It’s Wednesday morning, it’s not even really close to five o’clock (like in the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home…get it?), and yet I am heading to work, waaay earlier than necessary. That may seem odd enough, but actually, I’ve been “awake” for hours already.
This is nothing new. Something along these lines happens nearly every night, unless I have doped myself up with antihistamines (which produces its own rather significant problems). I just don’t talk about it very often, because people just don’t seem to get it or to appreciate the scope and scale and the chronicity of the problem. They seem to imagine that, since they have had some nights with less than ideal sleep from time to time, they know what I experience, and think it’s not that big a deal.
I am 56 years old (plus about ¾), but I have been “awake” long enough to have been alive, well…let’s see. To do the figuring, I need to work out my typical or average number of waking hours, divide it by the more normal or healthy number of waking hours, then multiply it by my current age.
Ikimashou: 19 or 20 waking hours a day is usual for me. I’ll round it to 20 for ease of math, since this is not a precise calculation anyway. So 20/16* or 5/4 or 1.25 times 56. Since 56 is evenly divisible by 4 we can just add that quartered amount, which is 14. So, I’ve been awake long enough for someone 14 years older than I am, or someone who is 70.
To be fair, most days I feel older than that.
On the other hand, I haven’t really been fully awake all these years. As the narrator in Fight Club pointed out, with insomnia you’re never really asleep, but you’re also never really awake. So, my brain has not been fully awake as much as a healthy 70 year old’s (or a healthy 56 year old’s) would have been.
I have spoken here more than once about the last good, full night’s sleep I had; it was in the mid-nineties, and waking up the following day was like seeing the first morning of the world before Arda was marred. It was amazing.
The fact that it was so memorable or noticeable, even at the time, should make it clear that I had already started having trouble with chronic insomnia, though I don’t think I recognized it as such yet. I think I had been not-too-secretly pleased by the fact that I didn’t “need” as much sleep as most of the people I knew, and I wished I did not have to sleep at all.
I had probably been accumulating the detrimental effects of suboptimal sleep for years already by that time. And the author of Why We Sleep, who is a serious and prominent sleep scientist, points out that one can never really “make up” for lost sleep, just as one cannot build up a sleep surplus to use later. Sleep isn’t a substance, it’s a process.
Anyway, the fact that I felt so great after that one night of really good sleep should have warned me that the rest of the time I was being affected detrimentally by less sleep. But, hey, I was in my mid-twenties. I didn’t exactly think of myself as immortal‒open heart surgery at age 18 does a good job of splashing ice water in the face of anyone who thinks he’s indestructible‒but I had enough baseline youth and strength to make up for the developing detriments, at least for a while.
However, I did know that I was not that happy with feeling unrested all the time. I recall saying to the therapist I was seeing in the latter nineties for my ongoing dysthymia/depression, that I thought probably the reason vampires live forever was because they perforce got a full day’s sleep every day.
It was a joke, of course, and it came to me because I had been reading Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles around that time. But I had at least come to some realization that my chronic sleep deficit was having negative effects on me. I thought it was mainly due to or related to my chronic depression issues, since early waking is a common sign of developing depression.
It was probably related to my depression, and it certainly affected it, but looking back now, with the benefit of more recent knowledge, I think my ASD (not the heart one, the other one, which went undiagnosed about three times longer than the heart one) was probably a big part of it, with the associated feeling of being always in a potentially hostile, alien environment no matter where I was.
I don’t know why I’m going into all this. Then again, it is my blog, so I guess I can write about whatever I choose. If I do ever have any therapists in the future, I can at least refer them to my blog if they want to know more about what goes on in my head. It’s of course a biased and incomplete picture, but so are all pictures.
Biologist and historians and psychologists and anthropologists** have had to deal with various forms of “observer effects” long before quantum mechanics developed its ideas about uncertainty principles and wave function collapses. The trick is to try to develop an objective model of a subject in part by recognizing the biases in and limits to one’s various kinds of data and trying to correct for them.
Sorry, I’m rambling.
I’ll close by saying that I seemed to be holding my own up through the end of the nineties, but after coming to Florida, my health gradually (and not so gradually) began to deteriorate. Then my life went, chunk by chunk, into the shitter. Of course, my spatial location was probably coincidental, and no matter where I was, roughly the same things would have happened.
Still, it’s hard not to associate Florida with my problems, especially now when the effing heat and humidity makes me think that Homer Simpson got it right: Florida is America’s dong. And right now it feels like America is long overdue for a change of underwear, preferably after a very good shower.
On that pleasant note, I’ll draw to a close for now, and if we’re all lucky (which seems unlikely), for good. I wish you all a nice day.

*If one sleeps 8 hours a night, as is the roughly healthy amount, one is awake 16 hours, since 24 minus 8 is 16.
**This sounds like a term for a person who tries to defend humans against critics. I suppose, in a way, that’s probably accurate.

