Truth be told I have several dozen issues, but not the least of them is a raging insomnia that strikes randomly and with increasing frequency. When I was younger I had it sort of pegged as being hormonal since it arrived with annoying regularity for a night or two prior to the arrival of dear old Aunt Flo and then again for a night or two preceeding ovulation. As someone who struggled with infertility for years one of the positive things that came from that heart rending time in my life was learning how the ebb and flo of certain hormones and chemicals can affect every single system in your body. They can and do alter not only your moods and weight, but your sleep patterns, your taste buds, and your sensitivity to light and sound among many other odd things.
I digress. Tonight my issue is the insomnia which has become random with what I am assuming to be the onset of the perimenopausal stage of my life. Oh joy, new terrority to explore and new horizons of insanity to endure. FML
Again I digress. Tonight I muddled upon something that I think may fuel my insomnia like the inconsistant flow of my hormones. Or perhaps it's the inconsistant flo of my hormones that is altering the chemical make up of my brain and leading me to be increasingly anal. Or maybe I am just developing a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive disorder in my old age. Who the hell knows.
Anyway what I discovered tonight as I was waiting for my annoyingly slow little blue laptop to chug itself to life at what was then 2:03am, is that part of my insomnia seems to be the unending feeling that something isn't right. Something is left to be done or something wasn't done in the correct manner. For instance; Every night before I go to bed I take my laptop (a 10" Acer netbook actually) out of the binder that I carry it around in (it goes everywhere I go including to work) and plug it in. I turn it on and put it on my lap whether I do anything with it or not makes no difference that is simply the routine I follow. Only until tonight I had never given any thought to the fact that it was a routine I follow.
Tonight after reading some atrociously bad vampire stories... decent writing probably, but I didn't care for the storylines and the characters didn't grab my attention... there just wasn't enough detail and description and as I explained to my writer's group last month I am a description whore and I like a story that plays like a well scripted movie in my mind's eye.
There I go digressing yet again. Anyway after I read the bad anthology of vampire Christmas stories and was still edgy, restless, and nowhere near sleep I set about trying various other nighttime routines that sometimes put an end to the insomnia. I won't bore you or embarrass myself by going over them, just suffice it to say that a variety of nighttime rituals failed miserable. I was still on edge to the point of being anxious and nervous to the borders of a panic attack... an issue to be addressed another time... It was at that point that I gave up and turned the light on thinking to just come online and write out some blog nonsense. I've been wanting to post a new blog for a bit and just couldn't settle on anything worth writing about.
Anyway I realized at that point that I'd just put the binder under the nightstand with my laptop still in it. So I pulled it out and plugged it in, and as it was chugging sluggishly to life like Frankenstein's monster in a Sierra snow storm the idea struck me that maybe none of my other nighttime rituals had worked because something wasn't right. I hadn't followed the routine of taking the laptop out and plugging it in as I have done pretty much every single night for the last two years. Maybe I have reached a point in my insanity where something as simple as not plugging in the laptop can keep me awake for hours.
That thought led to the idea that maybe it was the combination of not having followed the routine and not having written a blog post like I have been hounding myself to do for the past 24 hours or more. I've no idea why I've felt the urge to make a post, obviously I have nothing to say and certainly nothing important that anyone would need or want to read. Yet for some reason that burning desire was there. That need to write a blog post, the need to follow the routine; one or the other or maybe both.
Or maybe just the combination of all of those things mixed in with one person's need to feel as if they aren't utterly alone in the world during the wee hours of the morning. That despite whatever ghosts haunt their souls and keep them from resting that somewhere out there others are suffering from some similiar ailment.
Whatever the case it seems that something has eased the torment. The routine has been followed, the blog post is finished, and since I still have friends posting at Facebook I can assume I'm not alone in the world at 2:52am. Whatever the reason or remedy I may never know, but I'm tired now. I think when I say goodnight yet again to my online world, when I shut down my programs and set the laptop aside. When I make my routine trip downstairs to turn down the heat that I turned up a few hours ago, when I set the box fan that always runs at just the right angle to make the funny sound it's supposed to make, and when I set the three pillows on my bed in exactly the right places.... this time I might actually sleep... goodnight.
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