My name is Jenna. I don't sleep. But I want to.
Maybe you're a bit like me. Maybe you don't sleep either. You try to take a sleep aid, but it doesn't touch you. Benadryll, melatonin, nothing. Your mind races, a song plays in your head; a single phrase over and over, like a broken record. Your heart threatens to burst out of your chest like a bad horror film when you even think about nighttime. You lie awake for hours, wondering when it'll all end. You watch as life rushes by you with little to no regard, no matter how loud you scream for it to stop. You worry if the life you knew--the one before you seemed to develop this paralyzing fear of the night--will still be there if and/or when you do finally manage to hop back onto the world. And that makes you even more afraid. What if it's not?
Not sleeping can be hard. Trust me, I know. I've been there for quite a while.
I suppose I should start with a little bit about myself. I'm twenty-six years old, newly married and a full time student given a second chance on what may be a somewhat childish dream. I want to sing. I want to perform. Three years ago, after hitting what I believed then was rock bottom, I was urged by my now husband to take a leap of faith and move across the country. I still firmly believe it was the best decision I could have ever made for myself, and one I'm still surprised I managed to, given how cautious I am. Sleep had been an issue before I moved, albeit not a pressing one. Occasionally, about every few months or so, I would have a night or two where I just couldn't manage to drift off, no matter what I did. This was usually accompanied by some unpleasantries regarding my stomach. Still, it was manageable; I would manage to sleep soundly the next night and my sleep schedule was as it should have been before the disruption.
The kind of person that doesn't like to inconvenience others, I tend to take a lot of undue stress upon myself. I don't ask of others, I simply do, and there are times where I either get myself in a bad situation or bite of more than I can chew.
I had my first break down the weekend of my 25th birthday.
To this day, I remember very little of what happened. My husband (then fiance) was with me the entire time, and he doesn't talk about it. I remember the lead up into it. At the time, I was working as a teacher's aide in a classroom for toddlers, and it was a bad fit. I never had severe issues with stress until then, and more and more my sleep was disrupted by it. I remember nights where I would hear certain kids in our class screaming in my head while I tried to drift off. I was constantly sick, never able to get enough sleep between night terrors and a record five sinus infections. I had rationed the remainder of my vacation days for that weekend, as there was an event that my husband and I love to go to. That Thursday before my vacation, however, I couldn't sleep. Against my better judgment, I called in. That's when the worry started settling in. I didn't hear back; I was worried I had lost my job.
The breakdown happened around Saturday, that much I remember. I remember dragging my fiance (who has the patience of a saint, whether he believes it or not) around downtown Seattle, desperate to make up for the fact that I had, in my eyes, ruined dinner plans with our friends. It was the most terrifying experience of my life to that point, and very likely of his.
Needless to say, I found out Monday that I still had my job; two weeks later, I put in my two weeks' notice.
My sleep improved a bit, but it seems like that was the catalyst for something bad. I took up a part-time job during the later part of summer and lasted a little over a month before leaving due to stress and terrible scheduling. Starting school again that fall seemed to help my schedule a bit, but winter quarter it started to slip. It was subtle at first, with a day or two a month where I couldn't sleep. I could still function, and it was unpleasant at best. Spring quarter, three or four days, maybe. I nearly withdrew from a class because of a particularly rough experience with a teacher. My threshold for stress seemed to be getting a bit smaller. I blamed it on being a full time student and planning a summer wedding. Anyone would crack under that kind of pressure, right?
The summer months were a blur, as they tend to be when you're planning a wedding. My sleep became more erratic. Some nights I wasn't able to drift off until almost 6am, and was sleeping until the afternoon. It was okay, though. I was a full time student, that kind of schedule was normal. Any lost sleep was attributed to the wedding, and there was a lot of it. A lot of nearly buckling under the pressure too. I nearly called my entire bachelorette party off because of a hiccup and a bit of pain from a spill I had taken (I wasn't drinking, I'm just clumsy). Surprisingly, despite a small debacle at the beginning of our wedding day, I was probably the calmest I had been in months.
