Here's something you should know about me, I am careful with my sleep schedule. At least I try to be. I used to be really good at it: going to bed at 9:30, sleeping well, and waking up feeling rested. I didn't have caffeine past 5pm
(you're all shocked I know because I worship coffee) and I changed my alarm so that it would wake me up slowly instead of jolting me out of sleep. For a couple of years, it was great.
Now before that, when I still lived in Boulder and was dealing with a lot of stress and other things, I pretty much was an insomniac. I would be exhausted all the time but be unable to sleep. My body wanted to soooo badly but my mind would wake up and be going a hundred miles a minute as soon as I tried to go to bed. Mostly, I would lay awake in bed while the whole house was quiet. I would have gotten a lot of constructive thinking done if my brain was actually functioning rather than just churning uselessly. That might be why I have a lot of movies; I would spend all those hours at night watching movies. Then morning would come and I'd get up and immediately my brain and body would turn to sludge.
Have you guys ever seen Fight Club? Insomnia is described
perfectly in that movie.
"With insomnia nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. When you have insomnia you are never really asleep and you are never really awake."
That's it exactly and it was horrible.
At night my mind wouldn't shut up. During the day, I had to struggle to function at all. The only time I could sleep was a nap in the afternoon. I would sleep so deeply and so wonderfully but... I could barely ever manage it between school and work. And that, right there, is why I had to take a medical leave and re-think things. I had to refocus myself and get things back on track. The only thing I enjoyed ever was going to work at the vet clinic/boarding facility and interacting with the dogs. That was when I decided I wanted to do that with my life. That and during that time I think Vallie was really the only thing that kept me going through the insomnia and depression.
(Yeah, for those of you who don't know, I have depression. It hasn't flared up in years and I think that's because I keep a real close eye on my sleep schedule and it helps me function.) Anyway, I finally managed to overcome my insomnia because I went and backpacked Europe. I think it was the perfect storm because it shocked my system just enough that it jolted me out of my bad sleep habits physically and it also changed me mentally. That was the happiest I have ever been in my life. And I never ever want to go back to being that way. I am not myself that way. I was zombie me, and not the fun flesh eating kind.
So the fact that I haven't really slept well in 2 weeks scares me. I managed to sleep alright last weekend some but then that went right out the window this week. I have to sleep! I'm so exhausted and I hate that.
Tonight I am going to sleep if I have to kill everyone on the face of the Earth to do it. Well no... but I certainly am kicking Whitman, Gerani and Theo out of my room tonight. So help me if Whitman had woken me up one more time last night I was going to beat the tar out of him... that is I would have but it was doubtful that I could have summoned the energy. Also, I'm going camping this weekend so either that will be enough of a diversion from my normal schedule that I'll be able to get things back on track when I get back into town or I'll have relaxed and refocused enough that I'll be able to do it.
If that fails, then I'm headed for the doctor. Before I had these really gentle sleep aids that helped me turn my brain off just enough that I managed to sleep here and there when I took them. Course I didn't take them a lot because I was scared of getting hooked on them. But they're a good tool to at least make me fall asleep at a decent time.
Needless to say, I'm dragging today. I can't wait to get off work and go back home for a nap.
Nap..... Happy warm thoughts.
