Awake is the New Sleep

Maybe it's the weather. I keep telling myself. The weather really does, I think, have a tremendous effect on my mood. I'm always sadder and more inside my head during the winter months. And I keep telling myself that the sudden awareness of my mood also has something to do with the weather. Spring is a time of awakening, isn't it? The flowers, the animals and all that jazz. Everything coming out of the dark dirt or the dark caves. But it's not easy at first. Because the first step out of that cold, dark cave that's kept you sheltered and cut off from the rest of the world is, well, a bitch. You have to ease back into the warmth and the light that spring brings.

I finished a book last week. A sad and beautiful book. About a woman who shared an amazing life with a man she deeply loved. That's all I want. But so many of the emotions and life experiences that she shared are foreign to me. And I don't know, somewhere in between reading about life and death and love and loss and the full range of human emotions, I felt dead myself. Asleep. As though I've spent the past few months asleep. I haven't done laundry in far too long, my room's a mess, I keep procrastinating about the smallest things. Reading about someone else's life and fully functional emotions made me realize that I've been in a cold, dark cave of my own lately. Realizing that is the first step, I suppose, out into the world where the light blinds your poorly adjusted eyes and the warmth isn't warm enough to fully thaw you.

I feel like the past six months have been a total blur. What happened? Where am I? What do I want? Am I doing okay? So many questions. One thing happened. I realized what little control I have over my emotions and the course of my life, and in that, I gave up trying to control anything at all and just...simply...gave up. And fell into sleep and fell into the comforting darkness of that cave and the laziness it permitted.

Awake is the new sleep. Awake is the new sleep. SO. WAKE. UP.