insomnia

ah, insomnia my old frienemy.

so i know that i have sleep disorders, i've been diagnosed with sleep apnea and often will only be able to sleep around 4 hours a night. what i sort of forgot about though, since it hadn't happened for a loooong time, was my insomnia. see, before i moved here to sf and didn't have a job (which, not surprisingly, leads to not having money), there was a certain herb smoked on a nightly basis that relaxed the body and the mind, allowing sleep to happen. now that i haven't had the dough to support my habit, i remember why i felt like i needed to smoke every night. because i do need to. since being here, every night that i don't smoke... i don't really fall asleep. sometimes i do in the wee hours, right before the sun comes up, but that leads to me sleeping in for most of the day and frankly, i have better things to do.

while i'm spending all this time not sleeping though, i've been having flashbacks of other times when i wasn't sleeping. i can remember being in middle school, it seems like every time i slept at my nana's house, i would be awake for hours, sometimes falling asleep a hour before it was time to wake up. sometimes i would sneak into her bathroom and steal her tylenol pm. other times i would just stare at the red numbers on the digital clock and make up math games with the numbers (nerdy, i know). sometimes i have these 'flashbacks' of lying awake in my bedroom at my parents house. i'd stare at this one glow-in-the-dark star that was above one of my windows and try to focus my thoughts on it as a way to make myself fall asleep.

in college, i tried so many different medications for sleep. some made me really mean and i still wasn't sleeping. i tried ambien. it was magnificent. at first. then i needed to take more and more pills to fall asleep. it got to a point where i was taking 4 pills before bed and not sleeping, which really messes you up, if you've heard those ambien stories. luckily, unlike some people i know, i did not get behind the wheel of a car or chat online with someone else's friends and have my child find me at the computer at ridiculous hours and have to put me to bed.

once i started smoking herb on a regular basis, i had no trouble falling and staying asleep. sure, the sleep was interrupted due to the sleep apnea, but i didn't know because i was sleeping. which i'm not doing now. i've been trying this homeopathic pill called calm's forte but i'd probably be better off just banging my head against the wall until i pass out. the bottle recommends taking 1-3 pills 1/2-1 hour before bedtime. so i took 4. i took them 5 hours ago. then i tried to sleep and couldn't. so i read a bit. then i took 3 more. then i tried to sleep again. not happening.

i think the most serious side effect of insomnia may be that it leads to ridiculously long, rambling blog posts that don;t get proofread before being posted. so, yeah. insomnia.