Wake up and it's that space again. Feeling these feelings that are so common to me, which have been so much a part of my experience of the last several decades. Sometimes for long stretches on the periphery, and then they return. When they have returned, I have thought that they were personality defects, flaws requiring psychoanalysing. To realise that they are biochemistry is like a reprieve I am still getting my head around.

Through the prism of those feelings I am trapped and enslaved. I project it out onto the world (where truly there is so much enslavement), but really, what it is that I am enslaved by is going on within my own body. But there is freedom. I feel it, when I'm not feeling like this. At those times it is like a fog which clears and I am back to being me again and it's as if this never happened. But then the fog closes in again, and sometimes I don't even realise.  I have been struggling against this particular fog for so very long.

I feel apologetic for the fact that I have woken up unhappy this morning. What chance do I have when on opening my eyes I'm already swimming in the stress space, with that metallic taste in my mouth?  But this too is myself. This has been myself for as long as I can remember, and it's been like something trailing around behind me, a stink, like a bunch of old sausages.

I don't like to write here when I am feeling bad. It feels totally self-indulgent. I feel like I always need to be perfectly upright, that to be down is a vulnerability that, added to the rest of the vulnerabilities I have been getting about with, feels like a straw floating down onto the back of a camel. Writing here when I feel bad is an imposition on a world which already has far too much ugly and far too little hope and far too little freedom.

In these spaces, the best thing isn't to try harder. The hardest thing is to try less.  It's very hard to resist trying harder when your mind is revved and agitated. But this morning it is filtering up to me, somehow, through the tiredness and the murk and the reeds from the bottom of the swamp, that trying harder is not good for my soul, that it will just make me feel more enslaved. That stopping and slowing down and going a different way can be a revolutionary act in my own mind. That if I have woken up into a bad day, that the different way is where freedom is, even if my inner moneymaker screams what about the bank balance, what about the bank balance.

Inside I have a three year old child who is furious that she is not omnipotent.

It has been so long since I have regularly meditated that now it feels like a dreamspace.

I have made myself available for a less work than usual today. Because today is a day I am struggling, and my body has decided that it won't let me sleep any longer and I am tired and enslaved. I don't seem to understand my limitations very well at all. The inner promptings come from a long way away. Up from the murk and through the reeds another part of me which sits miles aside from the daily grind tells me to stop. She points me in the direction of the desk where I have not done anything creative for literally weeks. I am tired and cold and everything feels nasty. Though it never feels like it at the time, it is the best time to return to that desk and muck around a bit. After the sauna. Remind myself that I'm free.