Sleep and Ass Kicking

Hello all!

I don't have a fabulous picture or collage this time, because my creative juices have not been flowing. If you are dead set on eye candy, visit "The Number Garden" on Tumblr for edgy, off the wall pics. I'm sure one of them might convey the way I'm feeling right now.

My pshrink has reduced my secondary anti-psychotic in hopes that I will achieve more REM sleep, but that has left me hazy and In My Head most of the time. Some days it just feels like there's no fixing this thing upstairs that rattles my days and makes my nights horrifying.

I did find a sleeping pill that actually helps me sleep almost uninterrupted through the night, but it wasn't on the insurance formulary, and so I had to wait for a prior authorization from the doc and the insurance. After 2 weeks of no sleep (except for every 3rd day because I was so exhausted, and then only for a few hours), my insurance finally pushed the medicine through ... and VOILA! sleep!

The only problem is that I like to watch things like The Walking Dead or a Joss Whedon movie during the day. Now every time I close my eyes ... zombies! And they're eating me alive and then I die and it blacks out and starts over again. Unfortunately, this usually happens when there's no one else in the house to comfort me, so I'm getting my ass kicked by dead things and things that want me dead every waking moment. Sleep is the blissful interlude, but I find it is hard to wake and that the pill has me sleeping around 12 hours a night.

Off I go into the spiral of delusions and paranoia about death. My therapist doesn't want to talk about this, and tells me denial is how most people get through their days. I argued that denial keeps me dissociative and numb to the moment and the world around me. So I have been isolating myself to the nth degree, avoiding situations which cause me stress and discomfort. Since I have school during the week, this is proving difficult. I have a research paper due at the end of November. Just the thought of it stresses me out. Where to go from here?

Perchance to Dream ...?

And The Worms Will Eat Me Up, pencil by ME, 2005

My sleep's been all wonky lately.

Not only does it take me close to 2 hours to fall asleep on a normal night, my sleep is very fragmented. I wake to tactile hallucinations, the People In My Head poking and prodding in very uncomfortable places. Or audio hallucinations will wake me suddenly. The other night I heard a voice in my ear telling me to make sure not to paint my house avocado green. It startled me from my sleep. So my pshrink ordered a sleep study.

The techs at the sleep center were nervous and new. I clenched my teeth as it took the New Guy over an hour to hook me up to the equipment that would measure my sleep. I kept in mind this would reveal all the problems I have while sleeping and tried to grin and bear it. I had to wait a week for the results.

I went in with the assumption there was something terribly wrong with me that could be easily fixed. I was wrong. My page-sized chart of sleep was punctuated by 3 small dots of actual REM sleep. The rest of the page showed the zig zag marks of me hopping in and out of sleep. The stats said I wake up on average 10.6 times PER HOUR I sleep. When I asked why, the sleep doctor admitted he just didn't know.

"I can tell you what it's NOT," he assured me. "It's not sleep apnea; it's not restless leg syndrome; you're not having any seizures. As to what is waking you up, " he continued, "we don't know. It was not a full EEG, so we are just as stumped as you are." He folded his hands in front of him in a very doctor-like way and told me to try "sleep restriction" to see if that helped. That means he wanted me to limit myself to about 5 or 6 hours in bed, to see if I would sleep through it out of pure exhaustion. I pointed out that I'm already exhausted when I go to bed, and that I have school during the day. "Good points," he said and left the room.

My pshrink was alarmed when he saw the results. He said he wanted to try a med for narcolepsy on me, one that requires you to be on a national register to take. Red flags popped up in my head. I Googled the medicine (named Xyrem), and found it is government controlled GHB. The side effects were alarming. Sleep eating, bed wetting, psychosis and memory loss just a few of them. It also said not to ever take it if you are on ANY meds for mental illness. No thank you, No thank you, No thank you played through my head. I crossed my mental fingers that the doctor could not prescribe it to me based on interactions with my psych meds.

And it turns out he couldn't. Phew!

So he tried another sleep medication, which kept me awake all night with respiratory depression. I laid awake, afraid to sleep for fear that I would stop breathing entirely. My breath came shallow and difficult. So the next night, I halved it. I woke less disturbed in the night, but am still exhausted all day. I still wake up to the feeling of hands where they shouldn't be, though no one is there. And I still must deal with school, despite my fatigue. But no respiratory distress last night, and I hope after a week of it I can begin to sleep normally.

I wish this could've been a post of hope and perseverance. It's not. I just can't sleep well, and no one knows why. In its unsatisfactory way - like most true stories - there is no resolution ready on the page.

Starting Over

watercolour me, 2012

Anyone still out there?

It's be forever since I've blogged.
Things have changed.

I don't even know how to start filling everyone in with what I've been busy (or idle) with, so I'll just skip over it. Consider the past months of disappearance like 2 pages of a book glued together; if you care to keep reading, please do. If the book no longer holds your interest, I understand. Things will be missing, I know, but c'est la vie.

