Last night at 5am I returned to my house after spending a week away. Moving and change is something I seem to find very distressing. I was shattered to leave. It felt like being torn away from a lover. I folded up the soft navy blanket which the motel left me. The blanket I’d curl up under when I lay on the garden bench at night, having the whole place to myself. Once I cleaned up the place I lay on the bed under the blanket and listened to meditation music with one clear quartz pyramid at my head and two at my feet. I thought I might fall asleep, but I didn’t. Check out was 10am today, but I didn’t want to get up that early so left last night. Whenever I opened the door to carry more bags to the car I thought someone was waiting there ready to murder me. I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a strange headspace lately, which may have come through in my last post. I feel like I’m having all these intense dreams and thoughts which don’t make sense to anyone else.

I returned through the gates of hell to my dad’s place. There is clutter everywhere as I have a hoarding problem and have been severely depressed for twelve years now so never have it in me to clean up. I sleep in a human-sized “box”, a mini room just big enough for my bed. The room is stuffed with insulation and has a double-glazed sliding glass door. My dad made it to try to block the noise from the annoying geezer next door who is often in his yard hammering or blowing leaves off his driveway with a violently noisy leaf blower. The room is messy, like the rest of the house, with packets of pills and tissues covering the little floor space. The sheets also don’t fit the mattress properly, always sliding off.

I fell asleep around sunrise, then was woken at 9am by what sounded like someone banging on the glass panels of my front door. I was scared that somebody had called the cops about me after reading all the crazy posts I made to social media last night. Here is a sample:

“How do I know that everyone and everything is not just a hallucination, an extension of my own mind, and I am ultimately alone in the universe?”

“Will we be relieved of our ailments when we die, or will we carry them across into the next life, stuck in an eternal cycle of hell?”

“Everyone’s hurt me. My family’s hurt me. My peers all through school hurt me. Then the mental health system, who were meant to help me heal from everyone else who hurt me, hurt me too. There is not a single person in my life I don’t feel anxiety around and I feel like an alien here. I don’t want to suffer anymore. Even if I can find a place to live the hell away from people and noise I will still have to deal with the damage that’s been done to my nervous system. It feels like I have a bee stuck beneath the surface of my scalp. The buzzing has been tormenting me every single day for years and makes me want to die. I started thinking my crown chakra has blown up or something so spent $320 on crystals today hoping they would rebalance it, but I don’t feel so hopeful anymore. I have to clear out of this motel tonight and return to a place that doesn’t feel like a home. It’s all so distressing. There is no escape”

“Wake me up from this nightmare called life and get me out of this body!!!!!!! I wish I’d never woke up from my overdose”

“”Chuang Tzu was a philosopher in ancient China, who, one night went to sleep and dreamed that he was a butterfly. He dreamt that he was flying around from flower to flower and while he was dreaming he felt free, blown about by the breeze hither and thither. He was quite sure that he was a butterfly. But when he awoke he realised that he had just been dreaming, and that he was really Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly. But then Chuang Tzu asked himself the following question: “was I Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?””

“They say the body heals itself. But man and his drugs and technology are too powerful. They have fucked up my body, just like man has fucked up the planet. Maybe I am an idiot thinking I could heal myself with crystals.”

“I don’t want to leave this motel. It feels more like home than the place I live.”

Coming onto Facebook the next day after a particularly bad night is like finding out the things you did and said while drunk. Some people laughed at my posts, and a friend told me that I was “definitely off the chain”.

My dad had gone out. I stayed in bed and eventually the banging stopped, but I couldn’t get back to sleep as I worried they would come back. I turned on my phone but no body had left a message. I then wondered if it was the postman, so got up to check if they’d left a card, but there was nothing at the door. There was a lot of activity and noise around the house. I thought I heard voices, and all the neighbours were going out, slamming their car doors shut. I was hypervigilant and scared. I hated being back here after having so much space to myself.

Eventually I fell back to sleep, and slept the rest of the day, getting up at 8:30pm. My sleep is completely screwed up. I was hungry but didn’t want to get out of bed and see my dad as I felt so crap. I just wanted to be alone.

I continue to have vivid dreams. Today I dreamt about the waitress which I have a bit of a crush on. I haven’t seen her for ages as I haven’t been to the cafe. I found out there’s actually not much there I can eat, despite it being advertised as vegan. They use “bio-dynamic” rice which apparently is not actually vegan as they use animal bits to fertilise the rice. I also sleep all day and by the time I get up the café is closed. Plus I am not really sure if the waitress wants to hang out outside of the café. She did once offer to talk more with me, and I said I was interested, but she told me she was busy running trivia that day and never suggested another time. I sort of concluded she wasn’t really that interested in me and backed off. I am always anxious around her because I like her and didn’t need more stress in my life. But in my dream, we were close. The café was expanding, and she invited me to live there and work at the café. She showed me the room they had built for me. It was a bright, sunny room, an old bus which they had refurbished and attached to the café, and it was by the beach. It was not the quietest, as you could hear boats, trains and people playing at the beach. But I still loved it, and felt like I had finally found home. I think I might try to go back to the café and visit her. I hope she is still there.

I think I need to prioritise finding my own place. I can’t afford a whole house to myself, but a bungalow in somebody’s yard would be nice. It’s just hard to find somewhere suitable as I have extreme noise sensitivity and sleep during the day when everyone else is up. I also have no rental history. It all feels like too much, especially when I am depressed, and it’s easier to just stay put, but I know having a quiet, private place would do wonders for my mental health.