#6- Sleep and why I suck at it.

I, like many people in their early twenties, have a hard time sleeping. Not just getting to sleep, but staying asleep is a chore for a myriad of reasons.

For starters, I have tinnitus, which is a constant ringing/buzzing/whooshing/humming in the ears usually associated with hearing loss, and have had tinnitus for as long as I can remember. I can hear just fine, but unfortunately the constant ringing interferes with sleep. It's impossible for me to sleep now without some kind of external white noise in the background, like a fan or something, because the ringing in my ears drives me bonkers. Also, I think I'm OCD, because the noise has to be constant. If there's any kind of tapping, clicking, or rustling noises, I have to find out what exactly is making that noise and find a way to stop it. Hunting around the room in the dark wastes an enormous amount of time I could be sleeping.

Noise problems aside, it's hard for me to turn my brain off. It literally will not shut off no matter what I try to do. I can try meditating, I can try focusing on my breathing, I can try counting sheep, to no avail. SOMETHING in my memory banks is always much more interesting than trying to sleep. Then the adrenaline starts pumping because I'm so pissed off at my brain, and we all know adrenaline keeps us awake, so that's another hour or so lost just because I can't turn my brain off.

It's at this point, when I can finally get my evil conscious mind quieted down, that my bladder decides to say, "Hey, I'm full, get up and empty me."

So then I get up, incredibly angry, and by the time I get back I'm right where I started.

Laying there, as the adrenaline starts to wear off, I sometimes look at the clock. This is always a mistake. It always starts a chain reaction in my brain: I look at the clock. Then I calculate how much time I've wasted trying to sleep. Then I calculate how much time I have left to get to sleep. Then the countdown begins. I constantly have to look at the clock every half-hour or so just to see how much time is left. Why? I don't know. It might be the OCD.

Now, some of these problems aren't psycho- or neurological. Sometimes they're external. Such as the two roosters that my neighbors have--those little bastards crow constantly, starting at midnight and going off every two to three hours. That's not when the aforementioned neighbors have their oompa-loompa-Mexican-polka music playing at some ungodly hour of the night.

Or when the cat gets locked out of the main house and comes into my room (out in the guest house) at one in the morning. My door doesn't properly latch every time you close it; you have to fiddle with the doorknob and lift it a bit before it clicks into place, so it's easy for the cat to get in and start meowing.

Or perhaps when my roommate talks/moans in her sleep. This is a recent development, and it greatly concerns me, because it sounds like she's having nightmares. She never remembers them the day after, but she does moan, and it does keep me up at night. The solution to that one is simple, all I have to do is reach across with my leg and lightly kick her mattress so she rolls over and stops moaning. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

There's also my mom's little Dachshund who is let out every morning around six-thirty and simply must bark at everything, just in case anyone forgot that we had a dog.


So, because of all of this, I in my sleep-deprived mind at two-thirty one morning decided to go into the spare room to sleep. I turned on a fan, snuggled into bed, and was asleep almost instantly. It was wonderful.


Until the bird started chirping.

Actually, I'm not sure if you could quite call it chirping. I have no idea what kind of bird it was, but the sound it made resembled the sound of two marbles clacking together loudly. (Mockingbird, maybe? Who knows what those critters will imitate.) Anyhow, that one little clacky-bird was almost the cause of a mental breakdown. That day, I remember, was awful.

So that night I took more sedatives than was recommended on the bottle and slept like a baby.

I wouldn't recommend doing that, though-- the next day I was incredibly groggy for my drive into San Diego, and it also really scared the piss out of my mother.

Warm Regards,

Liz.


P.S.-- To all four of you that watch/visit this blog, I've been figuring out how to fiddle around with how it looks. Thank you for putting up with the changes and expect more shenanigans in the future, but for right now I think I like how it looks. Much better than the black background with the neon green font-- what was I even thinking?...