The Insomnia Abyss

Time to resurrect and redirect this forsaken blog.  I've decided to use it to document and chronicle an issue which has flattened and eviscerated my life: a chronic sleep disability.  And I use the word "disability" very deliberately here, because it is an issue which has not yielded to 8 years of treatments and approaches of all sorts of orientations.  For me, I am convinced that it is a basic dysfunction of a crucial physiological/psychological need.  And the need to document it arises because I am utterly alone in my understanding of my brand of insomnia as such.  To the unafflicted, its a curable matter of de-stressing, exercising more, eating right, practicing good "sleep hygiene", thinking positive, etc etc.  My own brand of insomnia has defied 8 painstaking years of efforts of all of the above, which I'm sure I will get to detailing at some point.

In my aloneness within the insomnia abyss, in the depths of the despair, depression, impaired cognition and reasoning, when I'm able to barely function well enough to hang onto my job and then retreat to my home, unable to socialize or even clean my apartment, feeling like death warmed over, I sometimes wish it were a better understood affliction just so I would not be so alone within its walls.  Cancer would be easier in this respect.  I say this recognizing that probably every person battling cancer (terminal or otherwise) would readily trade places with me.  And now, more times than not, as they would trade with me, I with them.  If my affliction were understood, I could describe my situation to others and and not receive the blank stares that I mostly get when I try to explain my zombie-like presence at work, my hermit-like existence, my vanishing from the activities that once sustained me and provided me with social outlets.  Nor would I have to think up excuses for bowing out of planned activities when I'm too blotto to function.

I work, I eat, I take up space, I hardly sleep.  That is my life, once which offers me a profound basis to question the value of its existence.  So if I'm able to continue writing here, I hope that it at least offers me the knowledge that my experience has been documented, and maybe it will provide the solace of commiseration to the few others who may be experiencing similar.