If I wasn’t me, I’d probably be a great person.
Thank God for sleep.
Nietzsche once remarked that the most significant buffer between a man and suicide was a good night’s sleep.
And for some reason even though I am not a Christian any more, my favorite line in the Bible remains: ‘‘And thus he giveth his beloved sleep.’’
I try to remember that when I start wishing for death. I just go to sleep and try life again in the morning.
/dark
And each night before I fall asleep (if I do) I hope that I won’t wake up. You can’t trust sleep, it’s temporary.
Sometimes sleep works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. (And naturally, depression has a tendency to disrupt sleep.)
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my first thought of the day makes it clear I’m doomed.
My thoughts exactly. I can’t always sleep. My sleep is frequently wracked with hellish dreams. At least when I’m asleep, I get a break from “me” and from my life.
I think I’m a better person for having overcome them. Not a great person, mind you, just better than I would have been otherwise, had I not learned to work my way through adversity. So I guess it’s a good thing that I could not escape from Me during those times, or I would have and not gained from them.
Something like “Fucking hell, here we go again.”
That’s my second thought. The first thought is usually, “I’m the worst person ever and deserve to die.”
Cheers!
It can be hell.
Yeah, I’m familiar with that one too!
Back at ya! [Raises his glass]
IDK, sleep can be bad too though. Sometimes you wake up with that eerie feeling like you’ve been violated in some way. Or you’ve come to a realization about yourself that feels quit unsavory.
I’ve always had weird ass, often graphically violent dreams. Lately they aren’t quite rising to the level of nightmares, though. Sorry to turn this into a depression support group, I just think we really experience the stuck with ourselves thing keenly and often.
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On the bright side, you probably don’t have depersonalization disorder.
One part of my insomnia is that when I try to go to bed, my brain races. I have a pill for it, but what actually works really well is to put something fairly mindless on the TV-- a rerun I’ve seen a few times, like a Big Bang Theory or a Law and Order and set the TV to turn itself off after 90 minutes.
This works great on the nights I go to bed before my husband. When we go to bed at the same time, sex helps.
Well I searched, and I searched, to find myself the perfect life.
Brand new suit, brand new car, even got me a little wife.
But no matter where I’ve gone, I was sure to find myself there,
You can run all your life, but not go anywhere.
- Mike Ness, Social Distortion, Ball and Chain
Yep, welcome to the Abyss, Mr. Kafka - we got you a table with a beautiful view down into it.
I have come to look at getting my brain to outside of my stress and into the moment as a form of mental exercise. Whether I am in the zone due to physical activity, some form of meditation, playing music and being in the groove - it all takes my mind out of my day. Making time for that mental exercise is the only way I know of to manage my relationship with this existential, Abyss feeling.
Alcohol and other substances can bring a sense of it, too, but in a far more superficial way.
College girlfriend never really understood what it was like going through the day with depression and stuff, so I would tell her, “imagine the person you hate most of all, now imagine being around them every second of every day nonstop and forever.”
And then imagine it’s more than one person that you hate who you’ll have to deal with throughout the day. And then are also people you like but they won’t come around while the assholes are in the room.
This is what mindfulness techniques aim to enable you to manage i.e. to observe your own thoughts, acknowledge them but also to acknowledge that they are only in your mind and you also exist physically in the world and can shift your focus just on to that e.g. your breathing, physical sensation. If you can learn this discipline - and it takes practice! - you can get that break you need from your mind working overtime.
You will be less likely then to get ‘carried away’ on your thoughts, worries, anxieties and to just be in the moment.
I have a mental disorder, and I’ve thought that if I could just view myself from an outside perspective or temporarily have a different mind, my problems would be fixed and my mind “reset” very quickly.