#i have a few different projects i'm trying to parse through at once because i have things i want to get done and things i just want to do

[heartbeatbookclub]

guess who spent way too much time working on writing stuff and thinking about ddlc tonight and is going to regret it in *checks watch* 5 hours

this guy!

[twilight-resonance]

Obstacle Course

This is a post about my brain. That's what you were here for, wasn't it? Well, whether or not it was, that's what I'm here for ultimately, so that's what you get.

Dude, sometimes my brain feels like a fuckin' obstacle course. I was sort-of parsing through how I might describe to someone the way that my brain works - or rather, I was actually parsing through how I might describe how my sleep works, and that's intimately connected with how my brain works. Always has been, always has been.

You see, different parts of my brain are active or "on" at different times of the day. And if I were to utilize the whole spread of those parts of my brain, I would only sleep from 3AM-6AM. This is part of why, you see, I had some terrible sleep problems for years - I was down to about four hours a night and dwindling, probably bottoming out on that 3hr stretch. I had to go to therapy to learn to sleep, and it was a whole thing.

More and more I find that a lot of organizational work has to happen in the morning - anything to do with planning, sequencing, deciding, etc. If I wait too long - usually somewhere in the 12PM-2PM range, but it can kick in as early as 11AM - a lot of the self-conscious, self-watching parts of my brain come online and actively prevent that organizational part of my brain. Or rather, it's there the whole time; but my brain has the right resources it needs to fend those things off earlier in the morning.

Afternoons are good for grinding. If I've already gotten a good headstart on a project in the morning - its sequence and scope laid out, all the problem-solving around any rough edges already done, etc - afternoon is when I have the energy and can just go and go and go. If I haven't already started working, good luck - what takes me 15min in the morning takes me more like 2 hours by afternoon, which seems extreme but is the regrettable state of things up there.

Evenings are good for relaxing. My brain is not good at relaxing, so this is important - a time when it can rest, and relax, and wander and play a bit rather than churn and chug away. It's the breathing room that keeps everything else happy.

Then, come about midnight - particularly once all the lights are out and everyone has gone to bed - two things happen. One is that the reflective, emotional part of my brain comes online. This is the part that is processing my place in the world and is in touch with how I'm feeling and what I'm doing and why; and is when it's closest to the surface for me to gently work with and witness. This is hugely important for my ability to operate the rest of the time - if I don't do this, everything during the day gets clogged up with lots of messy emotions and blocks.

The other part is that there are a lot of inhibitions that drop - the much more focused, planning-oriented part of my brain - goes to sleep; which means that creativity gets free rein. I do my best creative work in the deep night like this, and when I don't get that time, what I come up with for work tends to be a lot more trite and semi-recycled. So that's important too.

...So therein lies the problem. All of these things are important: if I don't get them all, all the other parts suffer. But if I get them all, I get a handful of hours of sleep a night. Like I said, I did this for about seven years - it started at six hours of sleep a night and slowly dwindled from there. I used to hallucinate semi-regularly from the sleep deprivation, in all kinds of fun ways. My favorite was the time that I was driving and suddenly everything flattened out; and instead of becoming closer, things got bigger instead. I was very lucky that I was driving a route I'd driven a million times, because I can't imagine trying to drive under those conditions on a completely unfamiliar road. Got there safe, and it was an interesting experience; but yeah, no thanks.

Like I said, I eventually went - well, got sent - to therapy to fix the problem. There were a few environmental things to help the process along - switching from a white overhead lamp to a yellow side-shaded lamp to mimic sunset, things like that - and the other semi-helpful thing was finding something that was (a) intellectually demanding, and (b) boring. For me, that was math. When it was time for bed, I used to have take a math textbook and a notebook and lay in bed doing math in bed for an hour-plus or however long it took to get sleepy. Can you imagine?

What actually ended up helping were two things. One, melatonin. I'm not a huge fan of drugs for solutions to this kind of problem; but this is one I found actually worked. It didn't take a lot - just a few mg, wait half an hour, and then the magic happened. I would get sleepy. It didn't make me pass out, it didn't make me stupid - but it made me feel like I had a choice. I could choose to go to bed, when my brain wouldn't let me otherwise. It took a few rounds of that to sort-of teach my brain how to wind down and prepare for sleep, and for the most part i haven't needed it since - I just needed those training wheels.

