Wide Awake

It's a little before 1:00 am on a Saturday morning, and I can't sleep.

I've never been "a good sleeper." As I've aged, the insomnia has only worsened. In theory, there's a physiological reason for it: a calcified pineal gland, preventing my body from properly synthesizing melatonin. So I take melatonin at night, so I can sleep.

Tonight, however, my insomnia is super awful. I'm wired. I need to be making, or doing, or something, but I don't know what I want to make.

I tried reading, but I'm not 100% into the book I'm reading, and I couldn't force myself to continue slogging through it in my current frame of mind.

I tried writing, but I've been bogged down lately on that, and am having trouble pushing myself forwards in my story. I don't know how George R.R. Martin does it, frankly.

I tried to order wedding photos online, but had trouble with my account, so that failed, too.

And I'd love to be organizing our office, re-styling the bookshelves and cleaning out the boxes of wedding ephemera that will go in our album (once I succeed in ordering photos), but that would be noisy, and my exhausted husband has long gone to sleep.

In all probability, the insomnia is a forewarning of a migraine to come. It's common for me to have a night of awful, restless insomnia, and to have a full-blown migraine, next day.

Or, the inability to settle myself down is a symptom of my anxiety and depression, which can also cause migraines, which then cause anxiety and depression and insomnia, and...

I'm still having migraines and am unable to work, and I've made a decision about my treatment: I want to cleanse myself.

I've been on so many drugs for so long that I no longer have any idea what it's like to just feel like myself. Back in 2010 - or possibly 2009 - my neurologist/best friend took me off of everything, so we would know what my baseline was. Since then, I've been on oodles of medications for various reasons: antidepressants and antipsychotics to prevent migraines, pain medicine for sciatic pain, muscle relaxants for muscle tension due to migraines.

I no longer know what it feels like to be me, without any chemical alterations.

For years, between the end of my chemotherapy and 2011, when a doctor put me back on antidepressants, I had very strong emotions. When I was happy, I was amazingly happy. When I was sad, I was completely devastated. But my emotions were true, and they were mine. I feel, these days, like I'm completely numb. I don't really feel, anymore. I try to, but really the only thing that gets through is sadness and anxiety.

I don't know if taking myself off of my medications* will make a difference. I don't know if I'll feel happier again. I don't know if my migraines will grow worse, or better, or stay the same.

But I do know that I'm tired of not feeling.

*taking myself off of my medications under doctor supervision and with their blessing, because some of this stuff will f*&$ you up if you just stop taking it