Sleep

Sometimes it feels like I spend the whole day waiting to be allowed to go back to sleep.

Sleep is wonderful. My brain switches off. That’s what I want most out of life at the moment, for my brain to stop. It’s an endless daily battle to make it quiet, but every night I get a chance to stop and rest. My brain switches off and I get quiet relief in sleep.

From the moment I wake up, my brain is churning. I used to just have normal thoughts, about what I’d do that day, plans and daydreams. Now I have commentary on all those thoughts. It’s always negative. No matter what my plan for the day, the commentary will think of a ways that could end in embarrassing situations and pull up every time in my memory that things have gone wrong in the past. It’s barely words. It’s not so much a voice saying ‘you’ll be embarrassed’ as it is the feeling. My brain slaps me with the same red-cheeked shame that came with being laughed at in my worst teenage – I wish the floor would swallow me - moments. There’s fear with the embarrassment too. Not just the worry something will go wrong, but the actual feeling of fear, the fight-or-flight, heart pumping adrenaline. The I’m so scared right now I could puke feeling. What am I scared of? Doing the dishes. Brushing my teeth. Stepping outside the front door. My heart pumps like you’ve asked me to walk a tightrope across Niagara falls, and as ready for embarrassing failure as thirteen year old me was if the teacher had asked me to perform for the class.

And that’s just the surface layer. If I let that bubble and boil, I get to the stuff underneath. Then it starts to feel more like a voice. Then I discover what I’m really scared of. I’m not actually scared of making dinner. I’m scared I’m an awful person, and the way I make dinner will somehow prove it. I’m not embarrassed by catching the bus, I’m worried I should be embarrassed by myself, and everyone on the bus will see who I am. There’s something wrong with who I am says the thought. I hate myself says the voice, and it sounds like mine. If I let them, the acid thoughts come swelling up in my brain, more and more bile flooding in.

So I fight. I fight to keep my mind occupied. I fill it with so much other stuff that there just isn’t space for the embarrassed feelings or the fearful feelings. A bit of those might creep round the edges of my defences, but as long as I hold them back, the voices of self-doubt and self-hatred are kept far away. Distractions are what I use mostly. I read novels. I play computer games, watch films. I read mindless websites. When I run out of ideas I just scroll through pinterest and let the endless bright pictures hold my attention. As long as my thoughts stay mindless and unreal, disconnected from my life, there’s nothing to be attacked by depression.

I can’t live my life like this. I need to be able to deal with real things. I need to get on with my life. But thinking about anything real opens the doors to all those feelings and thoughts. So I only open that door as much as I need to each day. I’ll do what needs to be done dealing with my finances, getting to the doctors, exercise, socialise, whatever reality demands of me today. And then exhausted and wounded I’ll submerge myself in distractions again.

Distractions are also tiring though. I spend all day battling my brain like I’m swimming against the tide, and I can’t wait to be able to sleep again. It’s a relief to put down my shield for a bit.

But there’s an evil seeming twist to things at bedtime; I can’t use my distractions while I’m trying to fall asleep. I can’t nod off while I’m reading or on the computer. So I have to put them aside, close my eyes, and have nothing between me and my churning brain. You have to let your mind wander and go blank to sleep. But my mind is never blank. It’s churning. So I have to fall into it and hope I’m tired enough to fall asleep in the midst of it, before it grinds me up.

It doesn’t work very well.

The thoughts often get too much. I frequently have to pull my thoughts back together and set them down a more positive track, the conscious effort involved waking me back up from my dozing. Sometimes it’s not enough to do that, and no matter what track I try to go down the negativity is overwhelming. The fear and self-hatred become so real and palpable, I can’t just lie in them, I have to do something to get out of them. When they get that bad, my other defences start to flood in, the voices that tell me the solution lies at the bottom of a pile of chocolate wrappers, the bottom of a glass, the edge of a knife, or….. Those voices hurt as much as the ones they’re escapes from. They’re the same thing really, wrapped up differently. But if I don’t run away from them they crowd in and get imaginative, laying plans for me and proposing dangerous ideas. So I sit up, turn on the light and grab my laptop.

The sleep I wanted so badly is out of my reach. It would have been a rest from the battle, but I can only get there if I can fight through the worst part. Instead I find myself blogging at 2am again. Writing about pain is a distraction from it. Maybe in a while I’ll be tired enough to fall asleep before the thoughts get too far. In a while I’ll attempt another bout against depression. And probably then another and another. But eventually I’ll win, and I’ll get to fall asleep. I can put down my shield for a while and rest. Sleep.

 Until tomorrow.