN and life's issues hasn't been so easy.
In fact, I've had to work quite hard at removing those constant irritations from my mind. And you know what? I don't even know what they are because most of it is coming from my subconscious.
Yes, the obvious is shaking a brotha to the core, but I'm not sure it's entirely just that. Or perhaps it is. It can be any of the very things that I suspect, or maybe none of them at all and something completely out there that I haven't even touched upon yet.
And with me, the unknown has always been scary. I'm looking at my personal body armor that is bearing the weight of constant assault from all of life's nonsense right now. Looking at it, I liken the stress to the tension of a violin string. One needs enough tension to make music but NOT so much that the violin string snaps y'know?
I know that most of my subconscious stress is not the grand result of great tragedies and the like, but rather a sad accumulation of a bunch of minor irritations that have grinded this brotha down the past few months. Yet, still I rise.
What I face now is the totality of these residual deposits building to a crescendo of some sort. And now, an uncontrollable power surge is building in me and a violent detonation is nearing epic proportions. And there's going to be one helluva big bang if I don't grab a handle on this soon. -lol- As you can see, meladrama hasn't abandoned me.
What has is my sleep. Sleep has been hard to come by for the better part of 7 months. I sleep for an hour, I'm up for 2 then get sleepy again just in time before I have to get up and go to work.
And at work, I'm alert enough to accomplish my job, sleepy on the drive home, on another level when I get home, and just in time to catch one of my programs or 2 before I have to try to go to sleep.
On the surface, I cannot tell what's been at the root of my sleep deprivation and unlike others who go through this, I'm not a walking zombie. I'm doing what I've always done even before the sleep issues began and very little about myself has really been altered except when I sleep at night, when I wake up, I feel as though I've slept hours. Even if only an hour or 2 has gone by.
Dreams, which I've always had trouble remembering, I'm recalling in vivid detail playing them back in my mind like a movie I've just seen. My doctor administered some pills, but I'm very hesitant to take them because I don't want to become dependant on them so I compromise and take only 1/2 of the pill.
Because after all, the great Dr. Cage knows better than the good ol' doctor. The heck with all of his PhD's and medical degrees huh? All I know is, this condition started in the spring and now we're in the fall. Will it drift into the winter? Only time will tell.
