Sleep Deprivation is Torture

Not sleeping makes it hard to enjoy just about anything. It makes it hard to carry on a conversation and it definitely makes it hard to write a blog.

After over three years of severe insomnia, some days it is hard to function at all.

Luckily, not everyday is terrible. I have better days and even better weeks. Sometimes I sleep 6-7 hours a night for a few days in a row and I feel decent. I feel like I can carry on a whole conversation and even remember what I was talking about. I feel like it isn’t ridiculously optimistic to make plans and have goals.

The strange thing is that even after several years of sleep deprivation, I still feel hope when I have had a few nights of sleep. It feels possible that the worst is behind me and that sleep might return as something that is a regular part of my life.

Then, I go days (I think I’m at 6 right now) of sleeping 2-3 hours (disrupted) a night and all I want to do is sit on my bed and cry. Except that crying takes way too much energy, so instead I just want to sit on my bed and think about crying. Or something like that.

I don’t know how to turn this blog into something positive. Positivity is in short supply and I’m not sure where to get more. It’s so hard to draw my attention away from being miserable to see the bigger picture.

I know there is a bigger picture, I know that I am incredibly lucky to have a loving family, a comfortable home, fresh water that comes out of my tap and three cats that will follow me wherever I go.

I know I am lucky, but it is still hard to feel it. There can be such a wide distance sometimes between knowing what we have to be grateful for and actually basking in the glow of that gratitude.

While I was searching for a connection to my gratitude (and procrastinating about finishing my blog), I found myself looking through the pictures on my phone. It was a good way to feel a little better, and I chose three pictures that to me somehow seem like a good finish to this blog (remember, I’m extremely sleep deprived, so if the pictures seem random and disconnected to you, just smile and nod kindly.)

This is my picture of a mama spider carrying all of her babies on her back. We saw her scurrying across the gravel path at Fort Whyte and I felt very grateful that I never had to try to carry all of my children at once.

This is my picture of Tavin and Avery gleefully trying to push a boulder into Nutimik Lake, which reminds me to have fun even while striving to do the impossible.

This last picture is one of a Merganser duck family in a thunder storm peacefully swimming on the lake. It reminds me that how we see things is within our control. It is all, always and forever, a matter of perspective.