tired

I sent T a text yesterday and I wanted to tell him more about what was going on for me but it all felt pointless. Instead it was the usual ‘Dr. K?‘ followed eventually by his response a bit later ‘I’m here‘.

I wouldn’t say things are absolutely horrific but I wouldn’t say they are okay either. I feel as though I am stuck in this state of perpetual tiredness that I just can’t shake. I’d like to cry about it, but that feels so dramatic, so I won’t. I’m averaging about 4-5 hours of sleep a night—sometimes a bit more but mostly less—and I don’t know how much longer I can sustain going on this way. I sit here and wonder if it’s possible to die from being too tired. Do you think that’s a thing? Death by exhaustion?

I don’t want to do anything. I have neither the energy nor the patience to involve myself in anything that requires me to be fully present at all. And that makes me feel like a bad mother and a bad employee. C wants to do things, yet, I just don’t care to. We can go places like the beach or somewhere else and it feels like I should be enjoying myself but I’m not actually sure if I really am. At work I’m crashing—not able to figure out where to start or what needs to be done.

Friday’s session was weird. No, that’s not right. Friday was awful and I don’t know why. I didn’t feel calm or safe or anything that I thought I should be feeling. It was loud and chaotic and completely overwhelming. I try to think about what it was really that made it so awful and I can’t pin it down to anything other than two people walking up the stairs and someone slamming a door. Thinking back it all feels a bit silly really. How can those two things make you want to crawl out of your skin and disappear so easily? That’s really what I wanted to do—disappear—but instead I sat there trying to get my bearings while it felt like the world around me was falling apart and disintegrating. That sense of awfulness has followed me since. I feel like I am supposed to do something, be something….I don’t know, better I suppose. I hate when I don’t know what to do and instead just find myself sitting here doing nothing.

Last night I had a panic attack. I haven’t had one in a long time and I’d almost forgotten what they felt like. I don’t know what set it off, but just as I was falling asleep it nailed me. It felt like death was coming for me and I was sure my end had come.

I’ve been trying different things to figure out the sleep issues but nothing seems to help. I’ve started taking my medication ½ hour earlier, with hopes that an hour later they’ll have started to kick in—no luck though. I’ve been trying to read before bed, with hopes that maybe I need to distract myself from how it feels—no luck there either. I’ve listened to my white noise machine, my fan and have all electronics shut off at least 45 minutes before I want to fall asleep—but nothing. Nothing seems to help me at all. I feel like I could just close my eyes and let the world around me disappear. All I want to do is close my eyes but I know I won’t be able to sleep.

I’m starting to learn that I sometimes I have a hard time recognizing that I’m having a hard time. Does that make sense? Things are ignored or pushed aside for such a long time until suddenly they escape and I’m left a puddling mess of not wanting to be here. How do we get to the place where we can recognize things are getting hard before we reach the point of wanting to die? It’s one thing or the other—everything is okayish or I want to die—we never end up somewhere in the middle.

My life feels like it has always been uncertain, scary and messy and that the only way to feel safe has been to tune out what I’m feeling. I don’t know what to do to make this all better. I want to know what I can do to change the way life feels.