The Science of Sleep

It happened again. My first-week-post-exam sleep is off, again. And it's concerning. Again.

As I wrote before, sleep has always been the first clue that something has gone awry in my mind. When I can't sleep, I worry so much more than when I can sleep. This week, I haven't been able to sleep. Even though I'm not feeling the manic feelings, although almost everything is in balance, the sleep makes me worry. It always makes me worry.

There are few doubts in my mind that, without my medicine, I'd be a mess. This is almost exactly the time of last year that I went off the motherfucking deep-end. This is the time when I was manic.

Just as sleep has always been a major predictor of mania or depression, stress has always aggravated the mania, has made is worse, more seductive. And though the medicine does a beautiful job of helping me feel less stress, I sometimes know that I should be stressed. This was a bad week. We waited for grades as long as until yesterday, for some classes. The anticipation, the waiting--the stress that I was feeling, the breakthrough stress...well, it was rough. But I made it through.

Still, here I am, hoping to God that I can go to sleep tonight, that I can go to sleep tomorrow and the next today, on and on. I hope that I don't sleep too much, that I don't swing out of balance, that I don't walk this thin line of sleep that I've been walking precariously this week.

But again, I am lucky. I'm lucky because I have that hope, that knowledge that my medicine is right for me and will take care of me. I'm lucky because I have friends who pay attention, who know when I'm not sleeping, and who ask about it. I'm lucky because I have Joey in my life, someone else to stay healthy for. I'm lucky, because when I fail a biochem exam, I have him to send me text messages, to call me "cutie monster" and to tell me that I'm going to be ok. That I am ok.

In case you haven't noticed--or in case you are tired of it--being ok is a major theme here, on this blog, in my life. When you spend a couple of years in a constant state of "something's not right," when you decide that that awful feeling is your life, when you don't even remember what ok feels like--well, being ok becomes the most important thing to you. Finding "ok" is a damned hard task, but a damned satisfying one too. Finding "ok" is what you have to do when you are being treated for a mental illness, and keeping hold of "ok" becomes your penultimate goal.

I'm deep in it now--deep in "ok," deep in remembering why I do this every day, why I can't be like other med school students who stay up all hours studying, who get wasted at parties, who sometimes say things about mental illness without knowing that it is staring them in the face. I can't be that person because I have to be ok, I have to stay ok, and because I am ok, like this. Every day. No matter what.