Disorderly Sleep

It has been a thing of concern ever since I was in my early twenties. They even confined me to a sleep lab for a night one time. I gave up on testing soon after, so never went back.

Neurological things often don't fit into neat categories. You be surprised how little they know in many respects regarding brain function. Even the drugs prescribed are often not understood. They theorize regarding the mechanics of how they work, but half the stuff was designed for one thing then it was discovered they work well for some other symptom.

In my case they concluded it was some form of narcolepsy but not the classic type which makes you fall asleep in the middle of a game of pool or standing there talking to someone. It just sometimes happens so that I'd hit a strange kind of sleep at last minute and blow through alarm clocks by two to four hours, regardless of how long I'd been asleep already.

We went the ritalin deal on and off for years. The off part was because I got tired of it and felt almost like I developed and immunity to it. So, I'd lay off for maybe a year. I eventually lost contact with any doctor who knew the story so I had no source of it. It would be good once in awhile, but overall I'd rather just compensate some other way. Nothing is with some side effect.

When I was working a job that often required being there at 5 AM, sometimes earlier, I spent all night drinking water. A big glass before going to sleep so every couple of hours it was up to pee, then drink more. That has been the only really reliable method I found. No combination of alarm clocks and bright lights on timers ever proved dependable. You just never know.

Lately it hasn't been critical most of the time, and I have gone long stretches waking up with the sun. But more recently that has changed around a bit and the sleep thing is all over the map. I must not have drank enough water because I overshot the time I needed to be up to make jury duty. I'll try again tomorrow.

It gets old--trying to fit. The trick is to avoid letting the things that are tough to change or unchangeable, induce a reaction which becomes spiraling depression. Much of life is a series of subtle and not so subtle compensations. People tend to move away from their weaknesses whether they think about it or not. If you have a sore knee, you tend to take up the slack by letting the other one carry the load. It works in all kinds of ways. You can't add well in your head, yu do math on a calculater, your phone, whatever. That is compensating.

The trap is when you think you should be able to do a thing, or ought to do it a certain way that is not natural to you and you force yourself to do it the hard way. I have done a bunch of that. That's the kind of thing that makes you crazy. It is not so easy to sort out because life naturally demands doing a lot of things you don't want to do, but you have to. And most of the time you are glad you did whatever it is. Separating that from the directions which are simply not a fit is what separates the happy and successful from the riffraff like me.

At least I no longer wake up cursing and screaming at myself when I miss the mark. I spent many years letting the frustration turn into intense self hatred and rage. That is where the testing helped. Finally someone convinced me they could document the fact that it wasn't because I am stupid and weak. The tests covered a lot territory beyond a sleep lab because some other things going on were interrelated.

Fortunately the jury duty allows turning up any day within a two week window. Otherwise I would have to throw myself on the mercy of the court. Not the sort of mercy I would want to depend on.

Welcome to the fog where I dwell.