insomnia cont....

The pink sheets, patchwork pillows, the stuffed dog with a black eye ripped out--they were all against me.Yet each night, I gave them another chance, hoping my sturdy futon would offer me salvation. I ended up throwing out that bed once I could sleep again. I feared my insomnia was embedded somehow in the stiff, lumpy cushion.

I mistook insomnia for lunacy, and I came to the point where I would just have to live my life a lunatic or die.I didn't want to die, that was for certain, so I tried to deal and accept that I was forever going to be a crazy nutcase who never slept. I mean, Martha Stewart (and I'm not quite sure why Martha plays any sort of part in this)claims to only sleep 4-5 hours a day, and look at how successful she is.While Martha and I might both possess a love of flowers, I certainly wasn't aspiring to design home furnishings or host my own show. I just wanted to make it to work on time.

I hadn't slept in so long that insomnia was becoming a part of me. My identity began to shape itself around my illness, though not many people on the outside knew that this was a new addition to my character. Rosie, the girl who does it all on 2 hours of sleep a day. It became a challenge to see how much I could accomplish while my body was hungrily crying out for slumber.

Looking back, I must have seemed like I was going insane. I was. You can only defy your body for so long.....the body always wins.

* * *

I write this part of the piece after Yoga, and I am all loose and rubbery. My mind is still and quiet. Insomnia feels a million miles away, but I can revisit the sensation in a heartbeat. I'm drinking a glass of < a href="vino.htm">Merlot from a crystal tumbler.I'm tired. I look over at my bed, a reincarnation of my old futon. Hendrix is curled up on a fleece pillow and I want to join him. Nothing speaks of insomnia, and I am assured it will not return.

Insomnia sometimes goes away on its own, but in my case it took a serious amount of time and energy to rid myself of this debilitating infliction. Insomnia was like a big puzzle, I had to fit all the pieces together to understand why I wasn't sleeping. Short of a major crisis, I started listening to myself, to the incessant warning signs my body put out. Insomnia was unnatural. My successful remedies for it were not.

I'll be the first to admit that I tried prescription drugs. I was three pills short a day of being a Xanax junkie. Upon the recommendation of a friend, who herself had an affinity for the synthetic, I would swallow a tiny white pill and wait, lying frozen under my blankets, for Mr. Sandman to sprinkle his miracles on me. If a few hours of sleep and a huge headache was a miracle, then Mr. Sandman let me down. I was bigger and stronger than Xanax. I conquered the drug like I conquered the sleep that never came.

One rainy afternoon I caught a glimpse of an article in Reader's Digest while visiting my aunt. The article claimed that women across the nation were getting addicted to Xanax left and right. I pictured housewives in terry-cloth robes popping Xanax like bon-bons, watching Dallas reruns while their husbands had illicit sex with their secretaries. I was not one of them. That night, my bottle of Xanax marched right back to its owner.

The same article mentioned another sleep remedy by the name of Melatonin. If you've never tried this hormone, I suggest doing so just for the experience, if you're into that type of thing. It's amazing. It's like a strange trip, except you're sleeping. Your dreams are incredibly vivid. That night, I dreamt I was swimming underwater, indefinitely, in an old antebellum home. I swam up a fireplace, into a brick walled ballroom, never coming up for air.

Though my dreams made for cool subject matter the next morning, Melatonin was just too intense to deal with on a daily basis. I kept some around and handed them out like party favors, but other than that, Melatonin, like Xanex, respectfully took its place on the shelf of shame.I was getting desperate. I was intent on healing myself, but nothing was working.

When times get tough, call Mom. That's what I did anyway. My mother is an herbalist. It only seems logical I would have found the solution months before I did. I was embarrassed. I was scared my mother would tell me what I didn't want to hear. I knew she would tell me to stop drinking, to get more exercise, to drink that special tea that's been sitting in the back of my cupboard. I wanted instant results, not an alteration in lifestyle. I told her this, and she sighed, one of those long, motherly sighs of exasperation.

Honesty heals. Don't let anyone tell you differently.I received a box not three days later. In my mother's distinctive cursive was a note...read Rosemary's book. I found a book called Herbal Healing for Women.Along with this book were three bottles with imprinted labels. Valerian, Passionflower, Chamomile. I got the point. I was supposed to read the book to find out what they did.

That night marked my entrance into herbalism. As soon as the woody, bitter Valerian root gagged my throat, I resumed a sense of contol about my life. I was going to sleep. I was going to be healthy, and I was going to do it in a natural way. I was comforted by these thoughts and slept better than I had in 6 months.

The ending isn't all that magical, I'm afraid. The herbs I was taking effectively made me sleep. They symbolized earth and the process of growing. I knew I wanted to grow into a positive, health-concious person-- my body as my temple.....and all of that stuff you hear about being well and good. I was tired of being in constant dischord with nature--defying it, ignoring it. By embracing the philsophy behind natural healing I felt I was repositioning myself in agreement with nature. After all, nature requires that we sleep.