Rattle and Hum

In the timeless rivalry betwee side-of-fork versus not-quite-softened red pepper contested in the epic battle to Separate a Bite-Sized-piece from the Omelette, red pepper held firm and Pynchon's fork slipped from his grasp, shot up in the air, and landed with a jangling crash back on his plate, an explosion of noise and movement in the middle of supper.

Naturally, I burst into tears.

Pynchon looked at me, a little shocked, but I couldn't quite hear what he was saying as the whooshing blood in my ears, the knocking of my racing heart, and the distracting sharp prickle of primal fear under my arms blocked him out.

My nerves are shot.

The root of the problem is that I'm not sleeping. Again. Whereas I used to fall asleep within minutes, only to wake up in the middle of the night for hours at a time, now I don't even get that first bit of rest. My new trick is to toss and turn for an hour or two, fall alseep, and wake up, heart pounding and mind racing, ten minutes later. I fall asleep somewhat easier if I attempt a midday nap, but still, ten minutes later--boom boom ack--it's all over.

There are other things. For example, massive road reconstruction 50 feet away from my house means that between 7am and 7pm my house is literally shaking. Glasses rattle, fixture hum, windows vibrate noisily in their frames. The plaster cracks. Nothing can stop the noise from intruding either, the whine and drone of many heavy machines rumble forwards, beep backwards, and bang up and down. I'm desperate to leave in the morning.

Munchkin has been waking up at night, not for long, but enough to rip me up from the depths.

And last night, oh last night! The student five houses down had a party that escalated into a raucous 11:30pm march down the middle of the street, tearing up one neighbour's rock garden to throw into another neighbour's driveway, before moving on to demolishing the barricades meant to keep people and cars from plunging into the excavated roadway. They came back and repeated their nonsense at 2pm.

It's amazing to me how even a couple of nights of broken or insufficient sleep can reduce me to hysteria and desperation. I actually wanted to physically harm those morons last night, an itch in my arms that wanted to claw someone's eyes out.

But I'm not talking about a couple of nights of broken sleep--this is becoming an intensifying pattern of persistent insomnia. It's like mental illness, really: I'm a different person, not able to enjoy the things I normally enjoy, not able to concentrate or focus, restless and anxious, depressed of mood and listless. Irritable and weepy. Unable to cope with the normal stresses of life, noisy neighbours or road repairs, say.

I've severly cut my caffeine and alcohol intake, been rigorous with my sleep hygience, practiced yoga, and avoided tv and computer time (glowing screens) too close to bedtime. I do yoga nightly. I take long walks during the day. And yet, still, ten minutes of sleep, a terrified wakeup, and hours of tossing and turning.

Insomnia, Dr. Google tells me, is not itself an illness but a symptom of some other condition--medical pharmaceutical treatments, then, address the distressing but secondary fact of sleeplessness by forcing the body to abandon consciousness with any number of powerful depressants all of which bring as much ill as good, and none of which are to be used any more than very infrequently or for a very short period of time. So the root of the problem is not, after all, that I'm not sleeping. It's something else, something else that manifests as insomnia.

My mother tells me that women in their 30s are the primary sufferers of insomnia. She surmises that having it all and doing it all is at the bottom of it all: it's anxiety and burnout. And truly, I have it all and do it all: demanding career, a beautiful home under constant improvement, a preschooler who has decided to 'marry' me, a husband with his own career and its demands, a drive to be healthy, to do the most for myself and my family. It's overwhelming me, maybe. No, it is overwhelming me, totally. Why else would I wake up in a sweaty panic to find myself worrying, absurdly, that Munchkin doesn't currently like vegetables and is doomed to adult obesity as a result of my failing to sufficiently entice her to eat green things? That three library books are overdue? That I forgot to email a colleague about something completely not pressing? That I forgot to put out our vitamin pills this morning?

Internet, do you suffer from insomnia? Why? And what do you do about it? I am losing this battle, and I am more than a little anxious that bursting into tears over dropped cutlery is more the rule than the exception at my house lately. Advice?