When all focus is only on compression and decompression, you have a big problem. You need to solve that problem by any means you have.

In my life as of late, my anxiety disorder has been the fog in which I run. Only. Because of this, my life consists of only two states: compression and decompression. This is not good. Life is a big thing, that much should be obvious. But life is supposed to go in waves that are not on a linear plane. Life—whether things are going well or terribly—should be of many dimensions.

My brain has a figurative switch to go into a simplified anxiety-only mode. That is not to say I am anxious one-hundred percent of the time. Rather or however, it is to say my mind travels upon one wave only that floats from compression (high anxiety, stress, worry) and decompression (a state that is more numb than it is relaxing.)

You see, relaxing opens up the brain to be creative and to utilize energy. The state of decompression is an active state that takes up energy—all of my energy—in a bothersome and icky simplicity to move from the previous state of pure anxiety.

This is bad simplicity. Life is beautiful when it is complex. For certain, it can be too complex—but anything can be too anything. When life is at the right¹ level of complexity, bad things have solutions and good things can be applied to.

Sleep is a major issue here. To bring this to real-life events, you must know my work is abusive and messy. My income can go away at any time, and the actors in play are not good people. They are political and many other things not worth the adjectives to describe them. They aren’t me, they don’t like me. In certain circumstances, I can deal with this, as I am used to being alone in how I approach the world. So I know how to deal with people I don’t quite click with—because that is all but maybe five people in the entire populous of my universe. This is not a matter of “clicking with.” I am subject to abuse, and that puts me in the realm of trauma.

Oh, I also don’t know how to leave this situation. I am addicted to the potential for money. This, if you need to know, is a button you can press to screw up my thinking. Use it if you wish to manipulate me, it works!

So I am faced with this fog of anxiety. It is a fog—I spend most of my time at work looking around to find something to grasp onto for proactive assertiveness. Being assert is not one of my gifts, but I can fake it enough to get myself into a less planar mode of thinking. I can act and see a positive reaction. I can, if the actors will play along. Abusive actors do not play along. They just play.

I gather, as someone who sleeps a good eight hours a night, I spend about 67 of the 168 hours a week in a fog of anxiety. I then spend about 56 hours asleep. This leaves me 45 hours free of all of this. Part of this time is spent so tiredly it isn’t worth categorizing. Let’s bring this down to estimates now: I probably have 30 hours truly to myself away from abuse. This, of course, assumes some work ignoring bad people—which I can only legitimately do on weekends. We’re whittling away time here, but we’ll still come up with hours for me.

Those hours are the problem. I spend those hours doing nothing but decompressing. Not relaxing, rarely creating (other than archiving old art and writing for this site.) I am certainly very rarely active. I am void of activity. I am just… here, decompressing. And… that’s it.

This is where I stand lately. I feel the need to write only about it. I may come back with a solution. I, of course, would need to find one first. Which, oxymoronically, requires activity.

Compression. Then decompression. Then sleep. Then compression. A single point as a wave on a flat plane. That is me, now.

At least I can look to my left and my right and see something else exists. See, however, just see.