I wasn't able to get much of anything productive done yesterday, mostly due to executive dysfunction and general anxiety, the latter of which I wasn't entirely aware of until today. I wanted to get stuff done on my day off, I really did, but found I didn't have energy for anything other than the podcast recording, which went well. But it took all my social energy to do.
Where the discovery of the anxiety enters into the equation is that I overslept on my day off due to my poor sleeping habits, which carried into today. As I went to go to sleep Tuesday morning, I found I couldn't wind myself down properly for what seems to be weeks now, a concept I thought was the result of depression (i.e. horrible thoughts keeping me awake) but I realize is instead a side effect of my anxiety issues.
I once again come back to a certain frustrating sense of irony at the realization that, even in the middle of the upside of a depression cycle, anxiety never really seems to subside at all, and so I am having thoughts racing through my brain at bed time, shaking limbs, headaches, stuff like that, all preventing me from managing to get rest at the time I want to. And I often want to.
Coming home from work is really stressful when it comes to my mental health. My friend Glaive had suggested to me that the reason for this may be related to just low psychic batteries (so to speak, not their words exactly), that I had spent all my energy working for eight hours that it was harder to regulate the mental health stuff (because I did it all night), with another friend also pointing out natural circadian rhythms are also in a constant disrupted state, and so the trip home is often either "I want to die" (if depression is high) or "I really want thoughts to stop" (when anxiety is high). Either way, I often get home wanting to shut the whole system down for awhile and sleep, but when the anxiety is high, I can't seem to make that shut down process work.
So I spend hours trying to quiet things down, maybe dose off in bed, wake up again for two hours, take a sleeping pill, wake up to pee (and be disoriented and groggy) after two more hours, and then finally enter real, honest sleep, four-to-six hours after the initial attempt. So I attempt bed at 9am, finally sleep around 1pm, and then try to get up at 5:30, but then my alarm goes off and I snooze it or ignore it, and wake up around 8 or 9pm, sometimes later, and rarely feel extraordinary rested.
This happened on both Monday and Tuesday, and killed a lot of momentum and left me feeling far more deflated than when I began.
I didn't have the anxiety dreams on Monday, though, but today I got hit with a doozy. I actually had two and, while both dealt with heights (I am terrified of heights and they give me major anxiety), only one was particularly notable. The first was mostly trying to achieve the task of not falling off a tall thing while dealing with customers at work which, while revealing on the subject of how I feel about my job, doesn't provide too much insight into the relationship between my depression and anxiety.
The second dream was the one that shook me.
I was in some sort of airport or public transit building, and my anxiety was already going through the roof due to all the people coming and going. There was a woman with me, but I don't really see her face, just a Charlie Brown adult softly wa-wa-wa-waing at me in a way that helps to soothe me a little. She holds my hand. Eventually, we get separated and I am by myself. A tall, young, somewhat handsome but a little off-putting man (The Odd Young Man) begins to speak to me, showing me a game on his phone. He seems a little off, awkward in a very aloof way. The game is nothing I recognize, and the writing is what appears to be some sort of not-quite-Japanese characters, like alien symbols I don't understand. I politely tell him I don't know anything about his game and walk away. As I look for the woman, he once again approaches me, and this time I cut him off and say I really don't know what to say about his game, but I am polite.
I find the woman, and again The Odd Young Man approaches me. I tell the woman the guy is weird, even unnatural, before he gets close to once again show me the game, though this time there is some cartoonish anime girl on the phone with more strange writing. I tell him, this time not politely, to leave me alone and that I don't care about his game. He then walks away without making a single expression or saying another word. I am weirded out by him.
I notice another man across the crowd, but can't seem to make out any details about him, like he looks normal but somehow blurry. I point him out the this faceless woman beside me, but she takes no notice. I find him suspicious, even a little alarming, feeling like he's watching the crowd for something. The woman again softly makes her soothing noises.
The woman and I are ushered onto a cabin with windows on a cable, like a ski lift, and we're taken up suddenly. It's going a little fast, and taking longer than it should, but the woman tells me I'm just anxious because of the social situation, and that I need to relax. I feel warm, and sweaty, and frightened.
The lift stops, jostling everyone around. I look out the window and am shocked to see I can't see the ground, just sky and clouds, like being in a plane. I look to the right and see the cable continues into the sky, but I can't see where it connects, where it stops, where it ends. Just keeps going. I find myself wondering if it will literally dump us into space, which frightens me me more. My heart is hammering in my chest, I notice I am sweating.
A voice comes on an intercom and tells us all that "Only one of you will be alive when we reach our destination. Each stop we come to, one of you will walk onto the platform outside for your conversation." The voice has no emotion, but I understand that this a threat. I look around at everyone, just a handful of strangers. They do need seem terribly concerned.
I feel a moment of profound shame in the middle of my anxiety. "This is my moment," I think to myself, "this is the horror movie moment you've prepared for all your life. Of course heights are involved, did you think this would be easy? Go lead these people. Solve this problem. Survive." But instead, I am frozen in fear.
A sliding glass door opens in front of me, and a black man walks outside. The door shuts behind him. There is a circle on a flat platform next to a snowed glass booth. The black man stands on it. I can see the wind is high outside. We cannot hear the conversation, until the man begins to yell at the barely-visible shadow on the other side of the glass. We can't make all of it out, but the words "bitch ass" are audible. This man will not be having whatever the shadow is offering. I sit down, turned away from the scene, trying to collect myself. Suddenly the sliding door opens and The Odd Young Man from earlier walks in and sits in a folding chair in front of me. He is dressed exactly like me. He informs us all that the black man has jumped from the platform. Heart begins to beat faster.
They're talking people into jumping, I realize. You go out on the platform for your conversation, and they convince you to jump off the platform. They will do this until every single person save one has jumped. I don't think I stand a chance. But I'm not sure what I'm more afraid of: being talked into jumping, or the fall itself.
"You're a liar and cheater," I say, "There's no way that guy just agreed to jump. You lied."
But the man across from me is gone. I stand up, looking at the sliding glass door. I know it's my turn, and I am terrified. I stand there, tensed up, and look at the booth outside. A shadowy figure is inside, waiting.
I wake up.
As I thought about the dream, I came to realize that the most important part is what I never got to see: what happened when I went through the door for my conversation, and I realize that why that is important is because I don't know which would win out: Will they convince me to jump? Or will I be unable to because I am too afraid of falling?
My depression, an occasional wish to die, could doom me. My anxiety, my fear, could save me. But either way, I am uncomfortable and stressed. Which of these sensations, these irritations, these destructive tendencies end up being more of a part of me? And do either of them have any merit? Is survival by fear a net positive?
I don't know, but it was an unsettling anxiety dream. Even if it did lead to some introspection into the way anxiety persists, even as depression waxes and wanes, and I'm not sure it has cycles in the same respect. But I still feel very tired, even now, and I can still feel the unease of looking at that booth, and wondering what choices I would make.
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