I was yesterday, too, but I didn't write last night. The drive here was nightmarishly long. With no traffic, I believe the estimated driving time is 1.5 hours. It took twice that long. Keep in mind, most of the drive is on a 70 mile per hour highway, so that means our average speed was 35 mph on a HIGHWAY.

Of course, that wasn't our real speed ever. (That'd be tolerable.) We just alternated between going 70 mph (the speed we should have been going) and being at dead-stop-and-go traffic speeds, effectively moving at what was essentially 0 mph. (Not quite that bad, but close enough.)

I slept over half of the way, but discomfort built up, leaving me miserable because no amount of body shifting could save my slowly-breaking body. (I am not built for long-distance travel. Anything longer than an hour starts to get uncomfortable for me.)

Once there, we set our tent up, believing that when we finished, we have five minutes before pre-rounds (the most challenging part of the entire weekend) were to start.

...We arrived to find them over. This, due to a disparity of half an hour between the listed schedule and the actual schedule. Later, after the dance, I asked my sister when it was dark: "Had you known, would you have preferred going to pre-rounds and setting the tent up in the dark?" She wasn't actually sure.

Me, personally, on the other hand...well, given the difficulties we faced, setting the tent up with light was a smart move. We didn't pack a hammer to nail the tent pegs in so had to scrounge around for a rock to use for that purpose. (It wasn't a good rock, even.) We also had some difficulties properly threading the backbone support things through the tent to get it to actually be a tent.

Another highlight of that evening: after the dance, we were invited to an afterparty. We tried to find where (we were given directions they said would make it impossible to miss! That we would definitely know it when we saw it that we were there!) for forty minutes.

They key operative word being TRIED. After doing as much searching as we were comfortable doing without potentially trespassing and/or getting lost (Circle 8--the place we are at--is HUGE, with many forking paths that go miles into nowhere; it's a labyrinth), we gave up and went to bed.

I was told by my sister to cover my feet up. Confused, I hesitated until she explained, "They reek." She ultimately slept well.

I...did not.

I suspect multiple factors. She can't sleep with lights; I don't sleep well without one. It being dark with no street lights, advantage to her.
She used three sleeping bags to stay warm. I thought a small sleeping bag to be my blanket on top of a larger sleeping bag as my bed, plus one of my two heavier coats unzipped would be plenty--not unjustifiably so, mind you. At 10:40 pm, it was temperate and I was even a little over-dressed with said heavier coat unzipped. I figured it'd only get a little colder, so I'd either zip up my jacket or put on my heavier jacket with both unzipped.

...I was wrong.
Oh so VERY wrong.

After zipping up one, putting the other on, and zipping it up, I STILL needed a little extra. Then, there was expectation versus reality. Expectation: Roll onto my left side (the side I always sleep on), and I'd sleep there the whole night. Reality: sleeping on hard ground meant that didn't happen.

I THOUGHT that me picking one of the thickest two sleeping bags as a bed would be sufficient. It was not. The thought of doubling its thickness by folding it in half never occurred to me (I was sleepy, to be fair). Though, I'm not sure that'd have helped.

So what I ended up doing: Invoking some dream logic.
Which, oddly enough.
I was lucid enough to KNOW was dream logic.
And yet all the same it worked well enough.

It involved some sort of "stack the layers" reasoning. I have no clue what that means (other than that exact phrase was used), but my subconscious weaved an intricate web of dreams, shifting between them as my body moved. (I believe there were some actual visual layers used in the dreamscape, think gigantic Inception-like scenes, woven over thick floors and thick floors. Like, think placing one mattress over another.)

Whatever it was, it kept me warm and relatively comforted, when I combined this layer-dream-thing with a real-life move: what I dubbed the "Continuous Barrel Roll". To combat the hardness and attempt to keep me warm, I continued rolling, in a circle with no travel, pulling half of my sleeping bag bed over me. I never moved towards my sister, I never clashed with the tent wall, but I know I kept rolling and rolling and rolling, as if going down a hill, in a continuous circular motion.

​It wasn't perfect, but it got me through the night.

I need to pack my things. Notably, dance clothes; my electric razor (don't think I'll get to USE it, mind you, but if I can I will because not looking forward to facial hair I can't remove), my comb, my pills, and paper with some writing utensils and preferably a hard background.

So, this'll be it for the next couple of days or so.

I should note I'll be leaving on an over-weekend dance thing.
I'll have no internet, so that means I won't be blogging.
​If I remember to bring writing supplies, I'll see if I can write a blog tho.

That is.
I don't make a second entry for a day when my previous first entry was already past midnight.

Mainly because of the risk that I'll have chronology issues on the blog that I don't know how to fix.

But I'll make an exception.

I am typing this immediately after my "all my days are the same" entry. It's 1 am, that entry was started at like 12:45 am.

But.

One of the things I wanted to talk about is how people give inquiries into my life.

