Sleepless.

I cried more this past weekend than I have in the few months of summer combined. It's as if I've been saving it all up for this very weekend. It's not like anything detrimental occurred either--such as a death in the family, a really tough goodbye, or a job loss.

Three words: lack of sleep. I think that's definitely what caused most of the tears. (Well, that and all the Grey's Anatomy episodes I invested in last week, which always make me cry like a baby).

The other night while lying in bed I experienced an anxiety attack. Thanks to the inevitable passing of days I am now emotionally detached from this event and I feel totally comfortable writing about it. Time heals all wounds right?
It was the first one I'd had since starting my new job three months ago, which is really good in leu of my track record. When I worked at my old job I'd get them pretty frequently because I've noticed having to wake up before 6 am for work (solely for work) is a trigger for it. Lord KNOWS I have such trouble getting myself to bed on time, which is why my previous work hours of 6 AM to 2:30 PM were a huge problem for me. I loathe not getting enough sleep.

I'm the kind of person who needs 8-10 hours of sleep a night to feel sweetly well-rested when waking up the following morning. Yes, I'm one of those people. My husband on the other hand can survive a 6 hour long night of sleep and actually function the next day; it completely boggles my mind. I'm very meticulous about sleeping hours too, constantly calculating the exact hours and half hours of sleep I'll accumulate if I go to bed at __(insert time here)__. I'd say I'm on the verge of obsessive.

With my new job I have to work every other weekend. So once every two weeks, I have to be in by 6 am on the Sunday, which means that those Saturday evenings/nights are awful for me. 
So this last Saturday night went a little something like this: First, I set my alarm, shut off the bedside lamp, turned onto my favourite side-sleeping-position and pulled the covers up to my ears. Thankfully, more times than not this is followed by me falling asleep, and callin' it a successful nights' sleep! Phew.

But this time around, it turned into a repetitive loop of random thoughts and images in my brain. Because I'm a chef, these thought loops typically resemble culinary-related subjects and events that I experience on a 40 hour a week basis. (I remember one time when I was in middle school I had a thought-loop of the America's Next Top Model show--it was incredibly annoying to say the least!)
This night in particular was about cleaning and seasoning chicken breasts. Over and over again, my goodness it just wouldn't end. If you haven't ever experienced these weird random thought-loop-hallucinations you'll never understand it and you probably think I'm a little nuts right now, but I'll try my best to enlighten you of this unfortunate weirdness of mine.

In the moment it feels totally normal, not out of the ordinary at all, but when you come back into consciousness all you can ask is what's wrong with my brain? along with a big resounding WHY?! It's such a crappy state to be in because it keeps you in a half-asleep oblivion for minutes to hours. I KNOW I'm "dreaming" because there's no way in an awake-state I'd ever choose to be stuck in a never-ending limbo of poultry parts but I also KNOW that I'm not fully asleep yet. This awareness of knowing I'm not asleep yet is torture because I'm feeling the precious minutes of sleep I could be having slipping away from me, unable to ever get them back again.

When I awaken fully from the thought-loop I try my best to stay calm because I just know as soon as I start to worry about the sleep I'm losing, the more sleep I'll end up losing.
So I attempt to turn the thoughts off, get fully comfortable, and shut my eyes. Then I start to squeeze my eyes shut, taking way more effort than it should. I start to doze off, but then I realize I'm dozing off so I get worked up about it, which wakes me up all over again. This cycle of dozing off and waking up probably occurred three times.

It's said that if you're having trouble falling asleep you should NOT look at the time on your phone/alarm clock because seeing the minutes pass by will heighten your anxiety even more. But I caved--I had to look. And I continued to look every hour. Big mistake.
When I notice I'm STILL not asleep, I start to get antsy. Jarryd is right beside me sleeping soundly and all I could think was how unfair it was that he along with everyone else on the planet is getting a good nights' sleep but me (a far-fetched assumption, I know). I don't dare wake him because why would I want to take the very thing that I want away from him? I begin agonizing about how early I have to wake up and how my beautiful 8 hours of sleep have now turned into 7...and then 6...and then 5...and then 4...Between the 6 and 4 hour mark I'm crying, continuously. I cannot stop crying, tears just keep on flowing down my cheeks (or because I'm lying down, they flow down into my ears which I hate). It literally feels like it's the end of the world that I can't sleep. Between sobs I'm squeezing my eyes shut hoping that maybe the tighter I close my eyes that some type of time travel will occur.

I can see myself waking up in my old twin bed back, surrounded by my once-trendy red walls covered in Harry Potter and LOTR's posters. Maybe when I open my eyes I'll be there again, I'll be a teenager again. I begin to rethink the past 10 years of my life convinced that if I hadn't done this or chosen that or gone there I wouldn't be in this horrible moment right now experiencing these awful feelings. Perhaps I could have done something, anything to have prevented this. When I open my eyes again and see I'm still in the same dark room in the middle of the night, it makes it hard to breathe. With the shortness of breath it's really difficult to feel like I'm actually getting air into the bottom of my lungs.

Now that time-traveling is ruled out I remove myself from thinking about the past and move onto the future. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow. How am I supposed to function on less than 5 hours of sleep? I'd give anything to sleep-in tomorrow morning. This week is going to be so busy, when am I going to get rest? I can't do this.
With alternating deep breaths I'm praying out to God, I don't know exactly what about; perhaps I'm just desiring that He hears me, that He sees me, and that He delivers me. Often in moments like this I see myself as a small child, wrapped up in Jesus' arms, safe from everything. You know that feeling you get when your Dad or your spouse is hugging you and you're enveloped in this phenomenal feeling of safety and peace? I 100% believe that an embrace from God is that feeling TIMES A THOUSAND and I dwell in that imagined sensation. I inhale as heavily as possible and take long drawn out breaths and feel the wetness begin to dry around my eyes.

I'm asleep. I actually manage to fall asleep. I mean, I always do. I've never once endured an anxiety attack through the entire night and into the morning hours and I pray I never will.
If you're someone who's never had anxiety like that, I'm sure it sounds over-dramatic to you--honestly, looking back now it seems that way to me too. I don't understand how a person could get so worked up about not being able to sleep or how someone could cry so hard about something so...fleeting. People lose sleep all the time, it's not that big of a deal. But when you're in that moment, you feel so claustrophobic being suffocated by your own fears. But at the same time it's like an out-of-body experience that you have zero control over. It feels like life will never ever move on from this very moment.

But you do, you do move on. Before you know it, you've fallen asleep and you're waking up abruptly to that treacherous alarm sound. You get up for work and you deal with it. You focus on the task before you, because it simply just has to get done. Sure, your eyes feel so dry, puffy, and heavy, but you get through it. You drink your coffee and you let the work you have to do distract you. And suddenly, you find yourself kissing your husband hello. You're smiling and laughing with friends. The night you had last night is long over and besides the small headache throbs between your eyebrows, there's literally no trace of it. You're OK. God got you through it once again as He promised. I think when you're going through this, all you want to be assured of is that it's going to be OK and that soon enough this will all just be a distant memory, if that. This most likely won't be the last of them, but when it does happen, you're gonna be OK.

"Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning." Psalm 30:5 (NLT)