I have suffered from insomnia my entire life. It is a constant battle to sleep and I spend many nights awake and frustrated even though I am exhausted.
The problem is hereditary but it is also exacerbated by my auto immune disease and currently, by a hormone imbalance, which I am trying to get addressed.
So what have I tried for sleep?
What haven’t I tried?
Every supplement and pill under the sun has passed through my lips in the pursuit of sweet slumber. Some of them worked for a time and then stopped and some made me so slow and stupid that I have done things like fall down a flight of stairs and break my leg.
The only thing that has even moderately helped lately has been taking Delta 9 (legal marijuana) gummies. However, there are many problems with this approach: It doesn’t always knock me out. Sometimes I am wide awake and I eat shit I have no business eating.
I feel really bad about it when this happens. It triggers all of my worst fears about weight and about a lack of self control and about drug addiction and about a whole myriad of things. And it irritates the people I live with. This is embarrassing and painful on top of everything else. And today it has caused them to be angry with me. I just don’t have the energy to deal with it today. I feel crushed.
And to top it off, I build up a tolerance to any drug very, very quickly.
There is no exception when it comes to thc. So on a night like last night, and the entire 24 hour period before, I had nothing to take but gummies and I took them until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. It didn’t matter. I was still up. I was just relaxed and I ate everyone’s snacks. It was/ is humiliating.
It was 2:00 am and then 4:00 am and 5:00 am and pretty soon it was 8 and I had slept maybe an hour all night: again. I had moved downstairs to the couch to get away from my husband so I wouldn’t bother him but I bothered him anyway.
Sleep is the dividing line between sanity and depression.
It is the dividing line between health and illness.
And it is the dividing line between me feeling I have any control at all over a life that is mostly out of my control.
Currently, I have been fighting for six weeks to get my infusion medication filled under my new insurance. I am going in circles. It seems no matter how hard I try and no matter what string I pull, I am going to end up missing my infusion next week.
When I miss the infusion I start to ache all over. I have worsening fatigue and I am more open to infection.
All of this is happening right as the semester starts and I go back to work. So, no, I have no control over anything.
I can’t control whether or not I get the medication that keeps me well enough to function.
I can’t control whether or not I sleep at all.
And I can’t seem to control what the fuck I eat when I take gummies with thc, which makes me want to just give them up.
That’s it.
I give up.