My sleeping pill, that is. Good ol’ trazodone.
My relatiobnship with it has become more nuanced and complex lately. It used to be that I took it before going to bed no matter what.
Now I take it on an as-needed basis.
The change started when I lay down to relax and read one night and ended up falling asleep for four hours or so, without taking the pill.
Interesting, but that’s all. The pill has always done little to help me get to sleep, it just helped me stay asleep. Before I started taking it, I was lucky to get two hours of sleep before I woke up and had to get up for a while till I calmed down from whatever night terror had awoken me.
Probably a reaction to my sleep apnea, that.
With the pill, I could get four to five hours of sleep in a row and that was a big help.
So when I fell asleep and got that same amount of sleep sans medication, I was surprised and pleased.
More importantly, though, I woke up feeling fine. Let me repeat that. I actually woke up feelinjg rested and relaxed.
That’s very big news chez moi,. Normally I wake up feeling like day old crap and it takes me over an hour to fully wake up. And sometimes, I don’t make it, and end up having to go back to bed.
That’s how I feel right now. Patient readers know the drill. I feel sleepy and dizzy and dragged down and kind of like I have been squashed flat and now I am slowly re-inflating to full three dimensional status.
Oh. And I feel lightly bruised all over.
For many years, I thought this was entirely due to my sleep apnea. But due to the incident in question, I have been questioning that assumption, and that led me to try a night without the pill.
And that was fine. I got to sleep fine and slept for almost as long as with the pill, and found waking up far easier to do. And so I made the switch.
I only take the damned pill when I am having a lot of trouble getting to sleep. Generally, that means I have had one of my goddamned attacks of being perfectly sleepy then suddenly being wide awake and tense and anxious and unable to sleep at all.
That happened last night. hence me ffeling like used crap right now. When I hit 500 words, I am going to go back to bed, at least for a little bit, so I can get my second wind and finish the damned thing.
I might end up getting another couple of hours of naptime, or the liter of diet cola I am drinking might finally kick in and I more or less bounce back out of bed and am actually able to think and act and get shit done.
I am hoping for the latter, naturally. I would rather be wakeful. It’s so very frustrating to want to be awake and alert and enjoying life but you can’t because this goddamned heavy sleepiness makes it impossible to concentrate or even function properly.
That’s when I turn into a little kid who protests going to bed and claims he is not sleepy even though his eyes are heavy and he has been napping on and off for a while.
Well, not really. I used to do that but I am more philosophical about the whole thing now. I still feel that way and I have the urge to try to do what I want to do through the haze of sleepiness and feeling crappy, but I don’t indulge it because I know it’s futile.
Better to give in to the urge to sleep and see where that goes.
And speaking of which, time to do that myself.
Aaand I am back. Ended up getting another hour or so of sleep. I feel a lot less crappy now. I still don’t feel that great, but at least I feeling marginally human now.
This got me to thinking about my attitude towards my own illness. It remains tortuously complex. On a deep level, I still can’t accept that my illness keeps me from doing what I want to do and that I need to take that into account when judging myself.
It’s that thing I call my ambition rearing its ugly head again. I burn with ambition and want so badly to go out into the world and strut my stuff and show the world what I can do, given the chance, and to finally make a life for myself instead of my current pitiful and entirely unsatisfying existence.
There I go again! Yes, my life is very unfulfilling right now, but heaping corn on it does not help and only ends up making me feel worse and even less likely to get anything done and even more likely to cling to my video games as a safe escape.
And yetm these energies cannot be denied. They have to go somewhere. And with my path to action blocked by my physical and mental infirmities, they have no outlet.
And it’s driving me crazy.
I feel so goddamned frustrated sometimes that I want to go on a rampage of violence and destruction just to get some god damned relief.
Instead, I wait. I wait for the day when the frustration overwhelms the resistance and blows the doors wide open for me and lets me finally step out into the light.
But in the meantime, it would be nice if I couild find my way towards not taking the frustrations out on myself. That means I have to forgive myself for being sick, and that is not an easy thing to to do.
Why? I am not sure. Hating onself for being sick is blatantly unfair and highly illogical. Hate the illness, sure. But being sick is no reflection on one’s worth or character.
But I just can’t help myself.
I am too damned sick to stop doing it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.