Toil, tricks, and goals.

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I couldn't make it out yesterday, or do much.  I was able to stay awake until 15:30, but was, essentially, blind deaf and dumb for the last four hours, give or take.  When my sleep patterns break, there are two ways they can fracture.  The first is through confusing day and night.  This is difficult to repair, but it isn't all that complicated.  It is just a matter of 'doing it', which takes time and sometimes great pains and effort.  The other way my sleep cycle can fail involves sleeping in very odd cycles.  Involving up to three sleep cycles in a day, to one sleep cycle every few days.  I am at two sleep cycles per day.  It rips up usable awake time, but sleep hits like a hammer.  No choice.  I can, as I did today, stretch and pull.  But function goes to zero.  And there is a risk, in that haze, that my awake time will begin to stretch too far, if I push too hard or lose consciousness too fully while awake.  Days, weeks, even months of haze can begin cycling if I do that.

The only thing I can do in that last type of break, is to attempt to push, gently, and figure out some control.  As is, pushing my afternoons is one part of it.  The other part is trying to sleep, or nap, in such a way that I can maintain the push and day cycle as much as is possible.  One might liken it to creating a firebreak nap.  Today, going to bed at 17:30, then waking at about 1:30, I will try to be awake until 4:00, maybe 5:00, then attempt a nap of two to four hours, rising just in time to get a nearly full day in, as long as I can reasonably push it.  I had hoped to be to an event at 19:00 tonight, but that won't be possible.  I might be able to push it, but I would neither be in any kind of shape to be out, and I would probably mess up my pattern.  Thankfully, save when medicine becomes an issue, or the weather is changing quickly, my breaks in sleep patterns have become much rarer.  Actually, having dinner arrive three days a week, in a certain time window, over time, has given me a pattern I can follow.  As a lighthouse beacon, over probably a year, I learned when to surface and be ready.  And, mostly, I can.

Probably seeming madness to some.  But this is what I have.  Being studious, if too often lost, more so in the past but continuing a bit, it has been a tangle to work with.  My health sometimes allows little else, but it is something.  A struggle.  Something to work on.  So I do.  It is satisfying when I, eventually, tame the beast enough for a smoother ride.  I just happen to be in, not on, that beast.  Later.