As of writing this, it has been about three months since I’ve felt well-rested. July of this year, coming off a vacation, started roughly since I was struggling to get my sleep schedule under control and, in a preview of the what would wind up being the entire month of September (and an unknown amount of October), had just returned from a vacation that was nice but not terribly restful since I kept having back pain due to the mattress I was sleeping on. The stress from that first week of July just picked up from there due to work deadlines and the amount of heavy labor I had to do to meet those deadline at my job. Plus, the back pain I had over my vacation faded a bit, but never entirely went away before it start slowly growing worse and worse until August started and I realized I needed to replace my mattress. It peaked two weeks later when I woke up with such severe lower back pain that I was afraid I’d permanently damaged my spine, prompting me to go out immediately in search of a new mattress. While I was able to reduce the severity of the pain I was dealing with by putting my futon mattress on top of my old, bad mattress, it didn’t really do much more than allow me to not feel like I was breaking my back by going to bed. Then, after an exhausting month of never enough sleep, I settled down for my first night on my new mattress and then started my birthday after barely six hours of sleep due to incredible and debilitating back pain. Since then, I’ve struggled to get even an average of five hours of sleep a night thanks to similar (but not the same) back pain that has shifted around my back over the entire month of September. Now, as October starts, my only hope for relief is the physical therapy appointment I have set up the day before this post goes up.
My hope is that this guy can tell me what’s going on with my back pain that, according to my research, is not commonly associated with any kind of sleep or mattress issues to a degree that it might show up in heavy google searching. I genuinely do not care what the source is at this point, so long as it is something I can fix. Exchange my mattress, do some kind of stretches every day, start doing proper physical therapy stuff, change jobs, get surgery, or whatever. I’m willing to do just about anything to fix this, after all, and all I can do at this point, after a month of largely unchanging pain in one specific area of my back, is hope that there is a solution and I’m not just doomed to this kind of pain for the rest of my life. I mean, chances are pretty good that there is a solution to this pain I’m experiencing, but the unending grind of it is wearing on my mind.
As someone who has struggled with depression their entire life, who is incredibly familiar with how much effort it can take to do the simplest things when my depression is bad, and who has had to make decisions almost every day for the last four years about what does and doesn’t get done due to my energy levels, I thought I’d be able to handle something like this. I thought that I’d be prepared and able to eventually adjust to any new debilitation I might encounter, given enough time. The problem is, I did not expect the double-whammy of life-altering, inconsistent pain and an inability to sleep for more than a few hours a day. I could deal with pain. I’ve got a pretty high pain tolerance, thanks to my life experiences, so I can eventually tune most of the low-end pain out and cope through the worst of the high-end pain until whatever interventions I’ve got can get to work. I can also deal with a lack of sleep. I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the two decades that I’ve had insomnia of some kind or another and can handle a few weeks of it at a time, if the need arises.
It has been three months, though, and I’m past my ability to manage my sleeplessness several times over. I’m genuinely worried that my coworkers are noticing and all I can do is hope that I don’t lose track of something important. I can’t manage the pain as effectively anymore because I can’t split my attention. Being this exhausted, I can only pay attention to one thing at a time and, let me tell you, pain is pretty difficult to ignore when you’re unable to process more than one sensory input at a time. Throw in my general depression, my eye issues flaring up (and a new eye doctor who wants to keep meeting to try new treatments that seem to just be higher-effort versions of the old treatments), continuing work deadlines, and the feeling of helplessness at not knowing WHY this has been happening after years of being fine… Honestly, there are days where it feels like a miracle that I even get out of bed at all.
It is so frustrating to know I could work through pretty much all of this stuff in just a couple weeks if only I could get the clarity and energy that a few nights of sleeping for eight or so hours would bring me. I know I can solve all these problems and emotionally process everything going on in my life if only I wasn’t so tired that I sometimes lose track of the paragraph I’m writing halfway through it or lose track of the conversation I’m having with someone every time I go on a tangent or into detail about something. I could get so much more done every day, and not just at work. I’d be getting more done at home. I’d be writing more. I’d have figured out how to stay connected to people from Cohost or what to do about moving my blog around before my plan expires at WordPress .com or how to start building community offline or so many other things that are just impossible when all I can do is try to manage my exhaustion and keep myself occupied while I wait for a potential future solution to come out of the few active plans I’ve been able to make.
The weight of this grows with every passing week. There is a cost to this kind of cumulative sleep deprivation. Your body stops working as well in general as stress mounts and even basic things like standing and moving around become more difficult. A grey blanket of fog has settled over my life, covering everything but the time I’m currently experiencing as I find it more and more difficult to clearly remember what I’ve done with any given day. I find myself feeling the way I did back when I was thirteen going on fourteen, during the most traumatic year and a half of my life, not because my life is in danger or I don’t feel safe, but because that is the last time I felt this adrift within my own life. I’ve started reaching the point of looking at sleeping aids I’ve avoided no matter how bad my insomnia got in the past few years because I couldn’t risk forming a habit. I’ve begun to wonder if life will ever change or if this is just what my life will be from now on despite knowing that there’s probably going to be some kind of fix. It might not be an easy fix, it might take some work, but I’m pretty confident there will be a fix given that this is a recent problem. All the other sleep-depriving problems I’ve had this year have been solved, so I’m sure this one will be too. It’s just really difficult to stay focused on that when I’ve had three months in a row of far too little sleep.
Hopefully, the day this post goes up, I’ll be writing about the plan I have in place to at least figure out why this is happening. I don’t expect to be able to skip right to solving the problem or even knowing what steps I need to take to solve the problem, though either of those outcomes would be great. After years of problems with no clear solutions, it would be so nice to finally be able to just solve a problem quickly and easily. I know that your early thirties is where things tend to start going down hill a bit if you haven’t been taking care of yourself that well, but I’ve spent the last three and a half years trying to fix that and it is so emotionally devastating to have hit this time of year in 2023 thinking that I’d solved the main issues and could start working on the “it would be nice” things only to slowly and unstoppably drift into a worse sense of self and personal comfort in my own body than I’ve maybe ever had in my entire life. And even that would be fixable if only I could get some sleep.