Insomnia and amateur philosophy

Well, I'm still alive. I have not much enjoyed this past week. My mind is not a peaceful place right now. I try to fill it up with books, in fact I've been on a reading binge the last few weeks. I have had a few days where concentration was a very serious problem. Sleeping is feast or famine.

I'm not feeling altogether civilized lately. I keep craving isolation. I want to go off into the woods somewhere, far away from people. I've never been a social animal. I dislike most people irrevocably and instantaneously.

I'm not on solid ground right now, and I know it. Everything feels slippery. I've been a lot of different things in my life, not all of them righteous, but these last few years of feeling like my identity has been adrift...it's hard to take. Being hard-headed, stubborn and spiteful even, have kept me going when I had no hope. No hope, no direction, no motivation, and hardly an iota of self-respect left.

Joining the military was a bad choice for me. Even if all the really bad shit had never gone down, I think I would still be struggling in some ways. The one thing the army really taught me, was how to hone apathy to a fine, sharp edge. All the time, it was MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, even when there was nothing going on. Some jackass NCO would just get bored, and start everyone hustling for no reason. You get crammed into tiny spaces, are given the minimum you need to remember that you are a human being, and shuffled around like a card in a cheap magic trick. Once you get adapted to that way of life, or maybe I'm just screwy, it's hard to shake that apathy loose. Really, once you get to the point where getting shot at can't penetrate that apathy, you are seriously messed up. Even in the barracks life, you just adjust to the fact that nothing you do will ever be right enough for some nit-picky fucker. Getting insulted was routine. They say that they tear you down in basic so they build you back up as a soldier, but it didn't happen like that for me. Build up, tear down, build up, tear down, just over and over. They did the minimum they needed to do to make you do your job when it counted.

I don't believe in the military way of life, that's for damn sure. It's why I never re-upped. The ideals I signed up for, those are still there. I don't have any perspective anymore. If anything it illustrated brilliantly every flaw in our society as a whole. I find myself constantly examining those flaws, trying to be objective. At the end of the day it comes down to the same answer every time. I don't like people. I don't understand them. We are a strange and improbable animal. There are too many of us. I have no empirical evidence to support this theory, but I feel very strongly that we are stagnating as a species. I could probably write a book about everything that is wrong with the world. It would be very science fiction, and extremely macabre. I feel the urge to spout doomsday prophecies. That probably means I should stop writing for now.

Downhill fast

The doctors are playing pinata with my medications again. They really have no clue as to what is going on with me. They added an additional benzodiazipine to my regiment of rescue meds. The pharmacist was shocked that they were giving me two benzos, plus hydroxizine for anxiety. They took away one of my mood stabilizers. All of this is just a stab in the dark.

So I'm doing the things I can do to take care of myself. I remind myself to eat and take my meds. I do my therapy homework. I try not to obsess about things I have no control over. I try to get enough sleep without sleeping too much.

Still I'm frightened by this new plot twist. I worry that I am getting worse instead of better. There really isn't anything else I can do. Just wait and see what's happening and how things turn out.

Encore

Another fun symptom to add to the list, now that the catastrophic panic attack I had earlier is done, is sleep paralysis.

I'm terrified to go to sleep now because the other night I had an episode of sleep paralysis. I was trying to go to sleep, when suddenly I couldn't move. I was immediately struck with a panic attack, and became absolutely convinced I was dying. I felt myself being sucked out of my head, like some demon was trying to rip the soul right out of my body. It was awful. I haven't been that afraid since my very first firefight, the day that I realized that people wanted to kill me, would kill me if they got a chance. I tried to move my hands and feet and couldn't, I tried to call out for help but I couldn't do that either. I wanted so badly for someone to wake me up, save me, something.

So I stayed awake all night the last few nights because I was too afraid, absolutely chicken shit, to go to sleep at night. When the sun came up, I felt like I could go to sleep and everything would be fine. Needless to say my sleep schedule is all screwed up, I'm having more and more anxiety because of sleep deprivation, and I feel like I'm finally losing my mind. I still have that sucking sensation in my head, but it's just a sensation, unrelated to anything that I can tell. But this fear of having another one of these episodes is driving me mad. My medications aren't really working to calm my anxiety right now, and I have a terrible feeling I need to go to inpatient treatment again to get this sorted out.

Years and years of therapy, of trying to get better, and then this shit happens. Add to all of this shit, and suddenly I feel like I need to find a cure for all these disorders ASAP, right now, someone call up God and make a request on his red phone, please, please, please. This is just one thing too many, and I can't deal with all of it. This is killing me. I'm crying and I can't even scrape up the energy to hate myself for it, like I usually do.

I just want to beg someone to help me, in fact, I did beg someone to help me earlier, and they said there wasn't anything they could do. I'm suffering so much right now. (And feeling sorry for myself, and being afraid, and ready to just give in to this soul sucking despair.)

Well I don't know

So just in case anybody was wondering, smoking cigarettes frantically does not help anxiety. Stuffing junk food in my face doesn't help either. My medications are definitely not helping tonight. Pacing. Can't settle down. I want to find a solution to all my problems and I want to find it right this freaking minute. Rationality has no place here. I don't know what to do.

A bit of hysteria

Panic attacks are driving me crazy. I'm crying now, and I don't know why, just quietly losing my mind. Can't concentrate enough to read, and I have nothing in me to write. I feel like I'm about to boil over with some new kind of hysteria. Of course, it's probably the same old thing, fear and fear and fear some more.
Living and dying all at the same time, I suppose.

Waiting

Sleeping a lot, trying to "recharge". Dr has me carefully sedated so I'm tired all the time. Ordinarily it would probably bother me, but I'm sleeping without the nightmares, so I am not really going to complain.

I'm being very careful not to think too much about the future, that way lies madness. I'm just going to kind of coast for awhile, I think. Take my peace and quiet when I can, and try to enjoy it. They will probably change the meds around again soon, because I can only deal with this high level of sedation for so long before I start having cognitive problems. Short term memory loss, confusion, and the ever popular dissociation. That is a problem for another day. I've still got a bit of a hair trigger for anxiety, surprising really, considering the medications. Overall though, I'm feeling better, which is a miracle.

I would not be surprised if I wound up in inpatient treatment again. My meds might need a complete overhaul again, and they probably need to find a different track for therapy. Anything too intense, sets me off completely, but the lower key stuff doesn't help much.

Happiness is a good night's sleep

I had another appointment with the civilian doctor who is supposed to objectively evaluate my disabilities for compensation. The doctor had no idea why I was there other than he was supposed to look at my right ankle, and x-ray it. I think he was a little embarrassed about it, because I had been to the same clinic for evaluations six months previously. It was acutely stressful for me.

I've also recently been having minor dissociative fugues, associated with flashbacks. So far it doesn't seem like a huge deal, other than being frankly terrifying. My therapist made us review my "safety plan", and I am forbidden from handling sharp objects or being left unattended in the kitchen. They changed my meds around, so I am sedated most of the time, again. My psychiatrist took me off of Trazadone, because it was preventing me from being able to wake up from nightmares. Instead I'm taking a cocktail of anti-anxiety meds to help me sleep. We're all hoping these dissociative states are caused by unusual levels of external stress and will be temporary.

So mostly, I'm sleeping a lot lately. I haven't been able to do much reading due to concentration issues, so I've been watching cartoons. It's frustrating, but I have to deal with it. Not much choice.

Hopefully the VA will get it's collective shit together, and make a decision on my request for Individual Unemployability. It would be nice to be able to do things like, you know, pay rent. Buy groceries. Stuff normal people do.