I am so tired, as in not sleeping for weeks tired. Probably ten days before we were to return to Austin, I stopped sleeping.

I would either lie in bed trying to fall to sleep. Or, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake for a couple of hours or more.

Some people talk about falling into sleep as if in trust fall–they just lean back and sleep’s outstretched arms cradle them. Not me.

When I did a ROPES course facilitator training, the trust fall was more intimidating to me than many of the elements 20 feet above ground. I was supposed to just fall back and believe I would be caught? That’s crazy talk.

My relationship with sleep is similar. I don’t trust it somehow. It will offer up dreams. It will come late or leave early. It will suddenly abandon me at 3 a.m.

Sleep and I are back to our dysfunctional dance. So, I have been taking an anti-anxiety pill pretty much every day for three weeks now, and it freaks me out. I don’t want to need the pills. I am trying to tell myself I shouldn’t project into the future and imagine a life of a pill every night, that I’ll take it one day at a time and eventually the anxiety will subside and the pills will be unnecessary. Right now though, I can’t fall asleep without them.

I tried sleeping pills. They help me sleep, but don’t allow me to wake up. It is like trying to crawl up through my mattress to come back to consciousness, no matter how weak or strong the medication. Because it’s not really the sleep I need help with.

It’s the loops of worries running the track of my mind. Let me just tell you, there are a lot of lanes. I mean, a whole marathon’s worth of runners could fit up here and train.

Meditation is not working. Deep breathing. Praying to the gods to grant me peace of mind in this moment. Watching my thoughts. Letting them pass. There’s just that echo of feet looping.

I’ve tried reading. If the book is too engaging, I stay up till 2 in the morning, or 5 a.m. one night this week when I started a new book when I lay down and read until it was over. Apparently, the reading should not be too compelling. Page-turners are bad for insomniacs.

Spirituality books would be good, if my thoughts would slow enough to pay attention.

Then, there’s the old lie in bed and hope stand by. Who thought up that torture device.

Tonight, if you can’t tell, I’m trying the blogging to sleep method. As in, if I just get all the thoughts about sleep out of my head, maybe I’ll go upstairs, lie back down, (since the hour and forty-five minutes I spent up there before coming to write this were clearly not long enough), and will trust fall myself into dreamland.

Ha!

Cavanaugh was facing as me after stories tonight and I said, “Hi.”

He smiled patiently at me and said, “We’re sleeping now,” closed his eyes and went to sleep.

We talk about kid sleep all the time, but how about adult sleep? What kind of sleeper are you?