All I can do is marvel at animals that are capable of flight, the one thing in the world I have found makes me the most happy and energized
Scroll down past today’s poem for today’s blog entry
Winter Poem
By: Leif Gregersen
As the days slip by so fast
It often seems that nothing lasts
Not our love or our generation’s song
Our time to rejoice and play is gone
If things only lasted long enough for me to feel
That the loves I once had were real
Just as real as all the days
Sadness came to me in waves
I have regrets that my only way to cope and deal
With my pain was to take a pill and just not feel
Feel either good or bad just dead
But not trapped inside my own head
When I was not quite yet a man
From commitments I always ran
Not understanding how love grows like a flower
Gaining beauty, gaining power
I wanted so badly to be free
I masked and hid the love inside of me
Now I’m both lonely and alone
Never quite feeling like I have a home
Deny it, but I say we still can have a chance
As long as there is one more dance
Though I think you understand the fact
Time is slipping by for us to act
There is also one thing I wish you knew
I hate myself for hurting you
I also think something else is true
You get sad and lonely too
So take my hand and come with me
Knowing that love still can set us free
November 14, 2017
Good day dear readers! I have been so encouraged by the increasing support and exposure I am getting for my blog that I have decided to do more entries than I usually do. Either that or I have found that working on this blog is one of the best cures for insomnia I have this side of sleeping pills.
Perhaps the whole idea of sleeping pills is a good issue to discuss today. For the past four days I haven’t taken anything to get me to sleep and I feel better for it, but not 100% yet. I should tell some of the back story, I have a lot of commitments from working for the Schizophrenia society to teaching creative writing and other things and I really need to be rested to do these things well. Lately I have been trying a few different sleep aids to help with this and they seem to do more harm than good. I thought maybe if I talked about them here that people would be able to avoid some of the pitfalls. To start with, I have my Psychiatrist’s approval to use melatonin, a naturally occurring hormone that can help balance out a person’s sleeping habits. It has some funny effects though, one of them is that if you (or at least in my case I have, I am sure other people have had different experiences) take it for a while and start to tolerate it, the pills can do something much worse than help you sleep, they can cause extreme restlessness that amounts to a type of seizure of legs and back muscles/bones. It is a very disturbing experience, one I have only ever before had in the psychiatric hospital when injected with a serious tranquilizer because I was “bad”. I still take melatonin now and then, but I am very careful about how frequently I use it. The other problem I have found with it is that it can make you very drowsy the next day and leave you with a desire to sleep a very long time.
The next pill I sometimes take for sleep is one that is called clonazepam or rivotril. I take it in the 0.5 mg orange pill. It looks a lot like the average gravol tablet and is very powerful. It is a tranquilizer along the lines of valium, but without some of valium’s more serious side effects. This is a prescribed medication and I am only given a few every couple of weeks which I use sparingly. This pill seems to be highly addictive because when I take it I feel very relaxed and soon drift off to sleep and feel better for the next day, but if I don’t take it for a few days I start to get edgy.
Those are the major ones. There is a pill called imovane, a blue little football shaped pill that I suggest people avoid. It is extremely addictive. I also want to warn people that sleeping pills in just about any form I have encountered them end up being a crutch and can seriously affect a person’s memory. Time and time again I have found that the best sleep aid is to get out and get plenty of fresh air and exercise. In my own daily routine, if there isn’t something for me to do that requires a long walk, I think of something. I seem to always be able to find a reason to get out of the house like walking to the warehouse grocery store a few miles away or walking to the post office. I used to like to bring and iPod with me when I did this, but lately I have just enjoyed walking as a form of meditation. I have to say that in the past short while I have been getting a bit lax about my walks and exercise in general and I have felt much worse as a result, physically and mentally.
The final thing I wanted to mention today was that if you find yourself sleeping days and staying up nights, there is a cure, which can only really be done in the summer. You need three weeks and not much else. What you do is go out camping, leave behind all of your electronics and get up with the sun each day. In three weeks your biological clock will naturally reset itself.
Best wishes dear readers!
Leif Gregersen
Mental Health coping skills blog by leif gregersen 