Aaaannd… it happened again… :)

[Squirrellesque]

Yep, it's Sunday morning and I haven't slept since… well, Saturday morning. I tried to go to bed. But it's not even that I just can't sleep. I'm tired and I would sleep if I stopped actively trying to keep myself awake. No, I'm scared of sleeping. Most likely because I'm afraid of waking up

I've been suffering from some kind of depression/anxiety for a while now. School fell apart in grade 10 when I started failing assignments I was working hard on – after being a straight A student without even trying. But I gave up trying and started hiding from it. Like I'm hiding from… something now? I'm not sure what. I'm really good at dealing with anxiety but I can't get rid of it. I know how to survive. I know all my escape routes, and I know which song to loop when to keep my stress down. But I can't live like this. I've just started a full time job a week ago and I can't afford to be sleep-deprived. My boss is already a little unhappy with me (he jumps to conclusions and thinks I'm a genius and not at the same time) but I know I won't be able to cope long without enough sleep. I only just got through last week.

So, why Sunday morning is the worst? My family hosts a house church meeting in our home every Sunday morning. It's not many – our family alone more often than not makes up more than half of the group. There are only three regular others. But I can't rectify what anyone believes with what I see. Not my family, not our visitors, not anyone else in the world I know of. And because I'm terribly confused about so much I start asking questions that can't be answered. Existential questions, mainly, I just think like that. But they've been gnawing at me for so long and there's no one I can ask. I don't have many friends, and only one of them has similar beliefs. I can only talk with her through email, and that isn't enough. And she can't always answer my questions. There are people I can get in contact with, but I have so little spare time with this work that I'd have to have to lose a significant amount of sleep, most likely. The weekends are always busy.

But I guess I just need to be able to sleep. What if I can't tonight again, and I'm running two or more days of sleep lost when I show up for work? My brain will be mush. Why can't I just let myself sleep?

[Squirrellesque]

Hey Grandy,

Thanks for your reply 🙂 Fortunately the magical hour of 3am came along and I started thinking straight enough again that I could make myself go to bed. Music used to be something that I would use to help me get to sleep, but it's been more or less a deliberate thing to stop using it. Like – if I'm wanting to not sleep, why would I do something so that I can? It's part of the oxymoron of my tiredness making me want to not sleep. But really, music is possibly the only thing that gives me something simple enough to focus on; as a fun fact, I used to (when the issue wasn't that I didn't want to sleep, but that I couldn't) listen to a 21 minute compilation from the soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. It's long, but it was reliable, and it had to be those four pieces played in a row. I'll try to remember that it's there to use if I need it.

Getting a regular sleep schedule is something I've dreamed of for years, but at the moment really the first step is bringing my bedtime back from 4 am to something reasonable, like 10pm at the latest. Preferably earlier. I'm also going to try napping again, in the hope that if I can time my naps correctly they won't stop me from growing tired of an evening as they used to. It's a step I can take. But keeping to a quality sleeping schedule will definitely help. I'll do what I can.

~Squirrel