December Days 2022 #22: Hibernatory
Dec. 22nd, 2022 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
Who doesn't enjoy a good sleep? Although, admittedly, my tendency is much more toward sleeping in than sleeping through the winter. And that also assumes that I can sleep in, rather than having a small gremlin who knows when it's time for her to get fed, and therefore when it is time for her human to get up and feed her. So less hibernation there.
Often times, once I'm up, I'll stay up, rather than go back to sleep. Some of this is a habit obtained from my earliest years, because time where I am awake and others are not is time I am free to do whatever I would like to do, so long as it doesn't wake up other people. This is prime time for playing in-depth games without the possibility of interruption or any other thing taking a higher priority. And because of the systems that I have developed around what is priority, namely "everything else takes priority because 'one more level' is pretty strong with me," I don't do as much game playing now as I did when I had fewer responsibilities to myself and others. Previous life was also much more regimented and scheduled, such that I could schedule "will do dishes and run vacuum during sportsball time" and make that a habit, with occasional fluctuations, but mostly because my time was my own to work with, I could build and maintain habits and a belief that I was doing fine with my life, because nobody else was there to criticize or suggest that I was doing anything less than that. Current life is a little more hectic, with other people present and different things that need doing, which is enriching and also plays hell with my schedule, so I still have a certain amount of wanting to have my "awake when nobody else is" time to do things for myself. (It was essential me time while I was with my ex, since my ex wasn't really interested in me having me time that she wasn't either observing or participating in, such that it would be "us" time, always, even if "us" time was was doing what she wanted to do.) If there's nobody else around, I can be reasonably sure that I don't have to guard against the likelihood that my happiness and enjoyment is going to make someone unhappy or upset with me, for any of the multitudes of reasons that it happens and all of the times where I've been yanked out of being happy by getting reminded of what I forgot, or what I said I would do, or my ex making a snide comment about my enjoyment and participation.
Wanting to have a good long sleep was a thing I've pursued for a significant amount of time, but having an undiagnosed condition that makes restful sleep difficult without assistance and also having a condition where your brain occasionally says "Bored now. Either we do something else or we sleep." sometimes makes it hard to get through all of your reading for classes. Or for work. Or for pleasure, too. The sleep condition part is being managed at the moment, and I'm starting to figure out how to use the medicines and other tools to manage and ameliorate those crashes from running out of concentration when I still need to have some. So that part is actually getting better with time, even if I had to make an unexpected large purchase when my breathing assistant went into recall and the company responsible for the recall has done mostly squat in the several years since, rather than approving and getting us replacement machines.
And, because it's December, and around the solstice time, while I do enjoy napping and good sleep, I don't actually want to sleep all the way through winter. Snow and thunderstorms were the indicators of the winter and summer seasons in my upbringing, and the job that I have places me in a region that gets neither all that much. Even though much of the snowfall here is temporary and light, I still appreciate getting to see it, and to push it around if it's actually enough snow to need pushing around. And there's usually one right and proper snowfall every winter, the kind that reminds me of my upbringing and the way that blanketing the world in snow is beautiful, even if you don't want to have to push clear the sidewalks and the driveway after you've enjoyed the scene. Watching precipitation from inside a warm house is pretty nice. (Being out in it, much less so.) I wouldn't want to sleep through the part of the winter that feels the most like winter to me in this particular place. Otherwise, my feelings of the seasons turning would all be off. Even though here is really skewed toward two seasons (wet and dry, with the small interlude of snow here and there during the cold part of the wet season,) I still want to have four possible seasons, of wet, dry, colorful, and snowing.
Having spent a lot of my time not really doing a lot of celebrating various milestone days of the calendar year, instead worrying about the costs of the celebrations and their obligations that my ex already had committed to, this particular expanse of the year is usually pretty sparse for "things Silver is looking forward to" other than various days off from work and snow. That's starting to thaw out some this year, to the point where I am genuinely appreciating the light displays around the neighborhood and am less grumpy about putting up various signs of the festivities. It'll still be a while before things move back in the direction of normal on that front, but I can now at least believe that they will get there. And then, perhaps, I will awaken from one of the longer hibernations that a part of me has taken so far in my life.
