My journey through pain - 16. Chapter 16 - Long nights of insomnia

I suppose first of all I should say I’m thankful. Ever since the bad things happened months ago , I hadn’t really had any problems falling asleep at night. Quite the contrary, in fact. I used to look forward to the nighttime because it was when I could go to bed and forget about how bad I was feeling for eight, nine, or ten hours. Then in the mornings I would get another anxiety wave, but I could always look forward to the night once again so I could catch my breath, emotionally speaking. Also, a very clear symptom of my constant depression for the past two years has been that I tended to sleep for way too long. Ten hours was the bare minimum but, in order for me to feel really rested, I had to sleep for about twelve hours and also take a nap in the middle of the day. That meant that my days were really short, and for years I thought that it was normal.

Now, things have changed. I have been working very hard on fixing or learning how to live with many of the emotional consequences of what I went through. Progress is always there, I guess… But now a new problem has arrived and it was so sudden that I don’t know what to do. It’s threatening to undermine everything I’ve been working for – it shatters my days into formless shards of tiredness and anxiety that won’t fit with one another to make a clear picture anymore. It terrifies me and it’s quickly taking over not only my days but also my nights. It’s insomnia, plain and simple. And I don’t know what to do about it.

I still don’t understand why it started. The first hard night I had was a week ago, which was ironically the night I was able to go out with a friend and just have fun. I was very relaxed and even kind of happy when I came home. I still remember the sensation, though it feels like I experienced it years ago instead of just seven days. I remember getting ready for bed, closing my eyes… And then anxiety hit like a truck.

That first night it manifested itself as an entire seven hours of sleeping in short spells, dozing off every now and then only to wake up with a jerk and me wondering why it wasn’t daytime yet. I was confused and I chalked it off to maybe some nervousness about the interview I was going to have on Wednesday, but I wasn’t worried or bothered that such a night would repeat itself. But it did. The very next night, I was able to sleep for about four hours straight and then I woke up. Fully alert. It was super weird, like somebody had flipped the switch that said to me: nighttime’s over. Only it wasn’t, it was about 3 AM and, after that, I was only able to sort of doze off fitfully for the rest of the night. When 6 AM finally came around I was exhausted of tossing around in bed and I just got up. A gigantic day with many hours lay ahead of me and I had no idea of how to fill them all.

Things got steadily worse as the week progressed. I had another night of waking up around 3 AM with anxiety dialed all the way up, finding it next to impossible to fall back asleep. Then the next day, I had trouble falling asleep to begin with and it was devastating. I was tired, sleepy, and yet as soon as my head hit the pillow my mind kicked into overdrive. It took me more than an hour and a half to fall asleep – an hour and a half of tossing around in the darkness, literally sweating with anxiety, trying to convince my mind to calm down and shut off for the day. In my case, when anxiety comes, relaxing and shutting off are the last two things my mind is able to do. It was horrible. I went through the day after that night like a zombie, tired, barely able to focus. Nighttime came and I was tired enough to fall asleep right away, but again I woke up at the same witching hour of 3 AM and I wasn’t able to rest very well after that despite me knowing that I needed it.

I tried switching around variables. Maybe eating earlier in the evening instead of an hour before going to bed. Maybe drinking less water, maybe watching something boring or reading or doing nothing before bed. But the very next night I again had trouble falling asleep to begin with and I was terrified. I still don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. It’s been more than a week now, and the horrible anxiety that used to greet me every single morning now haunts me during the night as well. I don’t know why. But it’s bringing even more fear into my life, and it is destroying my motivation. I have tried to reason this out but I can’t. Why am I having so much trouble sleeping out of the blue? Was it because I stopped drinking Coke? It’s been about two weeks since I stopped drinking soda altogether in an attempt to be healthier. Maybe there’s a chemical imbalance somewhere in there because of the relatively sudden lack of caffeine in my system? But it’s already been two weeks. Why now? And why isn’t it going away?

I have received advice during therapy and I have been told that, if I wake up and I can’t go back to sleep, I should just get up. I can’t bring myself to do it, though. Waking up at 3 AM, the thought of simply getting up and, I don’t know, working for a bit on my computer or preparing myself some tea or whatever… Those thoughts are so overwhelming. I can’t bring myself to get out of bed. It’s like I’m literally trapped in there with my own desperation and I can’t break free of my own volition. Getting up feels like I’m admitting defeat and I panic. I’m already having trouble filling up the empty hours of the day when I’m not working. To add even more hours to a sleepless day is more than I can bear.

