Thursday, June 7, 2018

I'm Not Dead; I Feel Happy

Cool, so... hey blog.  It's been what, five years?  Yeah, good.  You?  Good.  Ready for some more personal shit?  Also, casual swearing.

Way back then I wrote this little gem of drug-induced crazy where I proclaimed that I would be able to write a whole bunch more, then wrote one more extremely pretentious thing then promptly went utterly silent.  I could blame kids but they were really only a catalyst for what was to come.

It turns out I don't have ADD, or at least I don't think so.  What I have is oxygen-deprivation-induced brain-damage, aka sleep apnoea.
 
What does that mean?  First of all, it's infinitely less sexy than ADD.  Sleep apnoea doesn't have any songs that I know of, much less songs that represent the Red Bull brand.  It also means I don't breathe properly at night, so I wake up tired, generally cantankerous and unable to focus.  It can look like ADD if you ignore the crushing tiredness, constant headaches and irritation.  Thanks to a lifetime of being told that this is normal and my problems were my fault for not trying hard enough, I was well prepared to ignore all those symptoms and accept the doctrine that my constant failure to achieve anything was evidence of poor character.  Give it up for the Protestant work ethic!

So the drugs that I thought were treating ADD were actually just amping up my body and giving me hyperfocus, masking the real problem which was that my whole brain was crying for an out.

Yes, I shoehorned that phrase in just so I could include this gif.  Look at Donald go, what a goddamn beautiful performer.  Actually, watching it on loop, they're all amazing; even the unconscious single-scene actor is nailing it.

After about two days straight of the drugs my body would crash HARD and I would lose my focus again, and I wouldn't recover enough to try again for another couple of days.  So I'd realistically get about 2 days of productivity per week, and then the pain would return with a vengeance.  I stopped the drugs.

Then some years went by, and eventually I went, "Y'know what?  I'm utterly fucking sick of being tired all the time."  I went to the doctor, who sent me to get a sleep study done.  Contrary to what I'd heard previously, you don't have to wait months for an appointment to spend a night away from home in a cage, naked, bright lights on you, suspended by ECG cables.  You can just go to the chemist, they wire you up and you go home and sleep.  I did that, they got the results back, I hired a CPAP machine, and suddenly I felt awake, possibly for the first time in my life.  Then I bought my own machine because it was worth the money, MANY TIMES OVER.

In fact for the first two months or so I had this weird feeling where I had energy in the morning, and by the end of the day I was utterly physically wrecked.  I also had an eye-twitch.  I think my body and my metabolism had to catch up because they weren't used to supplying the amount of energy I could now use in a day.  I had been used to doing one chore in a day, then crashing because that was all I had in me.  Now I could just keep going all day; little irritations didn't get to me; the typical daily hurdles of trying to get stuff done wouldn't enrage me and take all the wind out of my sails.  I could play videogames without losing my shit.

So that's great, all fixed, right?  Yeah, nah, mate.  Gotta work out those kinks, y'know?  Like... don't forget to change the filter, or your treatment will slowly degrade until you're back at square zero.  And you won't notice because you've taken on a bunch of stressful crap that you thought you could handle now and you're so used to the life-long tiredness that it doesn't register as abnormal until you've lost months of your life to zombie-like shuffling.

That phase only lasted about 2 to 3 years - which is fine; I'm FINE with that; FINE - I've learned to keep the machine maintained semi-sufficiently, and I've bought some alternative fittings for the machine that work a lot better than the stock ones, and now I'm finally seeing a decent run of uninterrupted productivity.  Maybe I'll finally get my game prototypes to a state where I can submit them to publishers, and maybe I'll finally release that one game mod I'm actually proud of.  Also, I have a bunch of unpublished blog posts and ideas and I feel like putting them out there.

Oh, also my other blog where I put my portfolio apparently stopped working when I wasn't paying attention.  It was reliant on a plugin supplied by a third party, and they stopped supplying it once Unity started supporting HTML5, making their work redundant.  I'll put something together sometime soon.  We'll see.

No comments:

Post a Comment