Insomnia

I think by now we can dismiss all pretenses that this is in any way a daily blog. On the bright side, I've had three separate people prod Owl and I about updating, which at least means that we have followers! Well, three of them at any rate.

Instead of another tired apology for a long blogging dry spell, I'm going to talk about an issue that is near and dear to my heart.

Okay, so it's one of those things.

I've spoken a bit about Mystery Illness, but I haven't spent quite as much time addressing an issue that has plagued me for pretty much as far back as I can recall. With my clever and subtle title, I'm sure you're all chomping at the bit to find out whatever that could be.

I remember struggling with sleeping through the night, and with getting to sleep, as far back as elementary school. It wasn't dire, then, barring one memorable incident when I was in third or fourth grade where I was told a scary story at a Girl Scouts sleepover that haunted me so badly that I couldn't fall asleep without somebody else in the room. I don't remember how long this lasted---in all liklihood it was only a week or so, but to my tired, traumatized little brain it seemed like an eternity. I distinctly recall sitting in my classroom trying to attend to the teacher explaining long division to us, my eyes dry and scratchy, eyelids drooping, resisting the urge to lay my head down on my desk, and thinking that this feeling, this terrible, dull ache in the back of my skull, the fuzziness between my eyes, and the gnawing horror both from the lingering effects of that one damn story and from the creeping panic that sets in after two or three nights of restless agony, this feeling was going to last forever.

That was one isolated incident in my childhood, but it has etched itself in my brain in a way that only the most vivid struggles of an otherwise unburdened youth can---deeply and with much embellishment. Had I known that day in the classroom that I had only just gotten a small taste of what would become my future relationship with insomnia, I think tiny nine-year-old me would have broken down in tears. (Granted, we were studying long division, so tears may have been an inevitable part of the equation.)

At some point in middle school I was informed that a healthy human required, on average, eight hours of sleep to function properly. By that point my sleep issues were bad enough that eight seemed rather high, but not outside the realm of believability. By late high school and early college however, eight hours of sleep a night seemed like an utterly alien concept, a luxury that I could not imagine anybody ever being lucky enough to afford. The incident above was the only point in my life that my insomnia has been assosiated with a clear external cause, barring the occasional post-horror movie restlessness or the pre-exam stress-induced sleeplessness. Normally, though, it's just...there. This constant, inexplicable barrier that nothing I do can overcome. Some things make it better, of course, sometimes, but so far, there's no reliable fix, no instant cure, nothing I can depend on to secure those eight (or so) hours of recharging we all need to be as awesome as we can be.

Let me be perfectly clear here: Insomnia sucks. It's draining, nerve-wrecking, and seeps into areas of your life that you'd never expect. Try showing up for an 8am class or a job that starts at 7 when you haven't slept for the past two days straight. (Don't actually try this at home, kids.) You know that feeling you get when you've been sitting at your desk for too long and your back and neck ache? With insomnia, everything aches. Constantly. It can make you sick to your stomach, light headed, and irritable. It can ruin your appetite---some people gain weight, some people lose it, some people do both, fluctuating between the two like their internal mechanisms have gone entirely haywire, because that's essentially what they're doing.

If you don't have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, count your blessings (as well as your sheep, of course). It feels not unlike what I imagine slowly going mad might feel like, once you've gone long enough without proper rest. At times, it can be not just inconvenient and exhausting, but terrifying. For me, there's still sometimes this irrational, annoying, tiny Raven in the back of my head that chimes in, just around the time dawn is breaking, after twenty- or thirty-odd hours of sleeplessness, with the suggestion that maybe, juuuuust maybe, I would never sleep again. That tiny voice in my head is a real bastard, but when you're staring at your ceiling listening to a cacophony of robins right outside your window, even that seems plausible.

I've been trying, however, not to dwell too much on the negatives, however. So, let me say this as well.

Recently I've come to understand a curious phenomenon : when something becomes a constant, pervasive force in your life, you tend to develop a relationship with it. Whehter it is a good force or a bad force, it is an important enough influence in your life that it takes on a life of its own. To a degree this has happened to me with Mystery Illness, and it has certainly happened with insomnia. And as with all relationships, we either have to find a way to tolerate them, or cut them out of my life. Unlike other relationships, however, insomnia isn't like a jealous ex or a petty coworker. You can't just walk away from it. You have to find a way to tolerate it.

Right now, my insomnia and I have a working relationship. It is not a good relationship. It's the sort of relationship that has our friends shaking their heads and warning us away from one another, as though we could do anything to resist. It's like insomnia and I are two people stuck on a deserted island. There's no sign of rescue, so we've got to buckle down and work together, or at least around one another, to survive until help comes. (Help, in this case, is sleep. Was that metaphor not clear enough? Maybe a Lost analogy will make the deserted island metaphor better: Insomnia is Jack, and I'm Locke. Or possibly Sawyer, depending on how irritable I'm feeling.) It may not be a good relationship, but right now we have an understanding. Insomnia insists its here to stay, and since it doesn't seem to be budging on this issue, I've decided to put down my foot. If it's going to crash in my house, it's playing by my rules. Just because I'm not sleeping doesn't mean I can't be productive. Do you have any idea the number of things you can get done in the middle of the night? I can reorganize my notebooks and pens without Owl looking at me funny! I can catch up on Netflix shows I'm too busy to watch normally.

Honestly, I'm more productive when I can't sleep. A night owl by nature, I do some of my best writing in the wee hours. I read more. I draw. I paint.  The number of times I've dedicated several hours in the middle of the night to troubleshooting problems with my tablet or my PC is astonishing. Just a few hours ago I solved an issue between my tablet, an app I reaaaaaally wanted to play (guys go check out Plague Inc!) and Google Play that has been bothering me all week. Lately, I've been awake to greet the dawn. Sunrise is a time of day that I adore, but generally speaking I only see it from the wrong way round. But this week, I've been making the most of it. I've been compiling to-do lists. I've been tidying. I've started heading down to the bakery/cafe down the street when they open at 6. I grab two cups of coffee and some pastries, and bring them back home so that they're there for Owl and I when it approaches normal-people hours. Then I take my notebook and head down to the pier right behind our apartment. I love sitting on the benches and the rocks and looking out at the expanse of lake before me. I can see the downtown area and the university from the pier and the capitol building wreathed in fog is an image I will never grow tired of. I would probably rather be well-rested, but as a second choice, being constantly overwhelmed by the beauty of the city that I live in and the immense fortune and joy I have in my life is not the worst option.

Basically, this is a very long-winded explaination as to why I started this blog post at four in the morning. The bakery is open now, so I'm going to go fetch us some breakfast and take a walk down to the lake. Later today we will have the delightful rhubarb and strawberry pie we made last night, and we're making somem delicious homemade iced tea to go with it! We're planning to spend much of the day cooking and baking. We went to the Farmers' Market on Saturday, so we've got garlic bulbs and scapes that we're going to turn into a delightful compound butter along with sage from our freshly potted sage plant! We're also going to figure out what to do with the rest of our rhubarb, and do some meal planning and prepping for this week. It's going to be a pretty great day, so the fact that I got to be up for all of it is a good thing, right?

...right?