I am scared. I am frustrated. I am even a little angry – I know that healing is nonlinear and so on and so forth. I am told by people around me that I am indeed making progress even if I don’t see it. But now that insomnia has reared its ugly head and further complicated my life, I’m not sure I can deal with everything. I put my heart and soul into each and every day to make them productive, satisfactory, worthwhile. Almost every single morning, simply starting the day by taking the dog out for a walk has required what feels like a titanic effort on my part to fight against the horrible defeatist inertia that conspires to keep me in bed doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself. I fight against it and I have snatched my own sanity away from its claws again and again and again. Instead of shirking work I’m embracing it, trying to become a better person and a better professional. I’m paying attention to my body too, not only my mind, and I am exercising a lot and changing habits to eat well. I’m even socializing more, even at night, hard though it is for me. I fight against my lingering fears as well as I am able to.

And yet I don’t feel better.

I don’t understand.

I know I’m acting like a child right now in a way, who’s throwing a tantrum because he’s unhappy and he thinks stamping his feet and screaming for a little while will make him feel better. But I’m tired. I’m scared of how tired I feel. A few weeks ago it was horrible but there was a tiny bit of progress which I could see and I could cling to the hope that, with time, my pain would fade. Maybe it still will, but it’s so slow and it’s so hard to be patient and just wait for things to get better. I need things to be better now. I need for my mornings to not be tantamount to torture. I need for my nights to not have so much fear. I need… I don’t even know what I need. I have tried every single way of looking at my panic attacks and my anxiety. I keep telling myself, today for instance, that I need to remember my own words and be okay with not being okay. But the problem is that I don’t see things getting better – and this might just be a trick of perception, I might not be seeing the forest for the trees. But I am sick and tired of feeling like I’m going to puke from anxiety every minute of every day. I am sick and tired of the jittery energy that follows me throughout the day, making it impossible to sit still. I want this awful fatigue which comes from not sleeping well to go away. I want…

I don’t know. I think I’m rambling but it’s just that I don’t understand. If I were somehow able to substract the emotional component from my days recently, they would be great days. They would be days when I did many things, productive things, and even once or twice I was able to distract myself with a fun activity. But I can’t take away the emotional pain that shadows me. It’s this awful portent of doom hanging over my head that I can’t ignore. I don’t even know where it comes from and I don’t know how to fight it. I want it to go away, I desperately want it to go away. That’s why I’ve been working so hard, and dammit, I don’t often like to toot my own horn because I have been taught several harsh lessons in humility, but in this case I will come out and say that I’ve been working my ass off to heal, to be better, and I’m not seeing any improvements in my mood and it’s discouraging and scary and disappointing and I don’t know what to do. Why do I still feel this way? And why can’t I properly sleep?

I’m concerned about frustrating people around me. I’ve received a lot of support over the last few weeks, but when I still don’t feel good even after all that help I feel like I’m letting everybody down. Like someone will come up to me and say hey, we gave you all this attention and all of these pep talks and you said you understood. How come you’re not happy? How come you still say you feel bad?

I have no answer to that. I don’t even know what to do right now – it’s the middle of the day. Simply writing this down, the effort required, is making me sleepy. But I know for a fact that if I climb into bed right now I’m going to freak out. I’m going to freak out and I’m not going to be able to fall asleep for a nap and it’s just going to mess up my day and mess me up psychologically, even more if that is somehow possible, and it just boils down to me feeling trapped. I’m so tired and I can’t rest. It’s horrible. It’s almost like torture. I need some way to break the cycle. Nothing I’ve been doing so far seems to be helping, so maybe I need to do something else, something more radical. Maybe the answer does not lie in working hard, doing exercise, or socializing. I just don’t know where to look though. I’m going to sound like a whiny child again but I want to stop suffering so much, all the time. I can take the suffering and the anxiety and the worries and the regrets if they come every now and then, but not if they are here without leaving. It’s like I need at least a little bit of time to catch my breath, emotionally, before diving back down into the murk. But now it feels like somethings keeping my head down in the water and I’m running out of air.

What do I do? What am I doing wrong? How do I go forward feeling like this?