We’ve never really gotten along.
Even when I was a little kid, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I have plenty of memories of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.
Number one rule of sleep : stop trying! Sleep is not something you make happen, it’s something you let happen. You have to get rid of whatever is keeping you awake then just let the natural process of nodding off take over.
Maybe that’s part of my problem. My overactive mind has trouble letting go of “control”. On a deep level, I feel like I am only safe when I am awake and aware and using this big bad brain of mine to calculate and predict and all the crap.
Being raped when I was four really did a number on me. It forever ruptured my sense of safety and made me deeply paranoid on a very intellectual level.
I just don’t trust the world not to sneak up on me to hurt me when I’m not watching .
So I always have to be watching. Even when I am asleep there is a part of me that is awake and watching.
So my sleep tends to kind of suck. The idea of getting actual, deep, restful sleep where I wake up feeling rested and refreshed remains mostly theoretical to me.
It’s happened but very, very rarely, and seemingly at total random. Presumably something I did before set the neurochemical stage just right, or something.
Or maybe I just managed to do enough to exhaust myself and drain off all the excess energy that usually powers this megawatt mind of mine so that I could finally get some god damned rest.
Like I have said before, I know in my soul that I am happiest when I am busy, but I lack the ability to make myself truly busy
All I know how to do is keep myself occupied. Like I have made a home for myself in life’s waiting room and I’ve been waiting for something or someone to start me off in life for so long that most of the time I forget that I am even waiting for something.
I know that I can’t do this alone. I need someone to hold my hand and anchor me and help me say calm and focused and grounded so that my neuroses do not carry me away from what I want in life.
So yeah. I can’t do it alone.
But I have always been alone. I don’t really know how to do things with others because there’s never been any others to do anything with.
I am always alone. I got myself through school. I had no support from my family, my teachers, or my classmates.
But I don’t know how to exit my mental illness alone. I am increasingly sure that it will involve finally learning to connect with other people and the human race in general, and I am scared of all that.
The truth is that I am socially retarded. I completely bypassed so many developmental stages that I am still way, way behind the other kids when it comes to connecting with others and learning to just plain get along.
I don’t want to be alone. This sealed off world of mine is awfully cold and lonely. I long for some kind of real connection with another to end this death march through the Midnight Tundra of my inner world so that I can finally come home.
But I know the world outside my skull is not to blame. Not really.
The problem is that in order to let someone in, you have to open your heart to the world. and let life in.
You have to forego the cold comforts if icy intellectualism and embrace being emotionally real and present.
You have to be here now.
And I’ve never been able to do that.
More after the break.
Meanwhile, back at the topic
Oh right, sleep.
What got me thinking about my relationship with sleep was my inability to change my basic sleeping pattern despite my rather bold declaration a little way back that I was going to stop napping so much.
Um, no. That resolution lasted about as long as my hypomanic phase and that was all. One cannot change the habits formed over decades of repetition by fiat alone.
So I still have a segmented day where I am awake for a period then nap. or sometimes vice versa, and it’s all bracketed by meals.
So in the morning I will get up whenever, and at 8 am I have my breakfast while hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries MUCK.
It’s a way to have breakfast with friends every morning. An admittedly rather attenuated way, but that’s the form of social stimulation I can handle.
Namely, completely mitigated by screens. Sigh.
After breakfast I go back to sleep. That usually ends up being at around 10 am, but my energy levels vary and my active period could only last till 9 or keep on chugging until noon or even 1 pm.
Then there’s unstructured time till 4 pm, which is when I do lunch n’ blog, then go to sleep again, then at 8 pm it’s supper n’ blog, then nap yet again, and then get up by midnight to either Zoom with Julian and Felicity or hanging out with Julian and watching an episode of Colbert we recorded via PVR.
That’s my life. After each sleep period there is usually a time of wakefulness during which I play my video games until the next break.
Occasionally I loiter playing games for too long and need to take a nap in the hour or so before a blogging session instead.
But the pattern remains true. I nap a LOT. And I know why – it’s because I hide in sleep. I take naps to escape reality and give my anxiety level time to fall back to zero so I can get up and make it through another active period.
The idea of having to stay awake for longer than that, perhaps understandably, scares me terribly. It makes me feel like I would be “trapped” in wakefulness without the ability to retreat into sleep when things get too intense and/or stimulating.
Which is exactly how normal, healthy people live. They stay awake all day and part of the night, then sleep eight hours in a row except for sometimes getting up to pee.
That seems incomprehensibly horrific to me. I need my hidey hole of sleep to disappear into in order to function at all.
And I know how bloody unhealthy that is. That’s not how humans are meant to function. That’s why most people do not live like I do.
And I know that this need for a ready escape route stems from a fundamental weakness of character. Were I a stronger, healthier, more robust specimen, I would not need to run and hide in sleep so much. I would be able to live a normal life.
But I can’t change that via fiat either.
Maybe it would all sort itself out were I physically healthier.
But I don’t seem to be able to manage that, either.
I’m too sick to make myself well.
And ain’t that a kick in the nards?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.