I started school again with the grandiose idea I would get a fancy degree and be a teacher. After exactly one month of class, the stress of schedules hit me full force, and I collapsed under its weight. I am hanging in there, but I doubt the working force is ready for an unreliable person like me. I've decided to follow the usually disastrous path of My Own Thing.

I am still writing short stories and poems, drawing and reading.

One of my classes is in Contemporary American Poetry. It makes me examine my motives as a writer, and that is a good thing. I've decided to try blogging again, but we all know *wink* how incredibly unreliable schizophrenics are. We shall see how it all unfolds.

Compromise

Bryan's drawing, 2012

Bryan and I have been having trouble lately.

I have come to learn that relationships are like breathing.

In and out. Open and shut. Close and distant.

It's been a mad ride these past few days. We've been dumped at the bottom of the chasms of depression, and sailed the heights of new honeymoon-like bliss.
We danced around each other, each taking up the waltz in an ebb and flow of passivity and action.

Today we've compromised.

Today we put our frustrated little heads together and worked out a plan. I have my time, doing what I want to do with him (activities he dislikes, such as reading to him, or writing together), and he gets 4 solid, non-interrupted hours playing a video game I have no interest in. Everyday.

We made some together time, which was most important.

Tonight I wanted to draw with him. He drew a portrait of me that looks like time flowed backwards and I somehow got much older, but I love it. I discovered something I didn't know about him. He can put texture and emotion into a drawing. He had never opened up and exhibited this to me before. I feel a new connection.

Compromise is a key that unlocks a door of happiness and wonder. As a schizophrenic in a working relationship with a significant other, this is news to me. I've never had such consistency, such a willingness to let another in and be received in turn. I am proud of myself today. Hoorah!

Busy Work

I don't know what to say about this collage, except that it is not quite finished.

There are too many left over spaces, and my mind goes straight to them when in need of comfort from chaos or colour.

For weeks I have been feeling the constipated surge of energy that rattles under my fingers, bends my spine, and colours my eyes. It has been waiting to be let out. This evening, I took on a project of collage work. This one is probably my biggest yet, and as you can see, I've taken stuff from discarded poetry notebooks and sketch pads to adorn it ... along with some of the more classic art of others' (such as the painting "Climax", by Aubrey Beardsley (1893), and a photo of the famous Shiva sculpture).

I know it's a lot to take in at once! (Heh. Welcome to my brain.) So I've highlighted a few things for your amusement:
1)

I chose the dichotomies we humans live inside to represent my seemingly endless struggle with sane/insane, normal/abnormal value systems. It seems I am caught in this binary, like Jonah in the belly of the whale.

and
2)

The snazzy application of glittery butterflies, which signify metamorphosis and change.

It's now 2.13am, and I have reached my artistic limit. I cannot look at this with new eyes. Any suggestions on what might finish it?

Self-Misunderstandings

Speed Self-Portrait, 2012

Her face was a fist. It struck the gut of every stranger.

The tangled nest of her mind was a puzzle with no solution. Like a multi-tiered maze, it was paradoxical and led only in knots that frustrated any conversant. Combing it was as confounding as running fingers through wet, matted hair.

There were no outlets.

She ripped thoughts away from tangibility as though they were pages in a book. Chapters and chapters of unhappy endings tore to pieces, without even the satisfaction of the sound of tearing, or the clunk as they made their imaginary landings on the floors, the walls, the counter tops.

She was a mish-mash girl, invisible and strikingly obvious at the same time. She was always going in the wrong direction.

If time is a wire, supporting pin-ups of events like laundry in the minds of humans, she is certainly a spiral. She was a side-ways force no one can keep in the safety of boxes or definitions. Her thoughts and daydreams came and went as they pleased.

Ideas were tourists. They luxuriated on the chairs and divans in her hotel eyes, paid their fare, and made clean getaways through the highways of her lungs and the alleyways of her nostrils. Her breath came loudly, announcing their departure.

Her eyes warped from their darkness into a coffee stain. Her concentrated look was a spill, the liquid curved down at the edges of her mouth. Her face dripped its caffeine tears. She folded her smallness in half and hunched over the paper that was as crisp as her voice.

The miasmic world dissolved like sugar around her.

She picked her words from the piles among her feet, testing them, weighing them, and then setting them in order from lightest to heaviest on her page. It felt good to end her sentences with the force of an anvil.

With one heavy boulder of a line, whose scribbled face was as black as a burn, she concluded her constructions.

She weighted the edges so the whole epistle crumbled toward the bottom. The ink spots edged together like a crowd. Crumpled and used, the frailness of the elderly, yellow paper announced itself in her hands. Edge met edge.

Soft as a strand of hair, the beginnings sniffed at the stone ends. There was a crease, a folding of ideas as she smashed the lined poem together. It reached down and touched its toes, then carefully brought its arms together. Quartered, the weight entered her pocket, loving her hip the way no man would ever. It snuggled in warm as fingers.

The sun didn’t notice, and dripped down the already stained face of the sky.