With the wedding over, I thought okay, things are going to go back to normal. Except they didn't. My sleep was still erratic. Moving into the school year, I was starting to have episodes of not sleeping every few weeks. Again, still feasibly able to function, but it was getting harder. I was also getting irritable and constantly feeling tired. My patience was getting thin. I had an episode around Thanksgiving. Then another just before exams a few weeks later. That's when the night terrors really picked up. I went to see a doctor only to have her blow me off (but not without berating me about not knowing the exact name of my birth control first). It really came to a head, though during the winter break.
The days leading up to Christmas I didn't sleep. My second breakdown came the night of Christmas eve. I laid in bed and sobbed while my husband also freaked out, not because he couldn't sleep, but because I wasn't. And I was cracking because of it. I believe I managed to get some sleep between then and the beginning of January.
January 9th was my third breakdown, and I've been having smaller ones since. That was the night, however, that I started trying to reach out for help. I found a sleep specialist that would see me as soon as he was able (two weeks), and a primary care doctor that would see me that day. I thought maybe it was hormonal. Test results said no. I was put on Ambien as a "way to reset my sleep schedule" and sent on my way. I began missing class because I couldn't sleep. My mood plummeted quickly into depression, and my anxiety got worse as I continued to not sleep. My husband, the man with patience like a saint, was feeling it too. That made it worse. I was bringing him into it. It compounded. The nights I managed to get some sleep through the Ambien, I was myself. Bubbly, talkative, normal. When I wasn't, I was a mess; always crying, anything could set me off. I had mini breakdowns, sobbing fits where I didn't know how to feel, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of the day.
I felt like no one really took me seriously. That no one was listening.
Finally, I saw the sleep specialist and he did little more than test my reflexes and shrug his shoulders. Told me to take melatonin (which I knew didn't work) at dinner time to help my natural sleep cycle fix itself as well as fill out a sleep chart. Come back in a month. That was today.
I haven't slept. You can say I'm impatient, but when you can't sleep, everything feels dire. You wonder what's wrong, what you did wrong. Am I a bad person? Did I cut someone off in my past life and this is karma's way of flipping me off?
So that's my story so far. It's on-going, obviously. I don't expect anyone to read this. I need to get it out, though. I'm a talkative person when I'm not flipping out, sobbing and clutching whatever I can to me in hopes of calming myself down. Talking about things helps me, although I tend to keep my big problems to myself.
I want to believe that one day I'll get over this. That the future me, strong and beautiful, will look back on all of this and see how far she's come. Maybe she'll have traveled a bit. I've always felt I'm not very well traveled. I've never been out of the country. I've performed in some of the most famous halls in the United States, had the opportunity to study opera abroad. I want to go places, meet people, and maybe inspire with the things that I've done or can do. It just doesn't feel like I can do that right now. More and more, I find it's harder to leave my own apartment. I don't care about my appearance so much anymore, whereas once upon a time it was all I cared about. On the bright side, I don't complain about my weight nearly as much. It's best to look on the bright side when you can, right?
So, if nothing else, this is a record for my future, strong and beautiful self, to see how far I've hopefully come. Because right now I feel like I've hit rock bottom. I can't make myself happy, I can't make my husband happy, and I'm on the brink of disappointing more than a few people rooting for me. I've been in this position before. I know how that feels. But I was given a second chance. It just feels like such a crime that something like not sleeping, or being afraid of everything is holding me back. It's not who I am. I'm cautious, yes (again, moving across the country was a big deal, and not something I could probably do again), but this lack of vigor in life isn't at all like me.
Hopefully later today I'll have another piece to this puzzle. I managed to snatch an appointment today for a follow-up, instead of waiting another week. I'm aiming to be a bit more assertive, get a referral somewhere. Start really getting the help I need to be me again.