Often times, they will give the fluff questions. "How are you doing?"

I am often conditioned to respond automatically: "good", "alright", and the like.
Sometimes, when I pause to think, but am in a position where I don't or can't talk about it, I'll lie and give the response manually in spite of knowing it's not right. (I do give an honest answer when I think about it, can talk about it, and such.)

Yet there's a third type of situation, more common than both.
I pause to think, but no matter what I try to think about, I don't actually know. I don't have the details. I don't have the ability to think, "What's actually going wrong right now?"

In that.

Say someone asks me how I'm doing.
Say I give a fluff answer.
Say they prod further, or that instead of giving a fluff answer I hesitate.

Then I'm put in the position where I'll probably just answer with the fluff responses of "good", "alright", and the like...even though those aren't the truth. And the issue is dropped right there, because they don't go further. But they need to, because I require prompts.

I don't know what goes on with me. I don't know what's good, what's bad. I don't know how I'm doing. I need others to frame things for me, give me a reference point. "How's your day" isn't a good starting point, nor is "What's happened in your day" for that matter, and those are some of the more creative ones that just don't work.

I don't actually know what does work. I know a bunch of ways which don't.

But often, I find myself in a position where I would love to talk to people and talk my heart out but I don't have any coherent thoughts and I need something a lot more specific than most people can really give. In fact, it's even a little bit of a catch-22:

The only way to really learn something meaningful about me is to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things. The only learn to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things is to engage me in a meaningful way. The only way to engage me in a meaningful way is to have first learnt something meaningful about me to get the right response going in the first place, and thus the cycle continues.

My girlfriend is just about the only one who can actually consistently accomplish the feat I'd say, in spite of numerous others from close friends to coworkers (both long-time and well-positioned) to family attempting the feat. Even I can't really do it to myself; I can't really just ask myself, "how am I doing?" and come up with an honest answer.

That may sound stupid. How could I not know how I am doing when asking myself?

But it's true.

I don't actually know.

The times I do know, it was never because that's the questioned I asked; it was because I stumbled into the answer to an unasked question completely and entirely accidentally. 

All my days seem to be the same. So I'm not really feeling great. And yet in spite of that if you asked me how I was feeling I would say exactly that. Because I don't actually know what I'm feeling, if that makes sense, and you'd need to forcefully prod it out of me to get me to actually know it myself.

It's the worst kind of bipolar, and yet the description I am going to give is something I think might be relatable even to those who aren't, so I'm not even sure my BPD is to blame. It's just that.

Whenever I go to bed, it's always the same. I feel ashamed of myself for having wasted the day. I know that, given the circumstances, for whatever reason, I do need to go to bed, but always long for having done something other than that in the day.

Come the next morning, I'm usually busy preparing for work, but when I have the time to think, I always think of the ways I will manage to do better during the day.

And then, at work, I get lost in thought--I develop new, brilliant ideas, or revisit old ideas and give them nuances, or even just plan out the rest of my day. I'll plan activities, activities which would be me not wasting the rest of my day. I do this, over and over and over again, planning them and how to turn things around.

And then, when I get home.

I am burned out enough that I just.
Don't do any of it.
Or what little I do is as little as is humanly possible to do it while still being considered doing it.
And then the time disappears.
And soon, it's bed time again.

And the cycle repeats.

Over.
And over.
And over again.

The same loop.

The same sequence.

Never-ceasing.
Never changing.

I have a passing awareness of dates, because I just am generally fairly good at on some level tracking that stuff.
Yet at the same time. Days blend together. Weeks blend together. Even months are starting to blend together. Where one is the same as another. It's already the last week of June and yet I have just as much feeling as I did when it was the last week of May, and the same amount of feeling as first week of June, and midway through June, and so on and so forth.

It's just all the same, where I'm not doing anything.

​And you wonder why I see myself as a failure.

Today I did some minor revisions/expansions to a Phyrra and Cyrus ramble/blog that...I never originally gave, but in spite of that.

Today, I just.

I just am having one of those days where I don't want to do anything productive.

I want to retreat into a shell and do nothing of note. To veg out. Ideally with my girlfriend, obviously (because there is no such thing as too much time with my girlfriend <3), but. Failing that, I'm in a mode where I don't want to do anything except just stare at a screen. No writing. No gaming. (Though I may do a little.) Just. Staring at a screen.

MY INTERNET IS DOWN SO I CAN'T BLOG TONIGHT; BY THE TIME YOU'LL READ THIS, IT'LL BE TOMORROW.

To be honest, you're not likely to get a real entry from me for the next few days; I'm kinda swamped with stuff.

That means I'm not going to have anything.

My mom and younger sister left for a trip to Ireland, I developed a new story, and I did a little bit of confirmation research on a Phyrra and Cyrus blog entry I haven't posted (but meant to) meaning I can do said blog with better details now, but nothing which I'll actually talk about today.