When I got home yesterday, I watered the cat, started dinner and went upstairs to change into my flannel PJs, came back down, lit some candles, ate dinner as I watched TBS’s 3 back-to-back “Friends” episodes, then fell asleep as I expected to. At some point, I woke up in pitch darkness except for the glow cast by the TV. I had no idea what time it was, and I got up on one elbow and turned my left wrist toward the TV to see my watch. It was 11:15p. I thought I heard a voice directly to my left in the kitchen, but looking there, not only could I not see anything as I was bathed in the glare of the TV light, but I had fallen asleep in my contacts which then dried up in my eyes, so now things were not just contrasted, but blurry. I looked forward again toward the stairs. There seemed to be an orange glow coming from upstairs. I wondered if Vanessa had come home and walked by me completely unobserved. Or maybe the glow is from the streetlamp pouring into the side window of my hallway. I finally decided to get up and turn on the torchiere lamp. Vanessa was indeed smiling at me drinking water in the kitchen. “When’d you get home?” I asked her.
“Oh, not that long, about an hour ago.”
“How long’ve you been standing there?”
“Not that long, just taking my herbal supplements and meds. Want some water?”
I realized I did not drink a drop of water all day. “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and she brought me a tall glass. Since I was laying down on the couch, she sat Indian-style to my left and petted my cat as he walked up to greet her. “I’m all messed up,” I whined.
“Wanna talk about it?”
So we did, briefly, and half-watched “Friends” and “Will & Grace” as those shows flickered by on the big screen. At some point, she got up to use the restroom, and I fell asleep again. When I awoke at 4:30 a.m., I was again curled up in darkness save for the patterned lights strewn from the TV. Vanessa had blown out my candles and turned off the lamp, but left the TV on “in case [I] need the background noise to sleep,” as she’d told me the last time I fell asleep in front of the TV and awoke to find the candles extinguished and the lights off.
I looked behind me and saw that Dodo was also asleep, curled lightly sideways with the upper half of his body on his catnip scratching pad and the lower half on the carpet. I turned off the TV, walked upstairs, and laid down in my bed. I don’t know what it is about my bed that is so extremely comforting. I slept until 7a when my alarm went off, but drifted in and out of sleep instead of getting up.
I guess I thought that getting enough rest would reset myself mentally and physically, and instead, I was craving even more sleep. I examined the rounded puffy bags under my eyes as I squeezed the toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I’m not sure if I’m under-rested or over-rested, but something did bring me to a realization as I drove to work.

It’s not the bad things that are done to me or happen to me that bring on the depression. What really shakes my ground is the losing, or the loss, of faith in where I am in life. I want to be committed to where I am, but if things happen to make me doubt my present choice, the fact that I know I have the power to change my path and yet not knowing whether I’m meant to change it, that brings on a conflict of emotion vs. intellect, heart vs. head. I don’t like big choices like this. I don’t even like small choices, like does this object of clothing go into the delicate, regular, or heavy duty pile of the light or dark loads? That’s the prime reason I hate doing laundry. I’m also not keene on huge lifestyle changes. So when I get pieces of information that tell me a choice I’ve made in the past may no longer be the right choice for me in the present or future, now I’m panicking. And stalling only makes things worse as I’m conscious of the fact that the longer I drag things out, the more the alternative opportunities slip away.

I guess I’d always known this on some level, but I usually don’t address it and don’t give the thoughts much exploration. Maybe the extra sleep gave me the ability to deal with that global aspect.