Oct 9

 Brother visited before therapy on Monday.

I was up relatively early. Before Monday morning my anxiety skittered out and thought oh I am going to be fine, they will visit and say, oh there's nothing wrong with you ! On the one hand. That amount of energy would be good. On the other hand. Someone would mistake my masking for being well.

Uh huh. Monday morning was like molasses poured into an exhausted bucket. And the perspective shifted entirely. Oh. Oh. I am going to be lucky to just get myself fucking washed and dressed. Let alone anything else. I am going to be lucky to make it downstairs and stay upright on the sofa.

I quickly ditched any idea of a bit of washing up. Or a quick tidy up. Oh no. No no no. Just not feeling like absolute garbage was going to be all I could manage.

Slowly I made myself at least presentable.

I went to sit on the sofa. And I couldn't maintain. They were due. I couldn't do it. I gave up and lay down instead. Closed my eyes. Awful.

Sometime later I heard them arrive. Pulled myself together. Dialled up the mask. But was deliberate. And took my time.

They left a few hours later. Just before my therapy. I felt ok. Went to therapy. Started to drag a little. But still felt ok. Rested when I got home. Even played a game online for a while.

Then promptly crashed hard.

And then since then I have been bumping along the bottom energy wise with a few pushes of energy to play a game in the evening. And then crash before and after.

Today is Thursday.

I feel even more exhausted today than ever.

I have realised sleep or rest wise theres some real fucky stuff going on.

So. My sleep schedule has been dragged back into some form of normal. I am going to bed, eh, anywhere from 10pm til midnight. And waking up. Eh. Anywhere from 8am to 9.30am. And. My sleep rhythm wants to keep that cycle. I can feel it. Maybe. 10 hours of sleep or so.

But it's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.

And despite my body rhythm wanting to stick to that more normal ish kind of 10 hours of sleep. The rest of me is dying on my ass with that little sleep. I need more than 12 hours a day. 14 is often a good mix between stupidly long and not long enough.

I think my exhaustion this week has steadily got worse because my sleep is trying to stick to that 8 to 10 hour rhythm. And I am just not resting at all with it.

I wonder if that's half the problem going on. I have two different things fighting at what their idea of stability is. One is a circadian rhythm, used to daylight, that wants something in the ballpark of 9 hours. The other is exhaustion levels, ill levels, that absolutely want me to rest hardcore for most of the day. And obeying one or the other makes the other one unhappy and problematic.

Eh. Meh.

I hate it.

I hate being dragged back and forth and not having any energy to do shit. Little glimpses of light. Little spurts of uptime where I push at it and overburn. And then back to the mud.

It gets so old. So very old. Always fucking stewing in bed. On the one hand there is blessed oblivion in there. On the other hand. It's maddening. Frustrating. Like being stuck in a cage most of the day, every day, week after week after month after year.

Oh.

Look.

I appear to be at the rage stage of acceptance with my bullshit again.

Another trip around the stages of grief wheel it is.

Wheee.

My brother and my sister in law were good. Albeit. They are both visibly getting old. Not so much in their demeanour. But how they move. My brother particularly. He has slowed right down. Difficult to move. You can see it. My stairs gave him trouble. The awful hand of time passes over everything. A year passes. Things shift. Before you know it. The horizon has moved entirely.

But. They are both in good spirits. They offered to help me with the house. Nudged me to move down to them again. We talked about it. About how I felt like our family didn't gel. I didn't blame anyone. I explained, to my sister in law mostly, in very clear terms about what damage was done by our upbringing. Not damage you can spot on the surface. But scratch a little. And it's there. All the things we are and do. My brother sat there and listened. It upset him. In a quiet way. His eyes teared up. I noted to my sister in law the damage that had been done to the poor bugger. The ways it had shaped him. But also. To take my words with a pinch of salt. What did I know. I was just a dickhead. But eh. My words ring horribly on point. They thread all the bits and pieces together. They show you the full picture. It is, as I acknowledged, not a picture you necessarily want to show. I said I more often than not kept my mouth shut. You shouldn't said my sister in law. Always talk to them ! Hang on I said. There is some wisdom in letting sleeping dogs lie. And I do not want to upset the boat. Maybe. A little here. A little there. A touch. But. Somethings perhaps are best left alone.

