I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this much, but I’ve begun to have increasingly bad back pain. It started a few years ago, during 2021 when I was struggling with insomnia, but I was able to fix that with some body pillows and some attention paid to how I positioned myself as I fell asleep. After all, it usually was worst when I’d wake in some kind of weird, twisted-up position and that needed a two-pronged approach to prevent. I didn’t think much more of it at the time since I’ve been having back pain of some kind my entire adult life, thanks to carrying all of my tension in my shoulders and neck, related tension migraines, bad posture at desk jobs and a tendency towards being given heavy labor due to my relatively large frame at non-desk jobs (or during periods of time when my desk job stops being a desk job). Treating those four things individually over the years always seemed to alleviate my problems, just like the more recent stuff in 2021 did. In the years since 2021, though, I’ve added a series of other little position and balance adjustment tricks to my bedtime routine, like getting the placement of my downward arm (I’m a side sleeper) just right on the bed and my upward arm wrapped around my body just right to maintain perfect balance in my shoulders. Or getting a stuffed Kirby shaped just like a pillow to stick to one side of my actual pillows so they’d stop moving away from me if I shifted positions a bit while I slept. Or specific workouts to help decrease the stress on my shoulders and elbows from sleeping at odd angles on my side (since I can’t really lay fully on my side side in my bed without knocking my CPAP mask askew). And, most recently to address this latest surge of back pain, a way of tucking my pillows around me so that I CAN’T move while I sleep, coupled with letting myself wake up enough once a night to turn over and shift all my pillows around so I can sleep on my other side. Tons of little tricks that are no longer doing the trick.

You would think that, earlier in this process, I’d maybe consider the fact that I’ve never owned a good mattress as an adult. Since about a week before I turned eighteen (almost exactly fifteen years as this is going up, actually), I’ve slept on a crappy dorm mattress and spring-based bedframe, a pullout bed for 3 months after I graduated (it was my own couch, thankfully, but still a rough situation regardless), the cheapest (three hundred dollar) mattress I could get as soon as I could scrape the money together that I used from 2013 until mid-2018, and then a hand-me-down mattress from a friend who had it for an unknown number of years before me which I’m still using today. All of my bedding options have been pretty much my only available choice. I had to live on campus during college and didn’t have any kind of bedding I could bring from home since all that got given to one of my siblings the instant I moved out. I couldn’t afford a bed when I graduate since I was broke and living paycheck to paycheck until I got a “reliable” (three-month temporary position) job that paid me enough that scrimping on food could save me the money I needed for the cheapest new mattress I could find. I barely made ends meet until 2018, thanks to student debt and rising rent costs, and only got that “new” mattress because someone I knew was trying to get rid of it in order to move in with her partner, which meant my only cost was renting a box truck to move it from her house to my rental, which was the sort of thing I could finally afford without needing to save up for it.

In the past year, as I’ve finally reached a degree of financial stability, I’ve begun to think about replacing my mattress. Back when I came up with my financial plans for the next few years, my little tricks were still working and so I placed “New Mattress” beneath “New Computer” since I was still sleeping alright and was struggling to play new video games. Things began to take a turn in early 2024, though, when I began to get joint paint and muscle aches from a medication I started taking (and am still taking, since “limited run” sometimes doesn’t mean anything other than “someday, you will probably stop taking this”). Back pain officially entered the scene when the heavy labor part of my job started up in March and while I’ve done what I can to address it, it has slowly gotten worse in the five months since then, which feels horrible since I cut down the daily dosage of the medication I’m taking back in June because the back pain was severe enough then that it was ruining my sleep. That idea worked temporarily, thankfully, but the improvement didn’t last long and I was already wondering what else I could do to fix my predicament by the third week of July. Even worse, in the past three weeks, the pain has progressed from being something I could stretch away to being a persistent part of my day, limiting my range of movement and impacting my ability to do something as simple as easily walking up stairs.

Only at the start of this period of things getting worse, as I talked it through with my therapist, did it occur to me that maybe the sole culprit was my bed and while the other factors didn’t help, they merely surfaced a long-standing issue that was going to quickly become a problem anyway. I don’t think having a less labor-intensive job or even no longer taking medication that makes all my joints feel like its about to start storming would fix the problems at this point. At most, they might have delayed the start of all of this, but that would probably mean I wouldn’t have started on new mattress research until it was similarly painful or 2025 had rolled around (which was the year I originally planned to replace my horrible, beat-up, saggy mattress). Now, all I can do is be glad I did the work of researching mattresses before the pain got too bad and had the foresight to really hammer my system with pain meds on the morning of the day I went mattress shopping so I could make the decision with a clear mind and knowledge of the scope of the problem I’d be fixing. As of writing this, I’m still twelve nights (or five nights as you’re reading this) from my new mattress’ expected delivery date and I’m already prepared to sell my soul for a temporary reprieve from my old crappy mattress. In lieu of an infernal contract, I’ve created a list of temporary solutions that I’m going to attempt that will hopefully get things to at least a tolerable level for the time being. Like putting my futon mattress on top of my bed to counteract the (admittedly deep) sink in its center, replacing the entire mattress with my camping air mattress, or just sleeping on my couch or futon. I’m at the point where even the floor might be preferable because I don’t think that could mess my back up any worse than my bed does (and might even help in the short-term, despite my inability to sleep on my back).

All of which is to say that, even with all my self-reflection and focus on mindfulness, I’m just as susceptible to overlooking simple solutions, the core of problems, and my own issues as anyone else. After all, if I wasn’t still as hung up about buying things I need and can afford, I probably would have already replaced my mattress rather than wait until it was starting to kill me just to put off financing a large purchase (at 0% APR thanks to good credit and Labor Day sales). I could have done this same thing at literally any time in the last three years. I might not have had the money to buy a mattress outright like I do right now (which I’ve forgone due to the good financing options available and so I can have that money around for other things where financing isn’t an option), but I could have easily afforded monthly payments with no interest. I just didn’t want to admit that maybe I needed to spend money on something that would have a demonstrable improvement on my life but wasn’t strictly a requirement to continue living from one day to another. Which is my loss, really. Good mattresses, picked from a selection of options based on two hours of laying on beds and some excellent advice from a salesman who talked me out of more expensive options, are amazing. I’m really looking forward to it arriving the day before my birthday so I can wake up the following morning in enraptured luxury. Despite all the nice things I’ve bought myself as an adult, this mattress might turn out to be my favorite.