Six years and still not enough sleep

Today I am tired. And because I am tired, everything is awful. Life has no redeeming features.

Nothing I do is good enough. Nothing I am is good enough.

My dreams and hopes are either so small as to be pitiful, laughable and childish, or so large as to be unachievable and pointless.

I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing.

I feel judged and found wanting.

I feel vulnerable and weak.

I feel burnt out.

I am tired. And because I am tired, I can't distinguish between which of my feelings are transient, and which are deep, and dark, and permanent. And sometimes they are both. Sometimes it is the tiredness that allows the deep, dark, sad, hurt feelings to bubble to the surface and dominate all else. The feelings that are always there, but that I can keep under control, refuse to hear, crush with action and activity. But the small corner of my mind that remains rational, despite the exhaustion, knows that some of these feelings will be gone in the morning, and I will be bemused by them.

So maybe I should just ignore all of them until my filters are back in place? Maybe I should refuse to allow myself to wallow in self-pity until I have slept, and forced the darkness back beneath the veneer of positivity, so that I can carry on without wanting to weep into my little boy's sweet, soft hair as I hold him close after his bath. Or maybe I need to feel the feelings, so that when tomorrow dawns I can look at them more dispassionately and find which ones persist, which ones I need to try and take action on.

Do I really need to take a step back from some of the people I thought were my friends so that I stop feeling rejected and an afterthought? Or am I simply imagining things because I'm over-tired?

Do I really need to sweep through the house like an avenging angel and purge every room of heaps of detritus?*

Do I really need to worry that LittleBear's diet is alarmingly restricted and push on with a new regime of trying different foodstuffs, or should I be assured that a child who'll eat every member of the brassica family will probably turn out OK in the end?

Do I need to worry about all the things we don't do as a family, that "everyone else does"? Is LittleBear missing out on some essential component of childhood because there's a memo I missed about what normal families do at the weekend?

Do I need to censor the things that I say and do because my emotional verbosity, foul language and intemperate ranting is giving me a reputation as the kind of person to steer clear of? Do I need to stop writing a blog, because I'm slowly but steadily ensuring that everyone I know is aware of just how emotionally unstable I am, and there is no better way of driving people away than by being the eternal pit of negativity? Do I need to stop being quite so "me" all the time, and put back the facade of normality that other people feel comfortable with? Is being true to myself, and honest about the crippling self-doubt and anxiety worth it if the result is that I am kept at arms length by the world? Or is it better to be accepted on the world's terms by bending myself to fit?

Do I need to sleep more? Indubitably.



* This one's easy. The answer is yes. The real question is when will I find the time to do this?