Today was a pleasant day. There was a partial break in the real winter weather we’ve been having lately… yes, it’s back. It was sunny and warm in the afternoon. Some of the snow was melting. If this was back home on Prince Edward Island, it would seem like a perfectly ordinary day in early spring.
And it would be occurring in late March at the earliest.
Class was fine. Or at leas, it would have been if I hadn’t been so sleepy the whole time. This keeps happening. It is a real problem because it means I spend the entire class stressed out by struggling to stay awake and pay attention.
In fact I actually fell asleep in class yesterday. A first.
Till now, I have simply said it was from getting too little sleep, which is quite often the case with me. I go to bed at 2 am and wakes up at 7 am, and that’s only five hours of sleep. That is not enough for a healthy human being. I need more.
But I am loathe to stop hanging out with Joe watching Colbert and Daily Show after midnight. I would sleep better, but I would miss the pleasant socialization with my buddy Joe, and that seems like a net loss to me.
Or, at best, breaking even.
Without that time with Joe, my days would be very lonely, and I know for a fact that would be very bad for me. I need a certain amount of socialization and if I don’t get it, I fall apart and end up at the bottom of a very dark well.
In other words, I go crazy,
So that is one explanation for why I so often have to struggle to make it through my morning classes. Two others occurred to me today :
- It has something to do with how my school mornings involve the stress and strain of getting to school followed by a lot of sitting still and listening, and
- Maybe it’s my sleeping pills
And it’s that second theory that is troubling me.
This theory hadn’t occurred to me before now because it is a bit counterintuitive. After all, I get up in the morning and get my ass to school. It’s not easy but it’s not abnormally hard either. My crossword puzzle addiction keeps my mind active on the Skytrain, as well as keeping me from feeling claustrophobic during rush hour.
The rest of the trip, I’m walking, and it’s hard to fall asleep doing that.
Not impossible, but… tricky.
So if I can do all that, how can I blame my sleepiness on the pills? But actually, it makes sense in light of theory #1. Getting to school keeps me from feeling it, but once I am in class, the pills reassert themselves.
If that truly is the culprit, then I am really in a pickle, because I am not taking sleeping pills for fun. I need them. Before Doc Costin put me on those pills, I couldn’t stay asleep for more than 2 hours at a time. That was very bad for my mood. The pills let me get at least five hours and sometimes something close seven or eight (on days off).
So if the pills are the problem then the alternative, skipping the pills, is not a whole lot better. So it’s a tough choice. One way, I am sleepy and stressed in class, and the other, I get lousy sleep and potentially end up even worse.
Still, I want to explore this theory, so tonight, I am not going to take my sleeping pills and see what happens then. I might end up with insomnia. If so, I will have to weigh whether I should take them in order to at least get a little sleep.
The best case scenario is that I end up getting at least some sleep, and I feel way more alert and awake in class. That would seem like a miracle to me around now. It would improve the quality of my life drastically.
And honestly, I could adjust to sleeping mostly in the evenings, between 7 and midnight. That would still be five hours.
I guess I would do my homework after Joe goes to bed. Hmmm. This plan needs work.
Right now, I just want to hibernate. Sleep till spring, or at least, until I am absolutely, positively done. Need for sleep gully satiated. All napped out.
As it stands, I am probably going to take a nap after I am done blogging for the night. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather play video games for a while then do my homework for tomorrow. I have two sets of pages from TV Pilots to read and generate notes for.
But I will nap because I have no choice. There’s no point in trying to stay awake when you are too tired and incoherent to do anything. Best to rest up and hope to wake refreshed.
It could happen.
I am definitely tired of being tired and sick of being sick. Also, tired of being sick and sick of being tired. And sick and tired in general.
But the thing is, there have been times when I was more awake and alert and free of the chilling numbing fog inside, and on a deep level I rejected it because everything was too intense. I couldn’t take being that awake and alive. I have spent so long as a member of the living dead that being alive scares me.
Everything gets so loud!
So I retreat into myself once more in order to restore “normal” stimulus levels. It takes a long time for me to overcome that and truly try to climb out of my dank dark hole again so I can live in the light for a change.
Maybe the secret is to take the trip slowly. Restrain my urge to throw off my shackles and soar in favour of progress I can keep.
Or maybe I just need to get the fuck over myself.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.