It finally happened. I finally had people over to just hang out. Took three and a half months, but it finally happened. They weren’t my first house guests, since I’ve hosted an in-person tabletop game day for a Pathfinder 2e one-shot (that became at least a two-shot) and had a friend stay the night just a couple weeks ago, but they were the first people I had over with the express purpose of just occupying my space with me. It was really nice. We didn’t do much, other than hang out, go pick up pizza, and then idly watch the first two thirds of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring while we made idle chitchat, ate our food, and did stuff on our phones. Exactly the kind of chill, no expectations, no greater purpose type of hanging out I’ve been wanting. Now all I gotta do is make it happen again! Hopefully in less than three and a half months. It’ll probably be easier, what with the impending winter, but you can never know for certain. Some winters, people will just hole up in their homes and avoid leaving it for anything other than necessity. Some winters, people can’t wait to escape their homes for any reason at all. You never know until it’s happening.

I wish it had helped more than it did, though. I’ve been struggling through an enduring wave of depression lately and while it was absolutely lovely to have my friends over, I was still just as depressed and exhausted after they left. So much so that I lost track of time and wound up reading until about four in the morning. I still feel tired from that, especially since I didn’t get to sleep as early as I would have liked last night, either. It was no four in the morning, but I was climbing into bed a few minutes past one in the morning and a bit over four hours of sleep is not nearly enough, especially coming on the tail of the “five in the morning until just after eleven” type sleep. I’m really feeling my exhaustion today, despite my previous decisions to work on maintaining a sleep schedule that is more conducive to my mental and physical well-being. It’s difficult to stick to something like that when you settle down on your bed with a tablet to do a bit of reading and then that “bit” turns into four hours because you have no sense of the passage of time since it’s not like there you can track the pages moving from one side of the book to the other. Plus, if you’ve been spending a lot of time trying to avoid thinking about how depressed you are, a feeling you strongly associate with being tired these days, you wind up doing more than a little purposeful ignoring of how tired you are.

I’m hoping that I can use this exhaustion and how crummy I feel on top of that (from a mix of stomach problems and burgeoning weariness from today’s flu shot) to help push me into going to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight. And that I can parlay this reasonable bedtime into a whole week’s worth of reasonable bedtimes. I really need to stop letting myself screw up my sleep schedule the instant anything happens. I have a lot of bad habits I need to break and while it might make for some rough nights, keeping on as I have is going to wind up being horrible for my health. Nothing like long-term, sustained sleep-deprivation to really bring down your mental and physical health. I mean, I’m pretty sure my current wave of depression isn’t just from my sleep troubles, since it tends to rise and fall in patterns unrelated to how well I’ve slept, but it is always a contributing factor. Plus, I’d really love to finally get back to my pre-2021 sleep habits, when I wasn’t having frequent nights where I couldn’t fall asleep and wasn’t staying up until one or two every night to make sure I could fall asleep when I went to bed. I’m pretty sure half my problem is that I’ve just gotten so used to fighting off sleepiness that my body is doing it automatically during times that it shouldn’t be. I mean, its not like my body knows the diference between a night when I’m in bed before midnight, ready to sleep, and when I’m trying to keep myself awake all day because I’m dozing off while I’m at work or when its only seven in the evening and I’m sitting on my couch while I wait for it to be late enough for me to go to bed without worrying that I’ll wake up before morning and be unable to get back to sleep…

I’m so tired of being tired all the time. I really need to sleep more. I really need to destress and deal with my anxiety so my brain can properly quiet down at night. I’m tired of feeling like my head’s lost in a fog a couple days a week and like I’m coming apart at the seams every time I try to take stock of where my mental and emotional health is at. I got out of the terrible apartment. All the things that kept me awake, other than my anxiety, are gone. I should be able to sleep better. That’s the first step to working on every other problem in my life, after all. I really need to sleep more so I can stop feeling exhausted all the time. If I can get just one week of decent sleep, even by my later 2022/early 2023 standards, that would be a huge improvement. I feel like that shouldn’t be asking too much, but then I already know that sometimes my depression just creeps up on me, shifts time forward at an incredible pace, and leaves me glued to whatever I’ve been doing as I desperately avoid thinking about how miserable I feel. It is difficult to stop doing something that allows you to escape or brings you even the tiniest sliver of joy when you know that you’re going to be leaving that behind for the generally sad, generally forlorn, and generally hopeless feelings that swirl around your mind when you’re not chasing them away with something more urgent and interesting. It’s a tough spot to be in and it is truly unfortunate that the only rememdy, right now, anyway, is to get some more sleep. If only that were as easy to do as it is to point it out to myself…