Get Some Sleep
A few of us in this world are blessed with perfect health, but most humans struggle with some kind of a health-related challenge in their daily life, and I am no exception. It’s been one of the biggest obstacles to my creativity making it to any kind of fruition, and it’s been a thing for me since I was a teenager who my family thought just snored really loudly. I have sleep apnea, and it’s a bitch.
Wikipedia defines sleep apnea as “a sleep-related breathing disorder in which repetitive pauses in breathing, periods of shallow breathing, or collapse of the upper airway during sleep results in poor ventilation and sleep disruption.”
Translation: my body is too dumb to breathe when I’m asleep. So, dozens of times throughout the night, I just stop doing that. Then my brain freaks out, because obviously breathing is fairly important, and wakes me up so I take in some air. I’m totally unaware all this is going on, but for anyone forced to sleep near me (like my wife, for example), it’s a nightly extravaganza of snoring, followed by no sound, followed by me gasping for air, sometimes followed by me sleep talking about whatever dream I’m currently having. Favorite quotes include “You’re not supposed to be on this campus,” and “It wouldn’t be an angry mob without pitchforks.”
Not being able to stay in a deep sleep means that I get really bad quality sleep all night. Which means I’m tired as hell the next day. Which means I can barely stay awake through work, much less string a coherent sentence together once I’ve sat down to try to write in the evenings. Sometimes I’d be lucky to get 100 words on the page before my mind wandered and/or I was nodding off again. It hampered my creativity for a long time, until early 2023 when I got a CPAP machine, and that helped clear up my brain fog immensely. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I’ve found so far to the sleep apnea problem.
Unfortunately, a CPAP only helps once I’m asleep. Actually getting into dreamland is another problem entirely. I’ve been a night owl all my life, which isn’t always conducive to having a day job, or having the energy to be creative when there’s time to do so, because my brain wants to do fun things when it’s supposed to be unconscious.
I’m not sure where I was going with this blog, to be honest. All I know is that I’m currently recovering from COVID and it’s made me a little loopy with my already woefully messed up sleep. I pulled an all nighter on my day off, which then led to me sleeping all day the next day, and here I am in a fugue state, sitting in front of my computer wishing I could take a nap.
But I won’t. It’s time to write, and try to reset my brain.
