August 6, 2007
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lethargy
I usually wake up pretty early. Not at any set time, but anywhere between 5 AM and 7 AM I will usually wake up whether I want to or not. Sometimes, if I went to sleep really late then I’ll wake up like as late as 8:30 or 9 but never much later than that. I have an alarm clock and it rings every once in a while but I honestly can’t remember the last time the alarm clock has actually woken me up. I’ll always awake when it goes off.
And I tend to wake up pretty alert too. I usually don’t feel like I need something to wake me up and I usually don’t feel this urge to crawl back into bed and sleep the world away. I just get up. I start checking me email, doing many other pointless things, and living life as anyone would on a normal day. Sometimes I’ll get tired later and have to take a nap or something, but I rarely wake up and want to go back to sleep right away.
Today was different. I woke up feeling this profound feeling of lethargy. I really didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping and sleeping. I felt as if I had absolutely zero energy and zero will to act. None of the things I imagined doing with myself for the day appealed to me anywhere near as much as the thought of sleeping or even just lying down staring at nothing appealed to me.
And so I did. I woke up at about 7:00 AM, got up checked my email, and then went right back down to bed again. I lay there stared at the ceiling for a while, got up, dozed, got up walked around, lay down on the futon, dozed, got up checked my email, sat down in my chair, dozed, woke up lay down on the floor stared at the ceiling for a while, dozed, got up paced around my apartment, lay down in bed again, dozed, and so on. This lasted until like 11:30 or so.
I just didn’t want to do anything! My will was so totally sapped and I couldn’t understand why. There were so many things I knew I needed to do. There were so many things I, in fact, wanted to do, things I had planned to do last night before going to bed. But this morning the though of doing them just filled me with a sense of utter disinterest. They all seemed like such a waste of time. So instead I burned 4 and a half hours doing nothing at all.
What caused this feeling? Maybe it was the tiring and emotionally draining events of this past weekend. Maybe it is the inevitable feelings of fear and self doubt that I knew would come eventually but which I somehow managed to mostly avoid last week. Or maybe it was all that really odd dream.
In my dream there were two of me. One of me was standing and watching the other me, but like behind some kind of a glass barrier so he couldn’t interfere. The other me, who was the actual me, the point of reference me, was sitting at a strange desk and in front of me is this infinitely growing stack of papers and I am being forced to read them all. The papers are in fact huge letters from all of the people I know addressed to me. They are almost like payback for all the long letters I have written in the past, an equivalent amount for me to read in recompense. And what’s more they are all about me, lengthy treatises on who I am and what they think of me and what I should do and why I should do it. Some of the letters are angry, some are cruel, some are sad, some are kind, some are full of praise, others are filled with bitter criticism. The letters are all extensive, even letters from people I’ve barely interacted with, people I only met once, people I don’t even remember the names of. Their letters are there though, and they all have more to say than I ever imagined. But none of them ever have anything to say about themselves. And the whole time I’m reading, I keep wondering why they don’t talk about themselves.
The me that is watching behind the glass is horrified and terrified by the proceedings. He keeps shouting for the me in the chair at the desk to stop reading and to get up and run away. Get out of there while you still can! But the me in the chair is addicted and can’t get enough of the letters. He just reads and reads, sometimes horrified by what he reads, sometimes deeply moved, but in all cases incapable of stopping. I never want to stop. I feel so gratified for finally knowing something.
When I awoke of course I don’t remember any letters content. Indeed there weren’t any letters, only dreams. But maybe a part of me just kept wanting to go back there and read those letters, whereas a part of me is horrified by the very thought of my ever having been there. Perhaps the conflict kept me in this netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, trying to find some reconciliation between two directly contradictory urges.
So anyway, now it’s after 5 and I’ve resolved that I’m just going to spend the rest of the day writing, rather than doing the other things I should be doing. That usually helps me to reconcile the stranger thoughts that twist reality in ways I did not expect.
