Let's not forget this is ostensibly a photography blog.

I felt not-so-good for a bit this month, after a few weeks of excessive exercise, not very much/good food, and not enough sleep to mitigate those other factors. It freaked me out, because apparently these days I take pleasure in feeling good instead of feeling vaguely noble in my self-deprivation and discomfort. I dealt with it and was fine almost right away. I didn't think any more about it until today when I remembered a particular car trip a few years ago, during which I felt awful and didn't know why, and how miserable and vaguely scary that was. I was nauseous for hours and thought it was car-sickness, and then thought maybe I was hungry, and ate a lot that I later threw up and lay in the grass for a long time, feeling precarious. On the way home I fell asleep out of pure self-preservation. At the time I was having withdrawal symptoms from the medication I was half-forgetting-to-take/half-ignoring-into-oblivion, but not realizing that's what they were due to the thoroughness of my avoidance-oblivion. It's nice to feel good, especially in awareness of the contrast it makes to the various ways I've felt less-than in the last four or five years.

I feel markedly different from my past selves when I think about how I used to enjoy being sleep-deprived and hungry. That enjoyment eventually contributed to my anxiety when I started studying (or eventually just worrying about studying) instead of eating or sleeping, because being tired magnifies anxiety in its separation-from-reality lens, and being hungry makes me anxious by mimicking the shaking and nausea of a panic attack. When my constant worrying became unsustainable the most efficient way to stop thinking was to be asleep. I slept through weeks of classes and weekends of parties (sometimes ones in my own house), phone calls and emails, alarms, door-knocks, and in the end whole months of my life. I fell in love with being asleep, or maybe I slept all the time because I had mono, or maybe both the mono and the excessive sleeping were results of the previous adventures in not-sleeping. Moderation hasn't figured largely in my lifestyle or worldview.

Until recently! My desire for moderation in my diet and sleep-schedule is, honestly, immoderate.
Would I even recognize myself in a not-upset state?

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