in which our heroine suffers from insomnia

I don't usually sleep well even on my best days. last night was certainly no exception.

I tend to have the most trouble getting to sleep on Sunday nights because I'm so overcaffeinated on the weekend. case in point: all afternoon, evening, night yesterday, I went to the kitchen to fill my cup ("cup" is an understatement; it's more like a thirty-two ounce plastic mug), getting the two-liter of Diet Pepsi out of the fridge, and in the back of my mind was the lecturing voice, the one that says "you know this is a bad idea", and yet the cup was filled again and again. that was dumb enough in itself, but I also justified it somehow by telling myself "it's okay, I'll just take Tylenol PM tonight to balance it out". rational mind: "this is borderline drug abuse." irrational mind: "nah, it'll be fine!"

I laid down at 11:30, which is about normal for me. it's later than I'd like, but I've always been a night owl, preferring to stay up late (usually gaming) and sleep until almost noon -- good for working second shift jobs, bad when your workday starts at 7:30 in the morning. I was expecting a phone call, which has been a nearly-nightly occurrence for a few months now, so I wasn't really trying to sleep just then. instead, I laid in bed with the fan turned toward me, waiting for the humidity in my bedroom to subside. (I recently moved and I live on the top floor of my building. while I'm enjoying sitting out on my deck, summer, and the heat/humidity combo, sucks mightily.)

the call came a few minutes after midnight and ended around 12:30. though it was still stiflingly humid, I pulled the sheet up over me, grabbed the other pillow, and snuggled down into the mattress, waiting for the sleeping pills to take over. meanwhile, my mind was racing. I'm sure a great deal of my insomnia has to do with the nightly challenge of shutting my brain down, but usually if it doesn't work on its own, I can force it with what I refer to as self-hypnosis but is probably...well, probably close to that, now that I think about it. however, I won't go into detail; it's hard to explain and the few times I've tried have left me feeling like I'm slightly mad. at any rate, it's worked pretty well for probably eleven or twelve years.

last night, however...

one of the things about me is that I always have a song in my head. this is without fail. songs that are background noise in my mind when I'm awake become the soundtrack to my dreams at night. mostly I've accepted it as just how things are, but at times it's maddening. last night was one of those times. I managed to mentally turn down the volume on them, but it wasn't enough. for my self-hypnosis to work, I have to force my mind to clear, and I couldn't do it last night. add to that the fact that the pills weren't really so effective against the ocean of caffeine I'd consumed earlier, and it all led to me not falling asleep until 5:00. for the record, "5:00 a.m." is otherwise known as "an hour before my alarm goes off".

I peered at the clock some time later, which ended up being a few minutes before I had to get up. my eyes felt grainy, my head was pounding, and I knew there was no way I could get out of bed. I re-set the alarm for 7:00 and passed out again.

a few minutes before 7:00, I woke up, picked up my cell phone and called my manager, Renée. I told her my head was killing me and that I needed a couple of hours to let painkillers take effect before I'd be in. after that, I dropped the phone back on my night table, set the alarm for 9:00, and closed my eyes again.

I got up shortly before 9:00; despite my weariness, I still slept pretty lightly. I rushed through my morning routine (taking the painkillers then because I couldn't make myself get up to take them at the time I should have) and left at 9:20, making it to work by 9:40.

I would have probably been better off staying home and attempting to sleep some more. I'm completely useless today. I'm bleary-eyed and shaky, my hands are tingly and my sprained wrist is throbbing. I feel like I'm looking at everything as if it was underwater, with the same slowed reaction time.

the room around me and the conversations within are a dull roar, muffled and mumbled like the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher, all set to the 80s station we stream from iTunes. on the bright side, I don't have the energy to be neurotic; I barely have the energy to type this right now. on the not-so-bright side, however, I'm susceptible to making mistakes in my work -- not as many as Renée (which is a whole other post in itself), but enough. for me, the perfectionist, one is too many.

and the feeling I have right now...let me see if I can accurately describe it. in one word: desperation. in several: I feel as if nothing, not work, not my cats, not food, money, love, sex, sunlight, books, Spore, the local gas crisis, family, friends, nothing matters as much as sleeping. it's all I want to do, and I feel like it's the only thing I'll ever want to do for the rest of my life. at the same time it's both very understandable and also a cause for concern: understandable because...well, duh, and a cause for concern because that alone says to me that my depression, which I'm usually pretty good at keeping at bay, is looming around the edges of my compromised consciousness, waiting to strike, to overwhelm, with me too weak to stop it. I hope that's not the case, and I'll definitely be aware of any further signs that I'm heading in that direction, but it's pretty disturbing nonetheless.

and so here I sit, at my desk, and what do I have to combat my exhaustion? why, the hair of the dog that bit me, of course! I'm halfway through one can with another staring at me from across my desk. oh, and there's also sugar, in the form of a 3 Musketeers mint candy bar. I'm nothing if not absolutely, brilliantly self-destructive, eh? (though I did have a granola bar earlier that had both fruit and nuts in it.)

what I need to do (again), I know, is get rid of the caffeine. I did it for two months earlier in the year (ironically it was around Lent, which may have confused some of my religious co-workers, being that I'm an atheist and all), and it helped a lot. I also need to correct my horrible diet and get some exercising done. both of these things also have helped in the past.

anyway...er...I seem to have wasted a whole lot of work time typing this, so I'd better stop. maybe I'll take a nap when I get home...

(note at 5:40 p.m.: I did not take a nap. my bedroom window and the door to the deck both have blinds, but a whole lot of light comes in anyway, and my ideal sleeping environment is "dark as a cave". I'll have to do something about that next week. also, by 1:00, I was wide awake. well, not wide awake, but you know. I am the very model of the phrase "too tired to sleep".)