Sunday 5 November 2017

Chronic pain and exhaustion as excuses for procrastination

When I wrote my earlier blog post today, I was in a considerable amount of physical pain, with my right side hurting in an intense fashion. Currently just my right arm hurts, there's a numbed burning sensation in my right side and that's about it. While writing that earlier blog post the pain was much more intense.

I'm not sure whether it's just the pain that's making me sleep so incredibly poorly for months now. Using the bracelet that I'm wearing I can monitor how restful my sleep likely is. There I see that most nights I wake up repeatedly or at least am incredibly restless, without any recollection of this. By the time I wake up I'm feeling drained, exhausted and just want to get some sleep.

Most days I can force myself to get out of bed, get dressed and go to work and such, but I cannot remember the last time that I actually woke up feeling well-rested and energetic. Even after getting a solid seven hours of sleep in.

During the day will also suffer from these pains. They're distracting and drain my energy. As a result my ability to focus on things like work or projects has become ever more limited over the past years. Basically normally one would start with a full charge after a night's sleep, but for me it usually feels like there's no more than 10 or 15 percent available.


Then there's the effect sleeping poorly and stress in general have on psychological trauma and kin. When I'm exhausted I have almost no defence against anything negative. It feeds depression and negative thoughts, which in turn make one sleep worse again, and so on.

I'm currently not feeling the intense pain and agony as I did when I wrote today's first blog post. I'm still feeling decidedly depressed and anything but happy, but beyond a headache and a head that feels as if it's stuffed full with cotton, I'm otherwise more or less okay. Just really tired.

While talking with a number of people today who responded to the blog post, it was made clear that they do not think that I'm doing so poorly at this point. Walking in another person's shoes and all that, I guess. I'm still trying to figure out how much of my problems are just inside my own head. I know that some parts are not rational, such as my intense fear and distrust of others and feeling of being useless and worth absolutely nothing.

Trying to convince myself to beg others to maybe accept me for a job might take a while at this rate. There are so many options, so many companies and so many positions out there. I don't know what might be best or what to try, or what would work or what not. Yet this is still simple next to the Hell of real-estate, I guess. There one doesn't even have to begin to pretend that one can trust others there.


I should be fighting for my place in this world, but I'm so tired, and every time I close my eyes I see and feel those same nightmares again, of how people abused and hurt me.

If someone stood up and guided me through this process it might be easy, I guess. It should be easy for me, but everything out there seems to be aimed at overwhelming and/or demotivating a person.

One friend suggested that maybe I should move into academics. To that I replied that I could maybe see myself doing that, but that I would prefer R&D. Something science-like and gritty, with scary mathematics and horrific implications if one gets some detail wrong. That would be challenging.

Yet try finding something like that. Everything just has to be exceedingly dull, it seems. Sometimes it feels as if society is designed to drive people towards a depression from the sheer boredom.


I like things which can be reasoned and are logical. Things where one can see from the beginning which steps are roughly needed and where one knows what works. Things like a job and a home on the other hand seem like working on a project where you have to select from fifty-million different suppliers, most of which will deliver a sub-par product, yet there's no way to figure this out beforehand. I'd rage-quit such a project because it would be ridiculous.


I guess next week I'll talk things over with my therapist. See what his thoughts are. Maybe I'm truly just whining and it's all in my head. Maybe I'm the problem, or at least a significant part of it. Yet at this point nothing makes sense to me yet, let alone which steps would make sense. All of which feed into this depression and so on. Darnit.

*Hits the reset button on her life*


Maya

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