Insomnia

Well, here we are again. 

Confused?  Allow me to clarify.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I’m a night owl.  Always have been.  Where many people are in dreamland by midnight, I don’t even start to get sleepy until about 1am most nights.  My girlfriend tried to change that in me for several years, using every tactic from cajolery to bribery to verbal abuse.  However, she failed, and has finally come to terms with the idea that I’ll be awake for at least a couple hours after she crashes. 

It’s not that I’m opposed to going to bed early.  I just know that I won’t actually sleep for several hours, and I don’t like just lying in bed staring at the ceiling waiting to get drowsy.  However, my nocturnal nature comes with a price.  In most cases, I have to get up when I have to get up, which never leaves me that mythical eight hours of sleep you’re supposed to get.  More often than not, I’m lucky to get six hours.  Usually, it’s more like five.  That’s fine, as I’ve learned to function quite well on that.

However, once in a great while, sleep abandons me entirely.  And I’m left to traverse that weird, dead realm between 3am and sunrise.  This is where I am right now.   The house is dead quiet, except for my keystrokes and the A.C.   My friends are sound asleep, for the most part.   There’s nothing but me, the silence, and a whole lot of time to think. 

Usually, it’s a very dark place.  I’ve often spent the sleepless nights wishing – no, praying – for death.  Anything to relieve me of the hurt and frustration and regret I carry.  Anything to keep me from having to spend another day slogging through the toxic debris I’ve made of my life.   The bad choices followed by the missed chances and the sheer bad luck.  I can’t spend a lot of time looking back, because I start to realize that near every choice I’ve ever made was the wrong one, and I’m overwhelmed by despair.  

Cheery motherfucker, aren’t I?

Note I said ‘usually’.  Tonight’s different.  I’m all right.  I don’t feel good, but I don’t feel bad either.   I don’t really know how to define this state.  It’s not ‘resignation’.   ‘Acceptance’ might be closer.   I’ve changed a lot since the last time I had this insomnia.  As I recall, it was after I started playing CoX, but before I joined VoPC and met Raina. 

Longtime readers of this blog know what happened, so I won’t rehash it.  It was painful, but I learned a lot from it.  I learned that there’s only so much you can do to get along with someone before you have to say, “You know what?  Fuck you.  This isn’t worth my sanity or peace of mind anymore.”  If you’re the one doing all the changing and bending and compromising, then you have to take a look at the relationship you’re trying so hard to save.  What is it, exactly?

In the case of Raina, I was trying to salvage what I thought was a friendship.  Only, how could it be a friendship if my friend blithely refused to even consider my point of view?  Doesn’t there have to be at least THAT much consideration involved if you’re going to call someone a friend?  I’m not saying you have to agree with them, but you need to at least try to listen with an open mind. 

It’s a lesson I revisited soon after with Grim.  That was even more painful, because unlike Raina, Grim actually did seem to be listening.  Initially, there was an actual dialogue.  At first, I had no doubt that we could resolve the issue.  Then I saw where she was actually coming from, and there went that.

I’ve been there again with another friend.  It hurt even more, because the person I connected so strongly with vanished overnight.  I’m going to go off on a tangent and describe a scene from a movie that illustrates the feeling I’m trying to convey here.   Consider, if you will, the 1995 horror flick The Mangler.  For the most part, it was a gory damn mess more or less based on a Stephen King short story that was about a billion times better than the movie.   Actually, you could say that about 95% of his work that was made into movies. 

Anyway, I digress.  Long story short, a commercial laundry machine gets possessed by an evil force.  Lot of people die, blood, guts, yadda yadda.  However, our hero’s love interest tries to offer herself to the machine to save his life, and loses a finger to the machine, which stops chasing them and vanishes.  Our hero shows up at the laundry the next day with flowers for his lady, only to find the machine right back where it was, and everyone working as if nothing had happened.  He looks up to find his love interest in a suit, ordering people about in a brusque manner.   She sees him and gives him this heartless, icy smile, and waves mockingly to him with the hand that’s now short one finger.  Our hero realizes that the woman he loved no longer exists, throws the flowers in the trash, and breaks north. 

While I obviously wasn’t in love with this person, that’s kind of what it felt like.  They’re no longer the same person I befriended.  It happens, people change.  I continued to try to be a friend, but the distance grew continually, and at this point, we don’t talk.   Such is life. 

I’ve also looked at my relationship with my girlfriend.  Longtime friends and readers of this blog know at least some of the anguish I’ve been through with her.  Recently, I’ve taken a more honest look at things, and have come to the conclusion that I’m just as much to blame for the way things are as she is.  I haven’t been fair.  I’ve been downright mean to her, out of frustration. 

In a lot of ways, she can’t help how she is.   She just doesn’t look at any single facet of life in a way that’s easy to relate to.  She’s self-centered and lacks empathy, but I don’t think that it’s because she thinks other people are less important.  She just isn’t wired to be able to empathize with other people.  She can manipulate them via academic knowledge of their behavior/weakness/tendencies/etc, but I don’t think she’s capable of grasping their emotional context.  If something bothers me, I can explain why to her until I’m blue in the face and she may well ‘get’ it.  However, it’s purely academic to her.  It’s not that she doesn’t care about me, she just doesn’t viscerally get why I’m upset.

There are more key differences.   What I find funny….she doesn’t.   Her humor is more childlike.   She just doesn’t share my taste in movies, music, philosophy, etc.  In many ways, we’re aliens to each other. We really don’t have anything in common, but for some reason, we’re still trying to make this work.   I think she does love me…as best as she’s capable of.   If I’m to be totally honest, I love her too.  She’s not a horrible person.  She’s just way too damn different. 

But…because of that, I frequently feel lonely even when I’m with her.  It’s not anyone’s fault.  We want to understand each other and connect.   But it’s like trying to explain color to someone who’s been blind their whole life.  Or explain physics via interpretive dance.  The translation just isn’t happening.

Yeah.

See what happens when I can’t get any sleep?  Sheesh.