I’ve fallen a bit behind on my blog post buffer. I’ve regained some ground thanks to a bit of a herculean effort on my part, but I’m still writing posts only a few days ahead of posting them right now and I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to start gaining enough ground to stay ahead. The problem isn’t a lack of post ideas or time to write but a lack of adequate rest. I have plenty of ideas, I just don’t have the energy, focus, or mental fortitude to write more than one blog post in a day and sometimes struggle to even do one. Best I’ve managed was two on last Friday and I barely managed that. Turns out that two weeks of terrible sleep following months of uneven sleep will really wear you down. I wrote about it a little bit for a post that went up last week, but things haven’t improved as much as I’d like in the two weeks I’ve been sleeping on my new mattress. I’m reasonably certain (intellectually, anyway) that this is just the pain of adjusting to a new, good mattress after years on a bad mattress that was starting to cause back problems, all slowed down because a medication I’m taking has negatively impact the ability for my muscles to rest, recover, and strengthen themselves. I’ve done enough research and figured a few things out (given that this experience is similar to ones I’ve had sleeping on other mattresses in the past) to know what is probably going on. Emotionally, though, I can’t really grasp that likelihood. I’m so exhausted from interrupted and poor sleep over these past two weeks that it’s all I can do to keep myself functioning at all. I almost had a minor breakdown over the weekend because of how tired I was due to how little I’d slept and how the various interruptions in my weekend meant that I couldn’t take a nap to make up for any lost sleep. It’s difficult to emotionally process things and to keep my emotions in check so I can handle them in a healthy and constructive matter when I’m this tired, but I’ve managed to hold on by a ragged finger this long and I THINK things are finally hitting a point where they’re starting to improve.
Continue readingMattress
Reflections After A Failed Attempt To Rest
I was born early in the morning on the last day of August and I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. I mean, I’ve had mixed feelings about being born on and off throughout my life, but I’ve had mixed feelings about August and being born at its end pretty much constantly for my entire life. Most of that is due to the unfortunate coincidence that a lot of the most traumatic events of my childhood were concentrated towards the end of the summer every year, but a much more immediate and relevant part of that is due to my birthday frequently being overshadowed by people’s Labor Day plans. Sure, the trauma stuff hangs around and occasionally rears its head, but I can go to therapy about that and grow more capable of dealing with it. Being overshadowed by everyone’s favorite end-of-summer holiday is a yearly struggle that I’ve been unable to work around despite my thirty-three years of life. Hell, even on the years when my birthday isn’t connected to the weekend that includes Labor Day, I still struggle because that means I have to celebrate before my birthday rather than after it. I almost never manage to make plans in the years when it’s actually on Labor Day weekend because, no matter how far ahead I try to make my plans, everyone else winds up being busy. It’s a popular weekend! People are camping, grilling out, visiting relatives, or otherwise trying to enjoy the last gasps of summer before fall arrives in the Midwest. Even when I try to settle for having ANY kind of plans that weekend, for my birthday or otherwise, it rarely works out for any number of reasons. At this point in my life, after a decade and a half of trying, I’m mostly given up. There’s only so many time you can put up with people canceling on you or being unavailable despite your attempts to plan things super early. My bar has lowered enough that all I can really hope for is that people will remember to wish me a happy birthday.
Continue readingThoughts About Post-Stress Crashing But For Back Pain And Getting Enough Sleep
I’m two days (and nights) into sleeping on a futon mattress on top of my old, severely dented mattress. This has been a learning experience that has left me not only a little loopy for reasons I’ll speculate on later, but that has me thinking about just how easy it might be to detect a pea beneath twenty mattresses, if those mattresses are thin, old, or scrungly enough. On one hand, I’ve learned that there are many types of back pain, some of which you might only feel as you slowly recover from worse pain. On the other hand, now I know what it means to climb into bed as an adult. And how my last partner felt every time we both stayed at my place. I mean, it’s not like my current pillow-topped mattress was particularly low (the perfect height for me to settle back on without needing to really bend at the knees, but now my bed surface is above waist-height on me (I’m six-foot-three, for reference) so I have to actually CLIMB onto it’s weirdly spongy surface. Sure, neither mattress feels like that on their own, but the weird way that pressure settles through the futon mattress into the foam-topped spring mattress beneath makes it all feel like an old, damp, slightly mildewy piece of memory foam that springs back instantly. It’s mildly upsetting to touch with my hands, but the sensation disappears once I’ve got most of myself into the bed, so I only have to put up with it for a few seconds at most as I clamber.
