I’m so tired.

I am so tired, so deeply, dizzyingly, bone tired. And I don’t mean “tired of [fill in the blank],” though I am tired of many things.

I have slept mostly poorly and not enough for months. I’m on such a deficit that when I get a good night’s sleep, I’m more wrecked than usual the following day — it’s my impression that when my body gets good sleep, it remembers how things are supposed to be: “Oh my God! This is what we’re supposed to be doing! More! More of this! Now!”

But what do I then do? Almost invariably, I stay up late, get somewhere between five and six hours of sleep. Sleep which is riddled with anxiety (and thus less than restful) because I go to bed cursing myself for not having gone to bed earlier. Because I have always needed more than six and a half hours every night, my entire life, and now, with this going on, really — shouldn’t I shoot for eight or so?

The quality of my sleep has actually improved lately — fewer nights riven with Restless Leg Syndrome, fewer nights where I can remember every toss and every turn, fewer nights where I just get up and get some cereal and walk around in order to shake my brain loose of whatever is dogging it (stuff I can rarely remember the next day) — thanks mostly to the various supplements offered by Lisa, my naturopath.

(Lisa, who I love, because a couple of years ago she listened to my story of five years of post-surgical woe [surgery? you say. Click here, I offer] and ran a few tests and fiddled with various levels of vitamins and minerals and your whatnot and: Wow. Now the fact that the surgery left me an organ down [I'm now mono-adrenal glanded] no longer means a daily cycle of brain-deadness and exhaustion that is nothing like this sleepless-ness-exhaustion but is more like a kind of shut-down of functionality. I can function right now, I’m just really tired. Before Lisa, I had hours every day when it was sometimes hard to just plain function. Isn’t it amazing, how many different kinds of “tired” there are?)

But I digress. Probably because I’m so tired.

I was saying: The quality of my sleep has improved, but there’s such a deficit, that I just need more of it. Plain and simple. So I promised myself that I would get at least seven hours of sleep every night this week. That lasted three days.

Why do I tell you all of this? Because I sat here for an hour today, trying very hard to write something and all I could do was think about how tired I am.

Too tired to want to grapple with the ugliness out there, all around. Too tired to be able to seek out social truths and pin them down with words. Too tired to do anything but think about how tired I am, and how I wish I had a job that would pay me to do what I know how to do. Thinking too much about that leads to misery, though, a misery I found myself marinating in on Monday. I’m worn out. I’m worn down. I’m worn through. And the truth is that my lack of sleep is only a part of it.

But it is the part that I can do something about. To sleep, perchance to dream…. I don’t even care if I dream. I really just want to sleep.

Posted by emilylhauser on October 22, 2010

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/im-so-tired/