For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled to sleep. As a kid, I developed the habit of tossing and turning for hours, staring up at the glow in the dark stars littering my ceiling. My parents, while I love them dearly, were not very present then and that meant that there was very little routine in my childhood. My sister and I were often left to fend for ourselves with my sister, being 11 years older, enforcing bedtime. I think now that that lack of structure affected my ability as I grew up to create structure in own life. And while I now, at the ripe age of 28, have worked hard to create a life for myself with routine and security, the way I was raised had a knock on affect on my sleep pattern.
Sleep became the enemy.
As an adult, my sleep is just as temperamental and evasive as it was when I was a child. I’ve spent years doing what I can to make my room and environment as sleep friendly as possible.
You name it and I have tried it.
I have set alarms to wake me early and force my body into a routine in the hope that I will drift off quicker at night. I have turned off electronics and sleep with them on airplane mode to remove distractions that keep me awake. I listen to audiobooks that are supposed to calm and soothe in an attempt to quiet the haze of thoughts that surge in my mind as soon as the lights turn out.
And sometimes it will work. The days when I get a solid 10 hours are wonderful. I absolutely adore them. Like I would give up chocolate (the love of my life) forever if it meant I could get more of those night. Yet nothing truly seems to abate the struggle of getting a good night’s sleep for long.
I will go through a few months where I begin to feel rested and energetic. Proud of myself for finally achieving what I have spent years chasing. Then, just as I am lulled into a false sense of hopefulness, something new will come along to shatter the fragile peace I’ve fought so long to find.
The current pea in my mattress is my pain.
While the frustration of insomnia often leaves me feeling desperate for any type of rest, being kept awake because I can’t find any position where it doesn’t hurt or isn’t uncomfortable is unbearable. There are a lot of mornings when I wake up feeling just as, if not more, tired than when I went to bed.
Nights are supposed to be a place of comfort. When we remove ourselves from the stresses of life and slip into peaceful slumber where our minds spin up fantastical dreams and conjure up our wildest desires. Nothing can hurt us there. But, unfortunately for me, nightime has become something of a fear. I dread when everything goes quiet, the world shuting off, and I am left with the pain and the whir of depressive thoughts that come with it. It sometimes feels like I’m standing at the base of the highest, sheerest cliff and sleep is at the very top. The only thing standing between me and rest is my own inability to climb up this gargantuan drop.
Having spent so much of my life in this limbo, I have grown very accustomed to working and socialising through days when I’ve had little or very disrupted sleep. But there are some days when I’m too tired to fake it. There is just genuinely not enough energy in me to put a smile on my face.
Over the years, I have developed different coping mechanisms to combat my insomniac brain. Audiobooks have become a true favourite. Especially when I developed Tinnitus at the age of 13. For those who don’t know, Tinnitus is a medical condition where one’s ears create sounds like ringing, buzzing, hissing or thumping. In many cases, Tinnitus will eventually go away. In mine, it did not. That was a very hard time in my life, but that’s a story for another blog.
For years now, audiobooks have provided a mechanism for me to shut off my raging thoughts and switch into something that allows me to escape. I go through…a lot of them. I don’t think you want to know how many I’ve listened to over the past 15 years! But to whoever created them, I send my most heartfelt and sincere gratitude.
Sleep has become a regular topic of discussion between me and my sister. We both have developed our own issues with it and struggle to find the rest our bodies so desperately need. I don’t often talk about how hard it is to function when the baseline of your energy is already affected from the moment you open your eyes in the morning.
So today’s post is for those who are struggling with getting the rest they need. When the night feels so quiet and empty, when you struggle to shut everything off, when you lie there for hours wondering when you’ll finally drift off, You Are Not Alone.
From just A Simple Writer.