Continue readingSleeping On A Solution To My Years-Long Back Pain
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.
Continue readingA Little Change Can Go a Long Way
Last night, I got caught up reading a book. I was already up late because of D&D and remembering to update my blog, but deciding to read for a bit before going to sleep definitely kept me up for another two hours on top of all that. I’m running on about three and a half hours of sleep today. For now, I’m managing alright, despite having spent most of Saturday in a big-group social situation. Weddings are great, but they really wipe me out. Meeting tons of new people and being around that much energy takes a lot of effort for me. If it wasn’t for how wonderfully restful Sunday was (prior to staying up three extra hours, anyway), I’d be dead on my feet.
I don’t regret my decision. Matthew Colville is a wonderful author and I’m excited to review his two books, Priest and Thief. They’re an absolute joy to read so far and I find it incredibly frustrating (in the best way) that the third book is not yet visible on the horizon. The man has been incredibly busy lately, with his usual YouTube video series about running Dungeons and Dragons called “Running the Game” and working on the incredible Kickstarter he ran only a few months ago. Setting up an office and writing a D&D supplement take a lot of work and he’s managed to do them both without dropping any of his other plates, so I am willing to cut him some slack when it comes to working on his book series.
Staying up late can be a lot of fun. As long as I’m staying engaged and enjoying myself, I don’t mind doing it once every so often. It only becomes a problem if I start to make a habit of it and wind up leaning on caffeine to see me through the day. That’s never a healthy habit and it is an easy one for me to fall into since I feel the most awake and alert in the evening and night, no matter how little I’ve slept.
Thankfully, getting better sleep has been easier since I’ve gotten a “new” (owned by a friend, but still in way better condition than my previous mattress) mattress. It is some kind of foam and, while sitting on the edge causes it to sink alarmingly, it does a much better job of supporting my back than my old spring mattress did. My lower back pain is much diminished and might even totally disappear in time and all of my joints feel way better which is a benefit I didn’t expect. Six hours of sleep now feels like eight or more hours of sleep on a good night with my old mattress.
It was amazing to realize just how much my old crappy mattress contributed to the problems in my life. Low-quality sleep, aching joints and muscles, constant lower back pain, and little desire to actually go to sleep all added up to a certain degree of constant irritation or frustration that now seems so clearly tied to my old crappy mattress that I’d been putting off replacing for over a year. Almost a year and a half, actually. I probably would have continued to put it off if it wasn’t for the fact that one of my friends just happened to be moving and my girlfriend made a few comments about how my back pain was clearly tied to my creaky, dented, shitty mattress.
It is amazing how changing one relatively little thing I’d been ignoring for a long time made my life so much better. Even a return to “neutral” in terms of what sleeping did for me was a huge boon. Last week was super stressful and exhausting for a lot of reasons and in a lot of ways. If I’d been sleeping on my old crappy mattress, I’d probably be depressed, exhausted, and on the verge of tears/a panic attack at this point. Instead, I’m tired but ready to go play D&D again. I don’t need another evening of rest before I feel up for tackling another social situation.
That’s not to say I don’t want to rest. I would love to get to sleep early tonight and try for a lovely eight hours. I might actually wind up feeling properly rested if I could do that for a few nights in a row. I haven’t felt properly rested in a long time and it is now so easy to see why. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard to convince myself not to spend money on a new mattress. It was definitely worth what I spent and then some.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what else might be a seemingly insignificant thing that could have a huge impact on the quality of my life. Working out more springs to mind, as does putting more effort into ensuring my diet is well-rounded instead of the “eat food and just make sure it includes fruit and veggies” thing I’m currently doing. Neither of those are really insignificant, though. They’d both take a fair amount of discipline and effort every day, but the potential benefits should outweigh the costs. Back when I was more active in regards to maintaining my physical health, I felt better than I have since I stopped. Combining that with the benefit of a non-shitty mattress could have an incredible positive impact on my life. Likely will have. Should have. I don’t really know and I won’t until I try it out.
