23 April 2020

 I was rudely awakened two hours ago by an acid reflux moment; and I've been afraid to go back to sleep.

Also... I'm working with The Mood Center at Integral Care; and we're trying to get my sleep schedule back on a regular regimen. At the same time, we're trying to swap out Trazadone for the Olanzapine - and I think the Olanzapine was acting as a sleep aid. But, I've heard that Olanzapine can be such a dirty drug, for its long-term side effects...

So, it feels like my sleep schedule is in this cycle of 2 hours sleep, 2 hours awake, then 4 hours of sleep. Leaving me somewhat exhausted during the day, and prone to taking naps. That could also just be the quarantine. Or it could be side effects from the blood pressure and cholesterol meds...?

There's this lingering fear that, if my sleep doesn't become longer - i.e. doesn't reach delta cycles - that over time, my mental health will degrade into a manic episode. I'm starting to see some of the classic early symptoms of that. (Restlessness, Irritability, Rapid Speech, Increased Sex Drive...)

There's another dimension to my present-day situation. I'd like to reach out more, socially - through phone calls and texts. I'm stymied by trying to find an optimum time to do so; because I have fairly full days with online math tutoring. Still, there's a part of me that would like to believe that our communication lives are not entirely wrapped up in social media. I suspect, though, that many people have abandoned phone calls and texts as means of communication - that, or the darker conclusion is that nobody desires to reach out to me.

So, I'm left with Zoom meetings. Or... passing conversations with my house mates.

I'm super grateful that I still have tutoring jobs - that I'm currently able to get my essential bills paid. I don't know if it's enough money to help support others, though. ....and I don't know if there's much free time available for others, either.

I've let the poem/post collecting fall to the wayside. There's a tiny bit of me that would like to compile the last 10 years into different collections of writing. Yet, I do not relish sifting through everything to try to make a viable collection. Plus, there's the my experience of my mom and my aunt, who did try to self-publish - but not with a lot of return on their investment. So, I have a whole lot of poems that mostly served as an experiment: "Could I write consistently, every day, for a year? If not, perhaps writing is not my careeer."

I want to believe that I have abandoned the idea of journaling on Facebook. I don't want a lot of the friction that the comments seemed to stir up. But then..?! There's posts like this. I also still like to "shit-post" - posting stuff that has very little relevance to real events in the real world. I would think there are some personal reasons underneath that - not the least of which being "feeling grossly uninformed about the hot issues".