Snow War Hammer

H₂O²

H²O

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

– Shakespeare – 2 Henry IV (3.1.7-10)

Insomnia is my companion. It follows me every day of my life, through good times and bad, through sickness and health. No matter what happens, I can always depend on it to be there.

It seems my day is based on a 28-hour cycle. Either I’m awake 14 hours, 28 hours, or 56. No in-between most days. The 14-hour days are when I’m depressed and can’t wait for sleep to relieve me of waking. The 28-hour day is my “normal” insomniac sleep-wake cycle. And the 56 hours is when I’m really manic and can’t sleep until I virtually drop from exhaustion.

What this does to my circadian rhythms is to put me into permanent jet lag, also known as desynchronosis, dysrhythmia, or dyschrony. I seldom feel really rested or fully awake. There’s always a little drag there somewhere.

As for when I’m awake, it depends on the cycle. Much of the time I’m awake during the night (it’s 2:40 am now), but sometimes the cycle wheels around and I am awake in the early morning. Of course, no one’s awake in my household during the night, so it’s just me and Rupert the cat, who always comes running when I’m in the kitchen, day or night.

A quick look with Google tells me that I have (tah-dah) Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder, of the Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Syndrome variety, “which causes… sleep to occur later and later each day, with the period of peak alertness also continuously moving around the clock from day to day.”

I’m sure that this whacked out sleep schedule plays havoc with my circadian rhythms. I’m not nocturnal, nor diurnal, but “omniurnal,” awake at any time my sleep period tells me to be. I sleep when I can’t stay awake any more, and I wake when I can’t sleep any more.

So the concept of my “day” is something akin to my notions of “reality” or “normality.” It’s a free-floating thing, liable to change at any moment. When I am awake, it’s “day,” and when I’m asleep it’s “night.” I no longer call my medication “morning” and “evening,” but “waking” and “bedtime.”

“Yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” are relative, too. How can I say “yesterday” when I woke up yesterday and and am still awake today? Is midnight the demarcation line, or is it just a fiction of the clock? And today was yesterday’s “tomorrow.”

Dated journal entries are a mess. What is the date if I’ve been up both the 3rd and the 4th? Even this blog entry should be dated the 3rd, though it will go in as the 4th.

Some people decry those who are slaves to the clock. Fortunately, in my “retirement” I seldom have to be anywhere at any specific time, so hours may pass by before I look up at the clock, surprised. I count my hours more by the movement of the sun — of course, when it’s daylight. I’ve gotten pretty good at that.

But at night, there’s no accounting for time by the sun, and the moon is unreliable as a timepiece. If I don’t look at the clock, I can’t tell what time it is. It’s all the same.

I think that’s one of the things I miss most about this insomniac sleep schedule: the sun and being able to count the hours by it. It seems odd to me now that there was a time when that was not so. I got up by the clock and went to bed by the clock. Like so many things in my life, that was B.C. — before catastrophe. But that’s another story for another day.

I used to get upset about my insomnia, but I’ve come to accept it as just another part of living that I have to get on with, like diabetes or bipolar disorder. Make what you can of it and forget about when life was different.

Here it’s 3 am and I’m sitting in my office unable to sleep. Last night I woke up at 3 am and couldn’t get back to sleep until 6 am. Took my medications and still wide-eyed. It could be many things: hypomania, insomnia, the sleep medication being ineffective, my biorhythms being messed up, sleeping late today. Any way you look at it, I want to be asleep since I have a long day “tomorrow.”

As I have continued my battle with insomnia, my concepts of “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” and “today” are sadly confused. Yesterday started about 12 am with going to sleep for 3 hours, being up another 3, then sleeping for 9 due to the delayed effects of the sleeping pill. I worked on stuff pretty consistently until about midnight again, hoping to go to sleep “early.” But alas, it was not to be. 

So today started with insomnia and will continue so until the sleeping pill takes effect, if it takes effect, as it sometimes doesn’t. “Today” will be a long one, with writing a post for my Anxiety blog and various other things I have to do.

I avoided some things yesterday that I could have done, mainly answering emails and messages from various people looking for help. I didn’t feel very wise, together or able to communicate, so I deferred them until today. But they have to be answered then to help these people out and to retain their trust as somebody that will be there for them.

How did I get in such a place? I’m not wise. I’m not that very experienced with mental illness — at least not as much as many people. All I can do is to relate my experience and give whatever hope I can. 

But I feel so inadequate. Here are people with broken homes, multiple mood disorders, financial and relationship problems, the gamut. And here am I, with a wonderful wife who has stuck with me through thick and thin, a relatively comfortable living, and experiencing a very enjoyable “normal” period, though it’s the first I’ve had in years.

Yet they look to me. And I will do what I can for them, however little that may be. Maybe they just need somebody to listen to them, and I can certainly do that. But their stories are so painful that I start feeling the symptoms of a panic attack and have to stop reading and come back to them later.

It must be like aid workers in Africa or some other deprived land. So much pain and suffering, so many people, so little actual experience of what these people are going through. All you can do is offer sympathy — not empathy. To help as many as you can the best way you know how and with the supplies you have, and hope that somehow you are making their lives easier.

These images are seared in the brain forever, I am told. I feel the same way. It is very, very distressing for me. I often close threads on the Patients Like Me forum because I cannot bear the pain the people are suffering, I am just not in a condition that I might offer them something to help them out. I feel guilty about it, but I can bear only so much.

I may be coming across as feeling all-powerful, the guru that can solve the problems of the world. You should know that I don’t feel that way at all; far from it. I hardly know what to think when confronted with these people and their problems. I have such limited experience and insight that I’m starting to repeat the same things over and over. These are desperate people who need help desperately, and I hardly feel in any way up to the task. Yet they come to me.

If you are the praying sort, then pray for me. If you are not, just think of me from time to time and maybe some thought rays will zoom across the ether to help me out.

Written 2008/09/02

It’s the first of September, 2008, Labor Day in the US. That’s when all of us laborers are supposed to get the day off. Except for the poor dweebs and schmoes working in retail and restaurants that the rest of us will enjoy on this day of relaxation and rest.

And it’s the first day for this blog, officially. I’ve been putting this day off for a long time in favor of my Anxiety, Panic & Health blog in order to get it started, and now I have enough space to devote some time to this blog.

I’ve thought about this blog for a long time, well over a year, and have written numerous posts and half-posts for it. Will they ever get published? Don’t know. Probably not, at least in their current form. Because I will be too busy with my new posts to go back and pick up old material.

What kind of post can you expect here? The tagline of the blog, “Exploring the Nexus of Joy and Infinity” is broad and vague enough for you to expect anything.

But what I mean to do is to occupy myself with the “in-between” of advancing age and the inevitable end. The unknown territory — at least to me — of what it means to get older, what it means to look back over my life, what it means to look forward to my dissolution.

I’m not writing this blog for millions of readers, I’m writing it for you. Just you. It does not concern me that I might not get a bunch of readers, or that my Google Analytics may show a dismally low quantity, or that my FeedBurner numbers are high. I may not even bother with Analytics or FeedBurner.

As long as I have you, that’s all I need. Who are you? That’s for you to decide!