Insomnia

The past few days I haven't been able to sleep too well... I'm not really sure why, I think I might just be working through some of the stress I'm under. I used to have insomnia like this when I was younger, it's one of the main reasons that I became a bookworm, I used to sit in bed with a flashlight, huddled under the covers, reading until all hours of the morning, every night. I might actually try something along those lines next, to help me sleep.

But the past few nights, when I've laid down to go to sleep, I've been plagued with flashes of all the little things that have been bothering me lately, particularly the things relating to my parents. Tonight, for instance, my mother actually said that I was doing a very good job cleaning, she was impressed. (After spending five hours cleaning our bathroom, it would have been hard for her not to be.) But then she asked a question, and it's that question that's been bugging me. "Are you expecting company or something?" Here I'm making a concerted effort to make this house liveable again, teaching myself the skills to do that, skills I should have had all along, skills that are normal and necessary for a functional life, and my mother thinks that the only reason I'd be doing them is if I'm expecting company? Something is wrong here. Very, VERY wrong.

I'm also having flashes of my childhood, and my relationship with my parents then... I can't honestly say it was any better. I think the most important thing in my childhood to them was me being in cubscouts, and I greatly dissapointed my father when I called a halt to that before I moved on to boyscouts. Why is stuff like that important to them, but normal basic skills of life have apparently been forgotten entirely or pushed aside?

When I was in kindergarten, and had gotten in trouble a few times for being hyperactive in class and not settling down, my parents were anal enough to set up a system with my teacher so that she would sign off on my behavior every day for them to see when I got home. They also set up a very similar system with some of my teachers in later years to check and make sure that I was doing my homework (I've never really seen the point of repetative busywork being given outside of school that then needs to be checked in class during the same periods that the teachers are bitching about not having enough time to actually teach the subject in.) That's the sort of thing my parents got worked up over when I was young, that's where they put their priorities. Now, when I'm putting my priorities towards altering myself so that I have basic life skills and altering my environment so that it's clean and ordered and liveable, they either brush it off or think that it's the sort of thing you'd only do with eternal motivation like having a guest over... I don't get that. I don't get any of it.

One other thing that's kind of odd in all of this... the memory flashes that I get of my childhood, which are more intensely visual than most of my memories of that time, but 100% accurate as far as I can tell, are making me feel stronger. I'd compare it to integrating fragments of past lives. And that's the odd thing, none of the flashes have told me anything that I didn't already know about my life, they're just visual memories rather than the verbal and empathic records that most of my memories tend to be. So it's not like they'd be adding a fragment of my being that was missing, since I remembered all of that stuff before... right? I don't know, it's rather confusing. I'm going to have to think a lot more about it, and try to figure it all out.

I'm going to go now, and either catch some z's or curl up with a good book. Goodnight, all.

-Jarin