The other thing that helped was having someone I wanted to go cuddle in bed with. That was motivation to actually go to bed when the time came.

I like my sleep nowadays. Sometimes I sleep too much. I'm still ridiculously stupid-functional on no sleep, and probably always will be - that feels like something that was just broken into me over the course of those seven years.

...Of course, I feel like my brain doesn't work nearly as well as it did those years ago. Some of that is the Brain Damage, but some of it is that I don't get access to all those parts of my brain regularly. I'm figuring it out, slowly - figuring out how to wrangle The Obstacle Course and all the ridiculous trappings that come along with it. But that's how it works up there, and that's how sleep is so intrinsically tied to it, and that's why I'm going to have to battle sleep problems for the rest of my life.

Because you see: the reason I didn't want to sleep is because there were Things To Do. Stories and poems to write, things to learn, crafts to work on, planning to do, projects to work on... all of which were infinitely more interesting than sleeping. Why waste that time when you could do things?

(I am haunted by this to this day. I will always be haunted by this. Y'all know where Xitli comes from, right?)

So that's the obstacle course. And that's just one part of it. I've talked before about all the other things I've had to learn how to make my brain work - making sure I'm engaging in enough new processes and information and experiences and other "input", fucking with tiny variations in the lighting and where I'm sitting and what I'm listening to, all kinds of conscious run-downs on bodily needs, picking a particular scent to waft through the room on a given day... It goes on and on and on, and I swear it's nevereneding.

So that's me. Welcome to my brain. Guess what time it is now? You got it! 1AM! Tracks, no?

[discipulusmaleficus]

'I was hoping it wouldn't be obvious.'

Hana's talking, of course, about the dark circles under her eyes, the way she can't stop yawning and might as well be falling asleep where she stands. She'd done her makeup as she does everyday, though paying extra attention to the not-so-pretty aspects that plagued her that day; alas, it seems her ruse is falling short.

'I couldn't get to sleep and you know when you're tired and you start, like, overthinking things? I started feeling like I'd plateaued in my skills when it comes to demon possession, so I thought about how I could improve without putting myself too at risk. So I looked through my books, acquired some new books, and finally found the answer.'

From her bag she procures a leatherbound tome. She flips open to the dogeared page - yes, she's one of those people - and turns it to face Kalmar.

'It took even more time to translate it all. It calls itself a withstanding ritual from what I can tell, so someone can hold their own against "unwanted guests" trying to use their body.' And so why wouldn't it work just as well against wanted guests?

'The only thing is it's all timed, as in, if you don't do it on the right night with the right phase of the moon and everything, then you've gotta wait until the next month to do it.' Hana smiles. It's oddly sweet, given the topic of the conversation. 'And I must have great timing, because tonight is the night.

'So I spent all night and my day today trying to get everything together. I'm only missing one ingredient, and I was hoping you might be kind enough to help me. Not for free, of course.'

It's almost amazing she got through all of that without falling asleep. She hopes Kalmar can read this text and that the missing ingredient is one human sacrifice, because she might fall asleep before he gets done parsing all this information and, quite frankly, the thought does frighten her a little.

@idolsummons

Kalmar watches Hana impassively, poker-faced as he listens to her rambling. Contemplates her less-than-typically-perfect eyeliner and the concealer-caked puffiness around her eyes. He understands, of course. There have been moments when he's barely slept for weeks at a time simply because some project or six had arrested his attention.

It's a little more surprising coming from her, mind you.

"A withstanding ritual," echoes Kal. He takes the tome - fortunately for her, it's Latin, albeit a different dialect from the once he's most fluent in. It takes him only a few more moments than usual to skim through most of the details, and he finds the likely culprit quickly enough.

His brow creases.

(Maybe Hana doesn't realise. Maybe she's mistranslated. It has to be that, right? Cold-blooded murder would be -- too out-of-character for her. Right?)

He turns the book back towards her, points a skeletal finger towards the relevant passage.

"You mean this? Ah, 'the virgin blood of the prisoner showering over the caster, such that she might have the will of two men'? Et cetera? "