I have an up and down relationship with sleep. I like sleep, I love sleeping in, but sometimes I find it really hard to shut my mind down and go to sleep. I’ve had this forever, as long as I can remember. I can remember reading books under the bedcovers with a torch, when I was seven, to pass the time while I couldn’t sleep. I used to escape into books and daydreams to hide from the things keeping me awake, to pass the time waiting for sleep.
I have this feeling, I don’t want to post rationalise and I do not want to reinterpret my own history to add meaning that was not there at the time, but I have the sense, a kind of shadow memory of wordless feelings, that the thing that started it going was my sense of wrongness. My sense of “Huh… wait, I’m meant to be a boy? Er….?” which was vague and ill formed but… there indefinably. My escaping involved a lot of projecting myself into the heroines in my books, of not wanting to sleep in order to stay in the fantasy as long as I could.
As I got older, insomnia became not regular, but something that happened often enough to be a part of my life. Particularly when I am more stressed. Particularly when I am trying to work through some trans feeling related emotions. I spent so long supressing these feelings that I find it very hard sometimes to access them. I just get this… this… emotional pressure that keeps my mind ticking over without knowing why. Sometimes I can force the issue, sometimes I just have to wait for it to stop being shy and come forward.
I guess it didn’t help that training as an architect is kind of reinforcing for insomniacs. It’s structured to force you to work long and late, there is a culture of pulling all nighters to meet deadlines. Insomnia as useful learning skill! I can be extremely productive sometimes during a bout of it, getting large amounts of work done in order to pass the time waiting for sleep – although I doubt this actually helps me find sleep and mostly serves to distract from the discomfort of knowing there is something stopping you from sleeping.
I’m having a sleepless phase at the moment. Partly I think to do with money worries, partly I have some stuff I’m working through and it is uncomfy thinking and it’s slow.
I’ll be glad when I get back to some normal (ish) sleeping.
The medication I was on was an anxiolytic that had the fortunate side effect of making me sleep soundly for the first time in years. the downside of that was that it made me sleep up to 11 hours a day. It’s amazing how much being uncomfortable with yourself prevents you from going to sleep.