Sleep

We all need sleep. It's a basic biological fact. Growing up especially. I remember as a kid being able to sleep for luxuriously long stretches. Once after a week long backpacking camp I slept for twenty hours straight. It was glorious. After my teens though sleep and its necessity became somewhat of an adversary. Mostly, I believe, as a symptom of my burgeoning alcoholism I developed a pretty intense case of insomnia. Not that it was every night but if I wasn't drinking to excess I couldn't sleep and those rare days I was too ill or attempting to abstain I couldn't sleep at all. There were countless nights of sleepless tossing and turning before I made an honest attempt at getting sober.

The first year I was sober, perhaps as a side effect of the anti-depressants I took or as a result of being deprived of real REM sleep for the better part of a decade, I had nightmares every night. I slept fine but had intense dreams, they weren't frightening exactly just overwhelming and vivid. After that first year I no longer needed the medication and my sleeping and dreaming leveled out. I discovered absent from any substance I was a light sleeper. I've never been able to take naps and as my body and mind reoriented closer to something like normalcy a good night sleep took a bit more attention.

Now it takes me 30-45 minutes to fall asleep, if I wake up early its hard, most times impossible, for me to fall back asleep. Any kind of noise above the normal background variety, any fluctuation in temperature and I wake up. It's a struggle. Throw age on top of that and getting up early to pee becomes a consideration. Perhaps its a matter of conditioning or maybe its normal. Even if it is normal that doesn't make it any less difficult, any less frustrating. Sometimes it can feel like my body is fighting against one of it's own basic fundamental functions. And in those dark predawn hours the world is relatively unpleasant, maybe especially so given my history.

I try to go to bed allowing enough time to relax, meditate a bit, and slow my thinking. Try not to snack or drink too much water before bed and mitigate any possible distractions but sometimes things are outside of my control(delivery and garbage trucks, our powerful but unsubtle radiators, the cat). The past couple days especially have been kind of crapshoot. But all things being equal it is a relatively trivial and easy problem to contend with. And one, now sober with a considerably different outlook and having learned and grown over the years, I can begin to deal with.

Any problem, all problems, use to be overwhelming. Any challenge dramatic in its overblown proportions and how I let it effect me. Any complication daunting. Now having gained some level of maturity and some modicum of patience I can at least approach problems, irritations, setbacks, with a little bit of clarity and perspective. View difficulties for what they are- a normal part of life, that me and everyone else in the world deals with to greater and lesser degrees on a daily basis, and that they are above all manageable.