I’m going to keep thinking of more things I can try as well. I’m still trying to fit all the puzzle pieces from the past two weeks of meditation together, so something else to focus on for a bit should help me wrangle everything into place. We’ll see. I feel like I say that a lot. It’s kind of exciting to know that there’s the potential for so much positive change, but also kind of scary. Thing could wind up being incredibly different and, while I one-hundred-percent support myself getting into better physical and mental health, I’m not sure I’m ready for all the changes that might entail. Thankfully, I’m not on a schedule.
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Saturday Morning Musing
Being broke sucks. After the Christmas season and its associated commercialism has ended, I am forced to take stock of my financial state in preparation for filing my taxes. This year, as a result of a higher-than-average monthly expense accounting, I’ve been forced to make a strict budget. Having a girlfriend is great, for sure, but it makes me significantly more inclined to spend money on things I otherwise wouldn’t such as trips to other cities to meet new people or a bouquet of cooking utensils my significant other wants but doesn’t have. Which is a great gift idea, by the way. Flowers aren’t the only thing you can wrap in tissue paper and present to your significant other on special occasions.
I’ve stuck to a budget before and I keep pretty good track of my finances, so this is nothing new. It is an added layer of stress and anxiety, though, to have to update and track every single number to the cent rather than going with my “soft budget” that I’ve been using since I changed jobs. My student debt (and the credit card debt I occasionally accrue because I’ve got no answer to sudden expenses that aren’t covered by insurance) gets me wound up when I start thinking about how much I still owe after having paid as much as I have, so I try to avoid thinking about my finances in any kind of exact terms when I can. Even though I know my debt total has gone down since last year, it is still easier for me to think about last year’s inaccurate number than about what today’s accurate number would be. I know it isn’t a very good idea to ignore financial situations like this, but I’ve got my finances set up so I only need to review the hard numbers of my debt once a year, when I do my taxes. When I do, I spend some time looking into solutions to better my financial footing like refinancing options and consolidation, so it isn’t like I’m ignoring my problems entirely.
My dreams for the future, in financial terms, are pretty simple. I just want to be able to live modestly without needing to worry about money like I do now. I want to have enough set aside to absorb sudden expenses without needing to rely on credit cards. I want to be able afford a nice place to live and to have enough space to welcome people into my home semi-frequently. I like to host my friends and our gatherings, and I love to feed people, so being able to afford that on a regular basis would be amazing. If I’m really aiming for the stars, I’d like to be able to put any potential progeny through college (assuming the current system is still in place) and have some money left over every year to travel somewhere new.
Ideally, I’d be able to live this lifestyle as a result of being a writer. I know it is possible, even if it does seem unlikely most days. One of my biggest barriers to writing consistently is how upset I can get when I spend a weekend writing and then have to go back to work on Monday morning. I’d be so happy writing full-time. I’d be willing to sacrifice a certain amount of my financial dreams to achieve that, but not much. Writing is fun, but I can still do that even if I’m working a day job to provide myself with financial stability.
Budgeting, though stressful, can make your financial life a lot easier. I may not enjoy thinking about it, but having concrete terms for my spending makes it easier to see the impact a change in my spending habits can have on my bank account. While paying off my car loan by the end of the summer seemed like a bit of a pipe dream when I thought of it last month, my budgeting has told me that it is possible as long as I toss my whole tax return in as well. As much as I’d like a new mattress, I’m pretty sure that I’ll sleep better with all that extra money in my budget. For paying off other loans, of course. The best loan repayment plans depend on that snowball effect.
Though I might just let it hang out for a little bit, make a few friends in my bank account, and then get blow it all on something to replace my 4.5-year-old, $300 queen mattress that has a giant sag down the middle. Springs, I tell ya… Not so springy anymore.