I Guess There's Always Tylenol PM

This sleep thing isn't funny anymore.

I was a serious insomniac when I was a child. People don't usually buy this, but it's true. I remember having trouble sleeping when I was still in a bunk bed in Norfolk, Virginia, and I lived there from age 5 to age 10. I'd lie awake, looking at the ceiling, listening to Anne Murray (my parents' solution), worrying that burglars were going to break in and kill my father.

In middle school, I learned that I can't get to sleep or stay asleep if the light's wrong, or there are specific noises in the room. This is still true. And waking up in the morning? I had to change my alarm about every six months, and its location even more frequently. I'd either sleep through it, if the screeching hideous sound was too familiar, or I'd get up, turn it off, and go back to bed while still completely asleep.

In high school, I stayed up too late most of the time. (I've since read that teenagers' circadian rhythms are such that they're developmentally intended to stay up late and get up late.) I also learned about "missing the window" - where you're really tired and ready for bed all through the evening, but if you stay up too late, you get restless all over again and can't sleep, and the hours get more and more wee while you toss.

College was the golden time: I slept properly in college. During my junior year, there were periods where I retreated completely from my friends and normal college life, and I lived and died by Early to Bed, Early to Rise. I was sleeping 9 hours a night. My dark circles, which have been a part of my face since I was 10, started to fade. It was the best.

In the near-decade since then, I've felt like it's been a gradual decline, that my sleep patterns have gotten worse and worse and worse, until now, they're delicate and dysfunctional and impossible to predict. I've had long stretches where I wake up at 3:30 and can't sleep until 5:45, and then there were the weeks when I woke up every hour and a half exactly from 1:30 on, and then there was the super-early waking, which didn't last as long as the others.

Recently, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up at 7:30 or 8:00, never later. After The Avengers on Saturday night, I didn't get to sleep until 2, and woke up the next morning at 7:30, right on the button. I always tend to go to bed later when Matt's not around, and I can't seem to stick to a routine of going to bed at a solid and decent hour in the last month. I work and dawdle and screw around on the internet and reread blog posts and watch the last half hour of the movie and read another 10 pages of the book. And then when I do get to bed, I don't get to sleep quickly. And when I do get to sleep, it's a brittle sleep, easily broken.

Last night I don't think I slept solidly for more than four hours, between 2:30 and 6:30. I was tossing from midnight on, and when I started waking up (it's a gradual process, 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there) I felt heavy and restless and couldn't stay in bed.

During my 20s I solved this problem by taking melatonin every night, which kept me in a thick sleep rather than an insubstantial one and helped me sleep for eight straight hours every time. But after years of that, I started having bad loginess and stoned-ness during the mornings, lasting almost until lunchtime, and decided not to take it again. Valerian root helped me enormously during my wedding week (during which I think I slept about 20 hours, total, during all 6 nights), but it's not a silver bullet; sometimes I sleep just as badly on it.

It's so damn hard to concentrate with this going on. How well I sleep affects everything about how I live during the day. All I can do in the morning is feel like shit and curse myself for not going to bed earlier, for not being able to sleep later; all I can do in the evening is fret about what will happen when I inevitably fail to do the right thing and go to bed too late. Or what will happen if I do go to bed on time and my brain won't let me fall asleep.

Is it time to visit my doctor? I don't necessarily want to take nightly sleeping pills ad infinitem, but I'd really like just one fucking week where I get a good night's sleep every night, where I feel refreshed instead of miserable in the morning, where I don't sit up at night hating myself for not finding a way to fix the constant hung-over sensation. I mean, a lot of this is behavioral, but if I got a prescription I might be able to take the sleep thing more seriously and set no-nonsense deadlines for bedtime. Or I'll end up with a dependency that'll last another 10 years, by which time surely my sleep patterns will change yet again.

In other news, the draft of the sci-fi story's complete. I'm letting it rest in tinfoil and soak up its own juices for a week before I do the second revision and send it to those who have expressed interest. Matt liked it. I believe his exact words were "Robot be crazy."

New Normal

It's okay that you can't sleep. Dealing with big, difficult things is...big. And difficult.

But I have to get up in, like, five hours. And to teach yoga to a bunch of stubbornly unsmiling adults about whom I can't stop wondering why they're not at work. 

That doesn't mean you can just turn sleep on and off like a switch. Some people are wired up with switches, and you're not one of them.

Maybe you should get up and do something else. Take your mind off it.

Like what? If I read, I'll have to turn a light on, which will disturb Matt (who does have a switch). And that book I'm reading is so addictive I'll probably just be up all night reading it. If I write, I'll have to type, which will probably disturb him, too. And what could I have to say? All I'll write about is the anxiety that's keeping me awake, worrying over what's ahead like well-thumbed beads in a rosary. Anyway, it won't take my mind off it.  

Have you tried relaxing your shoulders and breathing at the ceiling?

Yep.

Have you tried letting the thoughts drift like clouds? That thing you repeat over and over in your restorative classes?

Yep.

Tried the heating pad? Tried reminding yourself how comfortable the bed is?

Yep and yep. Nothing's working. I'm awake and I can't sleep. 

You could always try working through the revisions you need to make, mentally, or trying to do math in your head.

I don't have any math that needs doing. And trying to do revisions mentally sends me around in confusing repetitive circles, like the teacup ride, and I never have any insights worth remembering. 

Why don't you get up anyway? Matt will forgive you for waking him with your keyboard.

I know. But he's dealing with this big shit too. It's awesome, but it's big and it's scary and we're in the same little boat, and the tide is rocking us both awake. It's not nice of me to whine on about my own trouble coping. 

Can't you come to any conclusions that will satisfy you temporarily? Just to get those five hours, before you have to teach?

No. It's too big, too new and foreign. And anyway when I think about relaxing I worry about the groin muscle I seem to have pulled today. How will I teach through that? 

I'm asking the questions here.

Sorry. 

It might not be a bad pull. You might sleep on it and find it's nothing in the morning. Just like the rest of this: in a year, it'll all be old news. There'll be a new normal.

I know that. It doesn't stop now from being a white-knuckle sleepless night. 

Heard that, sister.

Bed will be warm. 

Bed will be comfortable. 

I'm going to try again. 

That's the spirit.