As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.

It also helps that the various fixes and improvements we’ve done to the device I’m testing have made it easier to run. It’s still quite a lot of effort to do any kind of testing with it, but a lot of the friction is gone now so I don’t have to keep fighting as much as I used to in order to keep it moving. Now it carries itself along pretty well once I get it moving so I can mostly focus on control instead. The new one we installed runs even better than that, so I’m getting quite a lot done at the moment, despite being so physically inactive over the last six months. I really let my workout routine go, so getting back into this laborious testing has been a slow, exhausting process, but nowhere near as slow and exhausting as doing the testing back in January was, even without my workouts and prior testing to help prepare me. I mean, I wasn’t working out all that much back then either, on account of the exhaustion and the pain, but I was doing a lot of labor at work and that counted for a lot. All the physical therapy stuff I was doing helped as well, since it was a lot of core strength stuff. Anyway, it’s easier now, I’m able to recover more quickly, and while I’m incredibly exhausted today from how much I’ve done and a week of rough sleep for reasons of stress rather than depression or pain, I know that going to bed at a reasonable time tonight is not only within my grasp, but will be incredibly rewarding. There’s no way I don’t fall right asleep, as tired as I am. I mean, how can I lay in bed, stressed and anxiously thinking about the miseries of the world when I’m so tired and worn out that I can barely keep a single thought in my head while writing this blog post?

I’m trying to get my sleep schedule fixed. It’s not working great yet, on account of all the stress, but at least I’ve stopped staying up too late because I spent all day feeling miserable thanks to my depression and needed to fortify myself against the next day’s misery by doing as much fun stuff as I could force myself to do before sleep took me over completely. Now I’m just staying up late because I can’t sleep while the weight of the world is on my mind. Once I get that under control and get my work-night sleep average above five hours again, I’ll hopefully be able to get back to working out in the morning before I go into the office. Currently, I’m still struggling to even get into the building on time (well, the time I’ve assigned myself since it’s not like I’ve got a set schedule at work in terms of start/stop times, just in terms of weekly hours), and that’s with rushing out the door as quickly as possible once I can force myself out of bed. I need to get out of bed faster, wake up to my alarms when they go off (rather than twenty to sixty minutes later, when they’re still going off), and push myself into working out. If I can get all that done, I’ll probably wind up feeling less bleary and out of it in the mornings, too. Nothing like a bit of physical activity and sweat to wake you up and get your blood pumping. It would also be nice to start reducing my caffeine intake now that I don’t need the crutch to deal with my depression as much as I once did, but that’s contingent on not needing it as a crutch to deal with my burgeoning exhaustion.

I wish I could wrap this post up by celebrating how different things are and how much better everything is now that it was a year ago, but it’s diffcult to properly get a sense of that since, a year ago, my problems were entirely different. There’s no comparing the daily pain of my body and my sleeplessness–problems that only really impacted me–to the general collapse of society and the rule of law that has been plaguing my mind in all its forms for the last nine months in addition to my now-constantly-fluctuating sleeplessness. There’s just no common lines to draw between them to illustrate how they make me feel and impact my day-to-day other than that I’d say I’m doing kinda bad in general. At least my emotional state is just tired nowadays and not absolutely miserable. Turns out it’s a lot easier to not be as emotionally impacted by the state of the world when your depression isn’t constantly hissing in your mind’s ear, but that doesn’t help much when the world feels so much worse than it did a year ago. Which has the unpleasant side-effect of making me invest myself more in keeping track of what’s going on since I feel like I need to be miserable about all of this, especially now that I have parts of my day where I don’t think about it at all. Something to talk to my therapist about when next I see her, for sure. This definitely isn’t healthy, but at least I feel alright about it, most of the time. It’s a lot easier to not feel bad about stuff if you’ve developed the internal machanisms to deflect constant crushing misery from your conscious mind and then no longer have to deal with something powerful enough to flatten you instantly and instead just have to contend with how bad the world is–which is also a thing you’ve already been doing since it’s not like you didn’t expect all of this to be happening by now. Anyway, I’m going to go get some sleep and hope that I’m a little more positively inspired tomorrow so I can write about something fun rather than natter on about physical exhaustion and my newfound emotional fortitude.