Things that occur to you when you least expect them...

I think I know where my insomnia comes from. Well, that isn't exactly right. I think I know where my desire to sleep all day and stay up all night comes from. The days/nights where I don't sleep at all are a completely different thing. Either way, I think I have that one figured out, but I don't know exactly how to articulate it.

I woke up this morning and forced myself to actually get out of the bed- usually I would just roll over and go back to sleep until around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. I sleep on average about 8-10 hours at a time, but it's between 5am and 5pm. Some days I don't get to bed until 9 or ten in the morning and I don't wake up until close to 8pm. The reason I forced myself to get up this morning- and haven't let myself go back to bed despite how much I want to- is because as I was going to bed this morning at around 3am, I realized how odd, almost disconcerting, it was to be going to bed while it was still dark out. I understand that that is a bad thing and so, when I woke up this morning, I got out of the bed, hoping that I could stay up all day and actually start living on a normal person's schedule.

Which, really, is the crux of this issue: I don;t have a 'normal person's life' and trying to maintain a normal person's schedule only highlights that fact.

I have been sitting here all day battling a strange sense of restlessness that I never have. Ever. I am not a very restless person. I spend most of my time alone, inside, sitting still even, and it rarely if ever bothers me. Today, not so much. Today I keep looking at the clock and marveling that it has only been 15 minutes since the last time I looked. I keep hearing the cars outside, the ring of a phone in someone else's apartment, a far off radio somewhere else in the complex, and thinking that I ought to be doing something. I'm reading fanfiction and all I can think is 'Why are you still persisting in wasting all your time like this? Shouldn't you be doing something? Something usefull?' But I can't think of what that something is.

And that's when I realized. I hide from everything by staying up all night. There are things that I should be doing that I don't do- working, going to school, cleaning, eating, exercising, cleaning, living- and those are all things that ought to be done during the day by societal standards. I look at the clock at 1pm and think that I should have just eaten lunch. At 5 I think that I should have just gotten out of work. By 7 I'm thinking that I should be just finishing dinner. But I'm not. And that bothers me more than I can say.

You know how so many people complain about how no one ever believed in them? How so many people have no drive because they were never told they could do anything? I wonder about the reverse of that. What happens when someone is held as the 'last hope' for their whole lives? What of those people who are raised to believe that there is nothing they can't do? Raised to believe that they were in fact above the curve, better equipped to face live and succeed.

General opinion would say that those people grow up to be better adjusted, have a leg up, be more driven, etc. Right?

That's my problem. I am one of those people. I was told my whole life that I was better, that I could do anything I wanted, that I would be so much greater than where I started someday.

But they were wrong. I'm not any better prepared to face life than anyone else. Yes, I'm smarter than most of the people in my family. I learned faster in school than most of the people I grew up with, most of the people in my life in general, and in many ways, I am still ahead of the curve in my life. I can name on one hand the number of people in my life now that I would consider to be as 'intelligent' as I am. But it doesn't matter, because when you add in all my other failings, I'm much, much worse off than most people I know.

I have no motivation. I have no will power. And that is what bothers me most.

Do you know how frustrating it is to know that if you just tried and kept trying you could do anything? That all of your failings are not because of a lack of intelligence, bad situations, or any other outside force. That everything that you have ever failed at you could have excelled at. That you didn't fail not because of some unchangeable force but because of a lack of strength and drive to change what needs to be changed?

People have told me that I am strong. That I have lived through so much and they are surprised at how far I have come. That I am wise and understanding and strong- always strong- and perhaps they are right, but that just makes it so much worse.

I don't know exactly how to explain it, but... I am very disappointed in myself. I am always disappointed in myself, and I am not strong enough to fight that.

So, which is worse? Having no expectations set forth for you or having such high expectations that you spend your whole life striving for them and never do? Is it better to drown in the feeling that you are not good enough and view your dreams as unattainable or to drown in the feeling that no matter what you do, it is never enough. With the first, if you are strong enough to fight for what you want, and you eventually achieve it, aren't you done? In the latter, there is always something else that you should have done. It never ends.

But I suppose, with both, you spend most of your life feeling disgusted with yourself, so what does it really matter?