as small as a world and as large as alone, My Dark Nighttime World My computer on one leg,...

10:44pm January 25, 2015

My Dark Nighttime World

My computer on one leg, providing the only light (and much less than I used for the pictures). Me wearing a dad-shirt, a bipap mask, the beard locket, and eyeglasses. Fey nestled happily between my legs.

I am glad she is happy and snuggly right now, because she’s been a grumpy stick all day.

I love nighttime. It’s too bad I have to sleep through so much of it. But I do have to force myself to sleep, or at least try, because full-blown Irregular Sleep-Wake Pattern causes me both emotional and physical pain as well as messing up my body’s ability to regulate itself. Even medicating myself into a Free-Running Circadian Rhythm is a huge improvement over that. I know there’s people who find their circadian rhythm sleep disorders to be a problem purely with a society out of sync with them, and may even find their ability to just sleep whenever, to be an advantage over people who have to sleep on a schedule. And more power to them if that’s their experience. It’s not my experience, and that’s okay too.

For an experience of someone whose lack of circadian rhythm bothers her not one whit (i.e. someone totally different from me), try reading The Circadian Prison by Michelle Dawson. I wish I could function like that, but I can’t. When my circadian rhythms are at their most natural (i.e. completely out of whack, due to no meds forcing me to sleep at certain hours more than others), my neuropathic pain becomes excruciating, my health nosedives, my ability to get overloaded sits on a hair-trigger, and nobody enjoys it least of all me. But I am – genuinely – happy to see there are people out there whose lack of circadian rhythm is more advantage than disadvantage, and who are writing about it.

But I do wish I could be up all night without it ruining my mood, my health, and my pain levels, because the world is so beautiful in the dark. And because the dark affords my visual system the time and space to ‘decompress’ from the horrible overload of trying to use vision for any purpose at all in the daylight. I love the way things look at night. I love the dark.

Most of the time I can’t fully control my circadian rhythms and end up being awake a lot of the night anyway, so I get to enjoy the dark at least even if I feel like hell the next day. And sometimes I get the balance just right – just enough dark to enjoy it, just enough sleep to avoid schedule collapse. (Schedule collapse is the name a friend gave irregular sleep-wake pattern, which for her only happens in a cyclic way, swinging back and forth between delayed sleep phase disorder and irregular sleep-wake pattern. Yes, I know that’s not supposed to happen, but it does. I wish fewer people cared what’s “supposed to be” and more focused instead on what does be.)