Tag Archives: anxiety

Living With Mental Patients

Posted on by

With a few rare, sad, tragic exceptions, the people in my family tend to live a long time with relatively few health defects, only to spend most of their lives in utter misery, punctuated at the end with a large, delirious question mark. So, while I should have little fear of diabetes, cancer, schizophrenia or heart disease, the nature of the preceding sentence is such that I do anyway. I’m not a hypochondriac – they always think they’re sick. I’m a catastrophic – I don’t get sick very often, but when I do it’s like Starbucks coffee – far more unpleasant in practice and almost certainly lethal.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about the middle part of my thesis – the part about utter misery.

We aren’t miserable for any tangible reason, but the misery comes and we throw a blanket over it and write a name on it, like “MY JOB” or “MY RELATIONSHIP” or “THE CERTAINTY OF A LONELY DEATH.” My generation is lucky, because we have ways of dealing with it rather early in our lives. These methods include stuff like drugs and therapy, items that allow us to use our natural faculties to rip the blanket off and see that the thing underneath it isn’t a thing at all, or that it’s actually a part of us, or something else metaphorical.

I keep using “we,” but I’m only speaking about myself.

I had an appointment with my psychiatrist the other day, as people like me sometimes do. I was filling him in on some of my thought processes and some of my problems. He nodded and shook his head and and leaned forward and said, in an exasperated way: “Jim, you’re really hard on yourself.”

Yeah. I know.

But not as much as I used to be.

Come Sleep With Me

Posted on by

Imagine a good night’s sleep. Think about the perfect pillow placement. Think about the optimum temperature. Think about your pulse slowly pulling the sleigh of your fading consciousness through the snowy valley of soft, floating dreams.

Now, imagine that your bedroom is rapidly filling with angry bees and raise your core body temperature to the skin-sloughing peal of piping hot pizza sauce. It’s not a pillow anymore, it’s a concrete curb.

Insomnia happens to everybody, but if there is a limited supply of it in the universe, people like me take up the extra slack. Don’t worry, I got it. You go ahead and get that beauty rest. No, really, I’m fine.

Some nights warn you before they’re going to be long. It might be a last-minute stomach ache.

But most of the time you don’t get any warning at all. The night appears to be going a certain way, you feel the appropriate and familiar level of sleepiness. You lie in bed, drifting away, when you remember something. You take this something off of whatever safe little back burner you had it cooling on and pour it over your head.

The catnaps you manage to squeeze in between trying to sleep on the other side of the bed and bouts of cursing at the ceiling amount to about five solid minutes of REM.

I have such a difficult time falling asleep that fearing a night like the above might keep me up all night, thus proving the crippled President Roosevelt right – being afraid of fear makes for a very tired Jimmy.