It was good to see them both. I got big hugs from the pair of them. Particularly my sister in law. She gets it. She isn't a product of our family. It frustrates her a lot - without her understanding - why my brother is often the way he is. In respect of reaching out to family and the like. The silence where there should be communication. The reticence where there should be outreach. But. It is his damage. His survival skills. That have shaped him to be that animal. He is, without a doubt, learning, and growing and changing. He has in my opinion, slowly realised more about himself and his past in this last, I don't know, 6 years or so, than perhaps he has done in his whole life. My sister in law gets expasperated. Just do X. Uh huh. But you have to realise. Whilst it may seem like a reasonable, even, common thing you're asking. For my brother. It's like sticking your hand into a fire.

Trauma.

And getting over trauma isn't that simple as a nudge. Maybe. Like most of our scars. You never really do. You just learn to work around it. With it. But never get rid of it.

Therapy this week we covered a lot of ground about nihilism. Objectivity. Subjectivity. For most of it, it felt like me slowly teaching the shrink why objectivity was important. Knowledge gain. Better information. Not that living the subjective experience isn't important or even unuseful. But. Accuracy. And all that. Building a better mousetrap. Basically. If you want to build knowledge. And start even the smallest step out of the mud of pure nonsense, chaos and belief. You have to reach for the smallest of increases in objectivity. And one step. Leads to another. And on.

We covered how I didn't value my life. That I was worth more to others monetarily than anything else. Not just being miserable. Being objective. Being brutal. Your only worth is in money the shrink said. Yeah. Basically. I said. We also covered how I thought that I was dysfunctional. Broken. I covered it in objective terms. The shrink didn't like it. I am hearing that inner critic again the shrink said. But objectively I said. There is a line between resources required to support you, and resources you supply to the community unit. That's the harsh reality. And if I am neurotic. Unable to contain within a reasonable limit my emotions. To function properly. Then what use am I. And yes. You can be very touchy feely about it. But still. If everyone was like that. The world would fall to pieces. I am dysfunctional. Neurotic. Broken. The shrink was unhappy with my self assessment. I acknowledged it was brutal. But that didn't make it not true. 

We kinda left it there. The shrink was unhappy and uncomfortable. And I was objectively correct. The shrink did not like the weapon that was objectivity. They didn't like that it was important. That subjectivity was the thing, not the objective.

From the shrinks perspective. They are neck deep in subjectivity. It's all about the experience of the patient. The person. Whoever. And about changing that subjective reality. A form of existentialism. It's a touchy feely world. That constructs happiness out of your bubble. That acknowledges the bubble.

And none of that is wrong.

It's absolutely correct.

But there is also an objective outside. An unyielding truth. Which does not respect your emotions. Or expectations. Or what you think is fair. Or foul. It does not care about you. Or whether you think you are important. There is an objective reality that either does, or does not. The bridge over the river either stands. Or it collapses. There is no fucking comfortable conversation about re-imagining what failure looks like, or doing your best is all you can do, or being ok with it all.

If it collapses it fails. And kills people. Things. Destroys shit.

If it stands it is a boon.

That's the issue with objectivity. It doesn't care about the narrative cotton wool stories we wind around ourselves to keep out the harsh reality. Our fairy tales about our importance or value have no influence there.

In my work with IT I have seen this major factor in how people work. That everyone wraps themselves in this layer of bullshit. It often covers mistakes in my line of work. People excuse a mistake. Oh it was this way when I tried it. Oh well that was documented wrong. Or something else. It's layers of bullshit designed to comfort the ego. Protect people from reality. People are fuzzy contradictory cluster fucks. Computers are hard edged objective truth machines. The two have difficulty meshing with each other - so much so, its a skill and career in itself to be the horse whisperer between the two.

But on a meta scale. You can see that narrative weave is present in everything in human life. We tell ourselves lies and pretty stories all the time. Reality is brutal. Awful. Flensing. It will peel the flesh from your bones and leave you naked and blasted into nothing. It makes sense then to weave those layers of protective bullshit around yourself.

And in normal terms. That's what being human is. That's what shrinks deal with. And the art that shrinks apply is adjusting that weave. Applying a little objectivity. But not standing in it.

At the bottom of it all, a poor summary is really. Are you an existentialist or a nihilist. Or before that even. Have you not even got that far. Are you just locked into some proto level of belief and unawareness.

The ironic rub is.

That in order to do more. Succeed more. Push more. Get further. Build a better thing. Have a chance at making your environment better for you and everyone else. You need to dance with objectivity.

But the more you dance with objectivity the more it will destroy you. The closer you get to nihilism and learning that there is no Wizard of Oz.

As I said many weeks ago to the shrink.

Do you want to know. Or do you want to be happy.

Choose. And keep choosing.