11 July 2008

Reinvention

I have a bunch of posts sitting in my queue. Things that I've written a few paragraphs about, and then either ran out of time to finish, or got hung up on a spot, and moved off from it thinking that inspiration would come along and I'd finish it at some future point.

But a few of those queued posts have been hanging out for more than a year.

Part of my OCD is that I don't like unfinished projects hanging about. They bother me.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, often I can't go back to sleep because I lie there and think about what's gone wrong, what's undone, what I've screwed up, what I can fix, what I can't change, what I should do tomorrow....shit that I can't turn off. It was worse, lots worse, when I was more of a mess. Now it is more of a mild annoyance than a debilitating, paralyzing problem, but it IS an annoyance.

It makes me want to reach for the sleeping pills. They don't turn off the inner monologue, exactly. They do make it harder to hear, though, because they force your brain to kind of shut off. The problem with that is twofold. First, I've weaned myself off of the Ambien, a process that was by no means fun, and I've no desire to repeat it.

Secondly, well....there isn't really a secondly. This is kind of like the real estate axiom, that location, location, location are the three most important things when it comes to purchasing real estate. I've weaned myself from the Ambien, and I've weaned myself from the Ambien. Granted, without it this past winter, I'd have slipped farther and further, because I couldn't sleep. I could NOT sleep. Without the prescription, I'd get about an hour, maybe three at the most, and the pills gave me about five at a stretch.

Depression makes sleeping hard. Lack of sleep makes the depression worse. It is a miserable cycle, one that feeds on itself. Hearing that internal "you didn't do XYZ" nagging at me didn't help, either. Inte alls, as we'd say in Swedish. (Betcha can figure that one out without me translating.)

So what to do with all those dangling posts? I see them every time I log in to Blogger. Maybe I should delete them. That feels like giving up to me, though, so they'll probably hang out until I finish them, or until I decide that they are indeed worthless, and delete them.

I have a novel from the library where the author talks about the book having been re-purposed from its original incarnation. Id' be nice if I could reinvent some of those posts. My current focus, though, is outside of the computer and away from my writing. Which is OK for now.

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