3 AM

It's so frustrating when you're profoundly exhausted, yet can't sleep. I've fought insomnia for, at this point, a majority of my life, off and on, as has been well documented on this blog. I hate it. And to some extent, I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because when I awaken in the middle of the night, I often have an immediate reaction of, "Oh shit! Fall asleep before you can start thinking!" Which, of course, does nothing to help me fall back asleep.

And so often, the things that wake me up, or keep me up, during the night, are not even the things that are truly important to me, so much as they are the worry du jour. It's like I have a subconscious need for somewhere to focus stray anxiety, so I choose something going on in my life and think it to death, to the detriment of a night's (or a week's) sleep. This drives me insane (figuratively and sometimes it feels like literally). Most often, these are things not entirely within my control. These sort of nebulous stresses - things about which maybe I can do part of the resolving but not all of it, are definitely the bane of my insomniac existence. No matter how well I know I can't control a situation, I will spend those hours between 2 AM and 5 AM frantically trying to figure out a solution.

This history began for me at around 8 years old, when I would wake up in the middle of the night and panic about nuclear armageddon (or, as I likely called it then, "Global Thermonuclear War" - Thanks, War Games). I would spend hours in the middle of the night, just worrying about this happening. And actually, truth be told, that probably wasn't even truly where it began. That's just the first very clear memory of it, for me.

And since childhood, the insomnia has ebbed and flowed, and the anxiety with it. But over the past several years, since the abusive work situation I've mentioned before, it's really been ratcheted up a notch, with the full-scale panic attacks and the utter lack of confidence I have in certain areas. And that, too, is maddening, because I worked for so many years to become a confident person, and I was one, wholly, for a while there.

I realize, of course, that the things I worry so much about are not serious problems, generally. As I said, they are often not even the things that matter most to me. What matters most to me is B, and E, and the rest of my family. But rarely is it any of these things that is keeping me up nights. Why? I can't really say. And why can't I just figure out a way to leave it aside and fall asleep? Well, if I had an answer for that, I'm pretty sure I'd be happily sacked out right now.