Things that are relevant:

Such a wonderful day was had today. Simple things like working out, spending time reading by the creek, dinner, meandering about a bookstore, and finishing it all up with some movies make me a happy girl. Another relaxing and enjoyable day awaits for tomorrow. Here's to hoping tonight's sleep is improved from the last two nights.

On a completely unrelated note, I've already completed three of my twenty-some books for this summer!

Things that have happened/are happening/will continue to happen:

For the last year or so, I've been having a lot of issues when it comes to sleep. Whereas sleep was once simple, wonderful, absolute escape, it is now something that I dread every night. I know what's coming; my body knows what's coming. I just don't want to deal with it every night. I will say, when the boy spends the night, it's not so bad. Apparently the early stages of my thrashing wake him up and he is able to calm me down before it escalates any further. Unfortunately, when he's not there it is pure, unadulterated hell. It begins with some severe nightmares. These cause my body to start twitching and occasionally thrashing in my bed. Sometimes I'll just wake up in the middle of this and just need to wait a half hour or so to calm down. Other times, I'll wake up in the middle of REM sleep where my muscles are still in sleep paralysis. Thus, I am panicking from my nightmare, but further, I am unable to move any part of my body. This does nothing to help calm me down. In the last two weeks, these nightmares seemed to have increased in both frequency and intensity. Unfortunately, I am unable to spend any nights with the boy as we both work two completely different jobs and it is impossible. It's clear to me the reason for the sudden increase in night terrors, but there is honestly nothing I can do about it that isn't going to also piss off those closest to me. I suppose I will just have to continue riding them out until they give a little. I can put up with a lot of crap, but sleep was always an efficient escape. I'd like it back.

Cassandra Clare: Like a Boss

We read to know that we are not alone. So said CS Lewis. We read because shared experience is more bearable. We read to know that even if we don’t know people like ourselves in real life, they are out there in the world. We read to be in the heads of those people. We read, if we love books, because there is no one among us who hasn’t had a book or a character in a book pick up the fragmented pieces of our broken hearts and glue them back together just by being like us.

Rape myths are so dangerous because in a large part they are aimed at women and girls, and when girls buy into them, they buy themselves a lifetime of believing that if they are sexually assaulted it is their fault. It is their fault for dressing too scantily, for getting too drunk at a party, for being too pretty. Rape has nothing to do with being "pretty". The two ideas shouldn't even be in the same sentence. It is these kinds of myths that lead to the thought process that would assume that a scene of violent rape was about showing the heroine as desirable. That assaulted and punched in the face was a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Rape culture tells us women "want it." The truth tells us that they don't.

The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.

Yesterday started off so well, yet it ended so horribly. There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

I suppose I will spend the remainder of the day reading The Fault in our Stars again....

"There were always more bad guys to kill and good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction." 

-Hazel Grace Lancaster

“We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.” 

― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human