A little after midnight, Leo and I were walking home from Pops' place when we were accosted by a homeless woman, asking for spare change. I was made redundant last year from a job helping the homeless, so my heart immediately went out to her. My experiences have taught me that homeless people generally fall into two categories: good people who have suffered disastrously bad luck, and horrible people who have created their own situation and deserve nothing better. This lady certainly fell into the former. She was polite and sweet, and I felt awful as I rummaged in my wallet, knowing that I had no change to give her.
She thanked us anyway, and we started to walk again. My feet dragged. I couldn't leave this person out here with nothing while I was going home to my fridge and my cats and my bed. I could just as easily have been in her situation had it not been for meeting Leo. So I stopped.
"Can we invite her back to ours?" I asked Leo.
We both turned around and invited the lady to walk with us to our flat. She politely declined - she had somewhere to go but was having trouble getting there. Once again, she thanked us, and we wished her well as we went on our way again. I walked faster than before, my conscience clear. I had done the right thing.
Guilt is my constant watchman, my personal plague. I am convinced that whatever I say or do will hurt someone, and I cannot abide that thought. The slightest wrong-doing on my part causes sleepless nights and seemingly endless embarrassment. I apologise for every action, just in case. Leo tells me off for apologising too much and it makes me feel worse, knowing that I have offended him so.
It horrifies me to think of my family worrying over my state of mind. I sit in my flat, unable to do anything with my life, afraid to go outside, draining the resources of others. My university degree is being wasted, along with all the investment I and my parents put into it. My talents gather cobwebs in corners, unused and all but forgotten. And poor Leo! He has to live with my doubts and fears along with all his own troubles. For all I want to help him, my fears of hurting him further prevent me from doing what I know I should.
Thus the cycle continues, the ouroboros of guilt feeding into itself. I have long since given up hope of freeing myself from its grip; there is no way out of it that I can see.
Showing posts with label insomnia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label insomnia. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 May 2012
Sunday, 8 April 2012
Sleep
Sleep has never come easy to me. I don't understand how or why it works (who does?) so the act of falling asleep is something I've always been uneasy with. Since my teens, I have had to talk myself to sleep - literally talk nonsense to myself until sleep takes over - unless I can listen to an audiobook, music or a movie in bed. This might suggest an insecurity with sleeping alone, but until I left the family home I shared a bedroom with my sister Alba, who was always asleep long before I even felt settled. It has been the same with every friend I have had stay the night in my room, and every partner with whom I have shared a bed - with the notable exception of Leo, when we shared a sleeping space. Perhaps under my influence, even he cannot sleep without an audiobook these days.
Yet here is what I find most odd about my need for auditory stimuli - I cannot
remain asleep without one. If I have company, which in most cases renders my usual sleep-finding techniques impossible, I will wake up frequently throughout the night. Sometimes my eyes will pop open for a minute or less before I doze again; other times I will stare into the dark until someone else wakes up.
Some nights I do not sleep at all. Roughly one week in six - again, true since I was a teenager - I enter that surreal, distant daze in which I lose depth perception and the world becomes an artwork by Takashi Murakami: "superflat". Tiredness becomes bodily irrelevant yet all-consuming. My actions become automatic, limbs moving on muscle memory alone. I am there, but not there; physically there but mentally far away, in a dense and foggy place.
For the other five weeks in the cycle, my sleep would be as normal, provided the absence of silence in which to sleep. Yet this too changed when I was first prescribed antidepressants. Now the cycle has become bipolar; I have weeks where I sleep too much. I have started to lose entire days to my bed, and once awake I am constantly weary - yet not in the insomniac superflat sense. All three dimensions remain present, but I cannot summon the energy to function. Where movement becomes automatic when not sleeping, it becomes impossible when I can do nothing but. Going to the bathroom becomes Herculean, feeding myself unfathomable. Hunger makes me weaker and wearier still, yet my mind goes into overdrive whilst my body refuses to cooperate - in true opposition to my insomniac phases.
Periods of hypersomnia are only one of two changes my medication has wrought upon my sleep. Previously, my phases of insomnia were preceded by several nights of very vivid dreams, from which I could recall details of people, conversations and surroundings for days afterward. Now, these dreams are constant. They are rarely unpleasant and almost never carry a theme from one night to the next - except for a few nights last month, in which I dreamed of being late for school each night, albeit in different circumstances and company in each one. I feel sorry for people who claim they do not dream, dislike to dream or cannot remember their dreams. I enjoy dreaming and deciphering their symbology upon awakening. On some occasions I have been capable of lucid dreaming, an experience as fascinating as it is amusing. Unlike the effect of hypersomnia, I have no complaints about my enhanced dreaming abilities.
One last observation: whatever I listen to as I sleep has no intrusion whatsoever on my dreams. One of my particular favourite "sleepytime stories" is the inimitable Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter novels, yet I have never dreamed of so much as a single house elf.
I wonder, though, how common a cyclical sleep pattern like this is. I am trouble enough to my doctor already without raising an issue that truly only affects me two weeks of every six. There are bigger fish to fry first.
Yet here is what I find most odd about my need for auditory stimuli - I cannot
remain asleep without one. If I have company, which in most cases renders my usual sleep-finding techniques impossible, I will wake up frequently throughout the night. Sometimes my eyes will pop open for a minute or less before I doze again; other times I will stare into the dark until someone else wakes up.
Some nights I do not sleep at all. Roughly one week in six - again, true since I was a teenager - I enter that surreal, distant daze in which I lose depth perception and the world becomes an artwork by Takashi Murakami: "superflat". Tiredness becomes bodily irrelevant yet all-consuming. My actions become automatic, limbs moving on muscle memory alone. I am there, but not there; physically there but mentally far away, in a dense and foggy place.
For the other five weeks in the cycle, my sleep would be as normal, provided the absence of silence in which to sleep. Yet this too changed when I was first prescribed antidepressants. Now the cycle has become bipolar; I have weeks where I sleep too much. I have started to lose entire days to my bed, and once awake I am constantly weary - yet not in the insomniac superflat sense. All three dimensions remain present, but I cannot summon the energy to function. Where movement becomes automatic when not sleeping, it becomes impossible when I can do nothing but. Going to the bathroom becomes Herculean, feeding myself unfathomable. Hunger makes me weaker and wearier still, yet my mind goes into overdrive whilst my body refuses to cooperate - in true opposition to my insomniac phases.
Periods of hypersomnia are only one of two changes my medication has wrought upon my sleep. Previously, my phases of insomnia were preceded by several nights of very vivid dreams, from which I could recall details of people, conversations and surroundings for days afterward. Now, these dreams are constant. They are rarely unpleasant and almost never carry a theme from one night to the next - except for a few nights last month, in which I dreamed of being late for school each night, albeit in different circumstances and company in each one. I feel sorry for people who claim they do not dream, dislike to dream or cannot remember their dreams. I enjoy dreaming and deciphering their symbology upon awakening. On some occasions I have been capable of lucid dreaming, an experience as fascinating as it is amusing. Unlike the effect of hypersomnia, I have no complaints about my enhanced dreaming abilities.
One last observation: whatever I listen to as I sleep has no intrusion whatsoever on my dreams. One of my particular favourite "sleepytime stories" is the inimitable Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter novels, yet I have never dreamed of so much as a single house elf.
I wonder, though, how common a cyclical sleep pattern like this is. I am trouble enough to my doctor already without raising an issue that truly only affects me two weeks of every six. There are bigger fish to fry first.
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