Insomnia. It got me last night. Tossing and turning, I finally decided at 4:45am to get up. Brew the coffee. Write. I typically don’t have sleeping problems, I sleep through the night. I get my 8 hours. But I guess you could say I’m going through a big transition, right?
I suppose a “normal” person would chalk this sleepless night up to the fact that I had an extra coffee in the afternoon yesterday as a treat, or chocolate before bed. But for me it’s significant. In the back of my head I’m worried. Will it happen again?
And I evaluate my mental state and really understand how I feel. I write, I take the proper action, I know that I can trust myself. But my mind has failed before, and unless you have experienced this, you may not understand what these little bouts of going outside of your routine can do to your mental health.
I allow myself to do a pulse check, leaving this job was necessary but also like a death. I am grieving the fact that I am leaving something behind that was so significant to my life. To others it seemingly made little impact (these are just stories we tell ourselves based on what shows up in our reality). So as I’m tossing and turning I’m thinking about my abusive boss from years ago, the friends I lost when I also lost my mind. People I had known for years. Grew up with at this company. See, I went to college online or at night, started at this company at 20, so the friendships I formed here were similar to those you’d have during those years. And I lost them when I lost my mind almost 2 years ago.
So I wake up and evaluate where my head is at. I know I’m not where I was two years ago, not even close. Maybe someday I’ll be able to better describe what that felt like, I feel like it could be a whole book on its own. My mind began to connect dots that weren’t there, everything connected suddenly, made perfect sense, told me a story that was built on a complete fantasy in my head. I quite literally went to a different planet. It was actually kind of pleasant there. I was excited every morning when I woke up, like the world was a scavenger hunt made just for me. For the first time in my life I was excited for every day. Until it became too much, and well you know how the story goes from there if you’ve been reading along.
So anyways, I realized that I hesitate when I get excited now. That if I go outside of my routine, or do something spontaneous, my breath catches in my lungs. Is it happening again? I can hear my moms voice in my head. She was so cruel to me when this all happened, one of the many reasons we don’t speak at the moment. But I do have to push away the thoughts of what she would think of the choices I’m making. Even though I’m a full grown adult who has been raising a kid on my own since I was 18.
So what I’ve started to do, and what I’m doing in this moment, is talk to myself as if I were my own mother. You are going to be ok. You made the right decision. It is completely understandable why you couldn’t sleep last night, honey. There’s no need to worry. You got this. I love you.
And I realize that maybe I’m not the problem.
The Girl Without A Face 