Sleep is the key to everything for me and I am a day sleeper. It's daytime, I have an infection requiring extra rest and yet I am awake. While I remain awake, pain builds up in the back of my head and in most muscles and joints. As the pain increases, my mood gets worse until the moment comes when I simply cannot live another second. Usually, that's when I get to sleep. On the other hand, I dread sleeping as much as I dread anything in my life. There are nightmares. Usually, they involve little things like dashed expectations.
I'm back behind the wheel of my car on the open highway with my music playing nice and loud. I loved driving. It was one of those things that someone tried to convince me I could never accomplish. My eye/hand coordination was simply too poor, my reflexes were too slow and I don't have 3-D vision. I overcame the coordination with a lot of practice and repetition. Not only did I learn how to drive but I drove stick the entire time. I left lots of room for error and for my poor reflexes to cause problems and they never did. Yes, I drove like an old lady but it was for safety. I even learned how to judge distances accurately by turning my head just enough so that everything moved across my field of vision and I had no problem judging distance.
I could drive just fine in all but the worst of pain but the dizziness was another matter. I would be driving an Interstate approaching 70 mph so that no one ran me down from behind. The next thing I knew, I felt as if I were waking up or letting go of a deep daydream. There was this impression that a short but unknown amount of time had passed at 70 mph and I would get this urge to panic stop to orient myself. Once I was sure that this wasn't going away, there was only one thing to do. I turned in my license like any citizen in my place would and then I was done driving. The surgeries left enough damage on my neck that simply being in a car is agony.
These driving dreams always go the same way. I'm driving happily just like I described and then I remember that I'm driving without a license. This isn't something I would do even if I were certain to avoid getting caught because I could get someone killed. Just as I formulate a plan to pull over to the side of the road, the next rest area or whatever will be safest, the police car lights up behind me. I wake in terror, with the lingering mortification that I was going to spend time in jail and it all lingers despite the fact that this joy ride has never happened and will never happen.
My dreams of failure are the worst. My impending school burnout left me with the bad habit of leaving all my work for the end of the semester and then buckling down to make it work. I finished semesters drained, exhausted and in need of the sort of rest and relaxation I could only get at school. The idea of relaxing at home was a joke. I could never let my guard down at home so I only felt at home in school. Eventually, I dug too deep a hole for myself and my best efforts couldn't get me back out. That's not when I failed. I started failing the next semester when I needed time off in school more than anything. At the end of that semester, I went to find that extra gear of effort that I needed and it wasn't there. I never even made it to some of my finals because the situation was that hopeless.
Failure made me want to die. I wanted to die to avoid disappointing my parents which is doubly terrible because I learned that they could never be pleased. I wanted to die to avoid punishment from whoever it was that decided to punish me. I wanted to die because someone was going to take away my ability to make my own decisions. I wanted to die because I had so much frustration and rage boiling over and I was the only one who deserved to be my target. It was illogical in every way but I refused to see that until my beloved Melissa and others made me want to live.
This blog is dedicated to the principle of survival. Suicide is always a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I believe in fighting as hard as I must to live one more hour, day, week or whatever because something will get better in that time. I have rejected suicide completely. It is no longer in my bag of tricks even as some metaphorical last resort. Every part of my conscious mind is on board with this decision but it still matters in my nightmares. Once upon a time, I had to throw myself out of bed and down the hall where I could take a good look at my BA certificate when I had those nightmares. I stopped failing eventually. All it took was years of painful survival until circumstances turned in my favor and I graduated.
So, this is the time today when I get to choose between excruciating pain and dreams that seem to hurt almost as much. My conscious mind goes with Melissa on this one. Since I have to sleep eventually and the pain will only get worse, I try to sleep. On the other hand, you have the personality trait that has gotten me this far, good old stubbornness. Somewhere on the inside, I believe that it will get better if I can just stay awake long enough for it to happen.
Please let me sleep./Please don't make me sleep.
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