Remember all that stuff I wrote about being afraid to sleep? It turns out that this is mostly an insomnia symptom. Did you know that lack of sleep can make you go crazy? I don't mean that in the usual dancing to the good old Prince songs way. Lack of sleep will make you psychotic eventually and I wonder how far down that road I had gotten. Back in June, I was hit by multiple crises that threatened to leave my family homeless but started with a lot of noise that drove me into sensory overload. After I called the insurance company, there was little for me to do.
Let me rephrase that. There was little to do that I was capable of doing. In a moment of frustration, I carried a bag of trash out to the dumpster yesterday. It was just one bag and I was left twitching and shaking all over from the effort. I was asleep in my recliner so fast afterward that I have to say I was lucky to have made it that far. I woke hours later in severe pain and talking to myself about how doing too much never helps. There was a lot to do after the ceiling came down but too much of it was beyond my abilities. Therefore, I spent a few days pacing around the house frantic for something to do and I wasted all of my energy in this case of "the frantics."
I've defined "the frantics" before but it is worth revisiting. It is a case of being so overwhelmed by stress that I must do something every moment of every day. Normally, this is associated with severe insomnia. I go so far as to sit at the computer to write and fall asleep for a few seconds sitting there. When I wake in a brief panic from the feeling that I might be in the process of falling, I realize that I need to sleep and go to bed. That leads to lying there going over problems in my head until I either get up to do something (anything!) or I have a dream about frustration and failure that sends me rushing out of bed. I have to do something to distract myself and then I can sleep.
It turned out that the insurance company managed to relocate me on the same day that the very nice water damage mitigation tech finished. I believed that additional repairs were happening but I wasn't sure and that turned out to be just plain wrong. The time away from home did do something very important for me. My nerves were fried and I couldn't make myself slow down. Doing something useful was out of the question because I had already pushed myself way past my limits. That first night at the hotel was a chance to settle down and I spent the time twitching worse than usual.
As I've written before, the wonderful suite we were in was a balm to my nerves. The staff understood me as well as my own doctors in many ways. The thing I needed most was to be left alone in quiet and comfort. Over our ten day stay, they managed to make me feel welcome. Despite being in a strange place, I started to sleep and I recovered from the frantics. Finally, someone assaulted me in my fortress. It was a paperwork mistake where an insurance subcontractor could only approve hotel stays in five day increments. My adjuster could have handled this personally with a quick phone call but he was busy helping people deal with the freak tornado that hit Delaware and caused some damage. I didn't know about this so I was angry with his lack of attention.
In the process of straightening out this simple mistake, I learned of the real crisis. I've written too much here about the eventual battles with my parents and what actually happened didn't apply. I was forced to deal with what might have happened. I was forced to deal with a potential Armageddon that would start on the same day we left the hotel. I hadn't been able to recover fully from my previous shock so I found myself flipping out. Sleep was the first thing to go.
As things worked out, I spent my days trying to heal or, at least, mitigate the damage I was suffering. At night, Melissa and I worked together in a desperate attempt to do the impossible. We found ourselves trying to deal with the crisis of potential homelessness that could start in a few days. There was no time for sleep in my frantic mind. All of my pain control methods stopped working because they all require relaxation. Breakfast was the key to the entire day. The staff made us as comfortable as they could including one friend I wish I had managed to tip better praying with us. We survived right on the edge of a big breakdown because we had each other and because of that staff.
I was on the edge of another breakdown yesterday. I was behind on bill paying because I was convinced we were out of money because I hadn't been checking our bank balance daily. When Melissa got sick with strep, our system for getting trash to the dumpster fell apart. I produce too much trash for me to carry out by hand. She was coming home too tired to do much of anything. I'll admit that I wasn't even showering because that much standing was a daunting process. The walls were closing in on all sides. What could I possibly do about all these problems?
First of all, I woke from one of my naps and took an immediate shower. Life often looks like one of those horrifically complicated knots but, like those knots, you need to find threads in the tangle and pull on them to see if they will come loose. One loose thread tends to point to the next accessible thread until you have an untied knot. Life rarely holds still long enough for me to untie the entire knot but every little bit helps. After my shower, I took out a bag of trash with the intent of taking out more. Instead, I just beat the day long rain storm.
My next task was information gathering. I knew that I was behind on bill paying and that I was afraid my immediate bills would be more than my bank balance. When I checked, I was reminded of one of those obscure laws of checking accounts. If you put money into them and don't take it out, the money doesn't escape through some invisible hole in the universe like socks do. The money to pay March bills was there and I realized that these were March bills. While I had gotten one bill for April already, even that one was just a few days late. I silenced my inner troll who sounds way too much like a certain father of mine and remembered the Chiarian motto. "Be gentle with yourself."
The bills were paid including one that I thought was close to getting service cut off. I mention that one because that one was due a week from now. Whenever I start to fort up and close myself off from what seem to be sources of stress, that's a clear sign that I need to find accurate information. Even accurate bad news tends to be less severe than what my imagination serves up so regularly. With a clean body, clean clothes and fewer worries, I got comfortable in my recliner and had a meal. My habit of snacking constantly instead of having meals was leaving me with a constant sensation of hunger yet overeating worse than usual. After the meal, I went to sleep.
As I may have mentioned before, I woke up feeling terrible since it was raining and all. I just didn't feel hopeless the way I had earlier so I medicated and went back to sleep. That's how the rest of the day and night passed until I woke up feeling a bit better. Instead of dreading sleep, I look forward to it but not just yet. There are things to do.
Learned helplessness may not be an integral part of being a Chiarian but I imagine it's pretty common. After the first thousand times you do something that was once routine and come out in terrible pain, you might start flinching. For me, the key to dealing with learned helplessness is in two parts. Part one is avoiding the temptation to beat your head against the brick wall trying to knock it down. You can adapt your way around your limitations. A lifetime of having spina bifida yet choosing to live among healthy people taught me that you can't beat down the brick wall but you might just be able to cheat your way around it. I couldn't have done it without two angelic school nurses: Mrs. Gershman and Mrs. Blum but I still managed to attend and graduate from school with the "normals." There were a few disasters along the way but those two helped me along my paths around the brick walls.
The second part is concentrating on the things you can do. In this case, I was able to look for and find someone who gave me a lot of "mothering" away from home and find her. I wasn't able to find the other person I was looking for but I'm good at this sorta thing. It may take a lot of looking and a fair amount of letting the challenge simmer in the back of my mind but I'm fair to middling at finding people on Facebook. Be gentle with yourselves, fellow Chiarians. There may be things you can't do as well as you could before but take it easy on yourselves. Let the things you can do count as achievements. Letting yourself sleep can be a real win.
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