- hibernatory (not comparable)
- Relating to hibernators or to hibernation
- That hibernates
Who doesn't enjoy a good sleep? Although, admittedly, my tendency is much more toward sleeping in than sleeping through the winter. And that also assumes that I can sleep in, rather than having a small gremlin who knows when it's time for her to get fed, and therefore when it is time for her human to get up and feed her. So less hibernation there.
Often times, once I'm up, I'll stay up, rather than go back to sleep. Some of this is a habit obtained from my earliest years, because time where I am awake and others are not is time I am free to do whatever I would like to do, so long as it doesn't wake up other people. This is prime time for playing in-depth games without the possibility of interruption or any other thing taking a higher priority. And because of the systems that I have developed around what is priority, namely "everything else takes priority because 'one more level' is pretty strong with me," I don't do as much game playing now as I did when I had fewer responsibilities to myself and others. Previous life was also much more regimented and scheduled, such that I could schedule "will do dishes and run vacuum during sportsball time" and make that a habit, with occasional fluctuations, but mostly because my time was my own to work with, I could build and maintain habits and a belief that I was doing fine with my life, because nobody else was there to criticize or suggest that I was doing anything less than that. Current life is a little more hectic, with other people present and different things that need doing, which is enriching and also plays hell with my schedule, so I still have a certain amount of wanting to have my "awake when nobody else is" time to do things for myself. (It was essential me time while I was with my ex, since my ex wasn't really interested in me having me time that she wasn't either observing or participating in, such that it would be "us" time, always, even if "us" time was was doing what she wanted to do.) If there's nobody else around, I can be reasonably sure that I don't have to guard against the likelihood that my happiness and enjoyment is going to make someone unhappy or upset with me, for any of the multitudes of reasons that it happens and all of the times where I've been yanked out of being happy by getting reminded of what I forgot, or what I said I would do, or my ex making a snide comment about my enjoyment and participation.
Wanting to have a good long sleep was a thing I've pursued for a significant amount of time, but having an undiagnosed condition that makes restful sleep difficult without assistance and also having a condition where your brain occasionally says "Bored now. Either we do something else or we sleep." sometimes makes it hard to get through all of your reading for classes. Or for work. Or for pleasure, too. The sleep condition part is being managed at the moment, and I'm starting to figure out how to use the medicines and other tools to manage and ameliorate those crashes from running out of concentration when I still need to have some. So that part is actually getting better with time, even if I had to make an unexpected large purchase when my breathing assistant went into recall and the company responsible for the recall has done mostly squat in the several years since, rather than approving and getting us replacement machines.
And, because it's December, and around the solstice time, while I do enjoy napping and good sleep, I don't actually want to sleep all the way through winter. Snow and thunderstorms were the indicators of the winter and summer seasons in my upbringing, and the job that I have places me in a region that gets neither all that much. Even though much of the snowfall here is temporary and light, I still appreciate getting to see it, and to push it around if it's actually enough snow to need pushing around. And there's usually one right and proper snowfall every winter, the kind that reminds me of my upbringing and the way that blanketing the world in snow is beautiful, even if you don't want to have to push clear the sidewalks and the driveway after you've enjoyed the scene. Watching precipitation from inside a warm house is pretty nice. (Being out in it, much less so.) I wouldn't want to sleep through the part of the winter that feels the most like winter to me in this particular place. Otherwise, my feelings of the seasons turning would all be off. Even though here is really skewed toward two seasons (wet and dry, with the small interlude of snow here and there during the cold part of the wet season,) I still want to have four possible seasons, of wet, dry, colorful, and snowing.
Having spent a lot of my time not really doing a lot of celebrating various milestone days of the calendar year, instead worrying about the costs of the celebrations and their obligations that my ex already had committed to, this particular expanse of the year is usually pretty sparse for "things Silver is looking forward to" other than various days off from work and snow. That's starting to thaw out some this year, to the point where I am genuinely appreciating the light displays around the neighborhood and am less grumpy about putting up various signs of the festivities. It'll still be a while before things move back in the direction of normal on that front, but I can now at least believe that they will get there. And then, perhaps, I will awaken from one of the longer hibernations that a part of me has taken so far in my life.
