Return of Insomnia

12:42 am.  

Kacy and I crawled into bed around 9:30 pm after a particularly difficult day.  I had to take her to a doctor's appointment, which the anxiety of that kept her from doing anything productive today (totally understandable) and while I tried to be productive today, or rather yesterday, I wasn't as productive as I could have been.  Both Kacy and I have been overwhelmed the past few days leading up to the election and I have a feeling that the rest of today, which is now Tuesday - election day, is going to be that much more difficult.  

I'm fairly sure I've overscheduled myself this morning as well.  Between going and taking a few pictures for a client and then scheduling myself a networking event all within a couple of hours of each other... I'm honestly already exhausted thinking about what I've got to do tomorrow and it's honestly not that much.  I have been relatively tempted to just cancel everything, begging off due to the headache I know I'm going to be rocking in the morning. I keep looking at the clock and it's ticking by, slowly.  Too slowly. 

The worst part of this whole insomnia thing?  I have been micro-dosing all afternoon because I have been incredibly emotional and feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.  Simultaneously, I feel like I've been watching The Walking Dead all afternoon - meaning I have noticed that despite microdosing, I have been clenching my jaw, feeling incredibly lost.  I have also let the tears just come several times today, telling myself that it's perfectly okay to cry and it's a great release.  When that didn't work, I figured I would hit the nuclear option and disassociate for a while, playing brainless games on my phone for a while.  After sort of watching TV in the background (I don't even remember what we watched, either), Kacy turned to me and said she wanted to go to bed.  I followed shortly after but not before taking two Xanax in hopes that sleep would come quickly.  

One Xanax usually makes me pretty chill and can calm my anxiety down significantly to where I can function, breath through and realize that the world is not collapsing around me.  Two of those bad boys usually knocks me out.  This evening, however, that is not the case.  I desperately want to go to sleep, but for some reason it's not happening.  Normally, I take the pill and within an hour I'm fairly mellow and can at least see the light at the end of the panic attack tunnel.  I was honestly hoping for the typical result of me drifting off to sleep and I find myself becoming more and more annoyed as the minutes slowly tick by.  

Usually, if I have insomnia, which I have dealt with this since I was a kid, I eventually fall asleep reading.  There were tons of times that my parents would come into my room in the middle of the night when I was 7 or 8, find me sleeping with the covers over my head, flashlight propped up next to my pillow and a book open next to me.  These days, I fall asleep with my phone in my hand, reading.  Sometimes when Kacy gets up in the middle of the night, she'll see my phone still on and she'll say something and scare me awake.  The whole reading thing didn't work this evening. I'm thinking of moving on to some warm milk with cinnamon and nutmeg, a drink I discovered when I was pregnant with Jackson that not only warmed my tummy but just seemed to be really relaxing. 

Another thing that I would love to try right about now is taking a warm shower but unfortunately, I'm being blocked from that because Fiona (our 110 lb, 9 month old Anatollian/Great Pyrenees mix "puppy") has decided to claim the shower in our bathroom as where she is going to sleep and if it takes me several minutes to get her stubborn tush inside after being outside for a bit (at least the attempting to dig and get out of the yard has ceased - knock on invisible cheese fries), getting her out of my shower in the middle of the night?  I don't want a shower that bad. 

Toss.  Turn. Toss some more.  I gave up and decided to head to the living room and do some writing.  My brain is blocked from pretty much any kind of creativity.  So, I open blogger and just start free-writing.  It's an exercise that I'm quite familiar with.  Before I load up a new post, I look over the half a dozen started yet unfinished blogs, hoping that this one actually gets out of my head and ultimately makes sense.  I hope that somewhere in there I'm at least entertaining to someone or maybe make someone feel a little less alone in the middle of the night.  Welcome, if you've stumbled across this blog.  If you're feeling a little lost, so am I.  Does everyone tell you it's going to be okay and not to worry?  Yeah, they tell me that too.  I don't know how much I believe it, but I really do try to stay optimistic.  I don't know about you, but that's getting harder and harder each day.  

As I sit here and continue to type, I realize that I have given everyone fair warning that I didn't think I was going to be any good for the next few days.  It all goes back to current events - not just the election, but my Dad returning to Florida (which he will be doing on Thursday), and honestly I'm worried about what happens after the election.  I am hoping that I will be able to take my first real deep breath after all is said and done, but I know we probably won't know the results for a few days after.  I worry about instantly having to separate my family and send both Kacy and Ace out of state.   I also hope that sanity prevails and I'm thankful that I'm not in an overly populated area, but am thinking that we'll hunker down regardless for the next couple of days.  I worry that certain people will incite violence just like they did the last election - whether it be a coup or a celebration.  I worry that I should have armed myself with more than a katana and stun gun, wish I still had my bow, so I could use it as a range weapon, because I don't want a real gun in the house - there are too many people in this house that have some sort of depression/anxiety going on in this house and I don't think having a gun in this house would be a good thing.  

I feel like I'm getting a little too honest here.  Maybe that's the 'tism talking, but maybe it's also because I have primarily been an only child and I don't really have anyone to talk to about this other thank Kacy and she already knows all this so I have to talk to the echo chamber that is the internet.  I think that's why I like being here and writing.  I have this hope that my words, my thoughts, are not getting lost in the echo chamber - that they're finding someone out there and it's helping them.  Even if it's just me saying "hey, you're not alone." But in a very verbose way, talking about what's bugging me, what's making me happy, blah blah blah.   I use this blog and my social media as a diary of sorts.  I like to tell myself that by writing my story, I'm writing my history and one day maybe my great-great-grandchild will stumble across this on some internet archive and be like "Hey! I'm related to her!" And maybe it will intrigue them and help them realize that I was a real person just like they are.  It may be nothing more than words on screen, but here I am, and I'd like to think as an anthropological study, this blog may shed light on how I lived over the course of however many years I have this blog.  

My friend Raven says that I should write a book.  She says I have a lot of stories.  I tell the stories but add the caveat that my life isn't that interesting.  Yet, some of the stuff that has happened over the course of my life has been very interesting and full of coincidences.  There have also been some really interesting betrayals by friends that I never saw coming and, in the words of that wonderful guy from the tik toks - "Emotional damage."  I've often thought about switching over to a vlog format, recording my thoughts on video, but then I think about how I would want to edit and make it more entertaining and I get bogged down in the details.  I'm not in the headspace to actually do something like that.  I'll stick to the occasional tiktok of myself walking to the mailbox, talking about the weather or how I'm feeling.  I can handle 60 seconds of brainlessness. 

It is now 1:30 am.  I'm going to go try the milk trick.  If that doesn't work, I may try another xanax.  I don't like to have more than 2 in a day, but I think that I might allow myself the acception tonight. Let's see how we do....