This is the third morning in a row now that I've awakened from a natural sleep. The first two nights I managed 6 hours at a stretch, last night 7. It's ridiculous how good I feel right now, how awake, how 3-d, how refreshed. Weird, but I swear my brain feels juicy and plump. Man, sleep is so basic and so good.
When I made my list early in January, the very first thing I wrote down, my #1 goal for this year, was to learn how to sleep again on my own. Is it really possible that 36 days into 2010, I'm already there?
I am grateful to Ativan and Ambien for the sleep they gave me in 2009. Without them, I would have been more fried, since the only reason I turned to them for assistance was that I became such a miserable, anxiety-addled insomniac sometime in February-March of 2009. And yeah, last year was challenging so it doesn't surprise me that my anxiety didn't have enough daylight hours to express itself and needed to jump off at 1 or 2 every morning and kick me until dawn. I tried a lot of stuff -- yoga poses before sleep, less coffee (mistake!), more aerobic exercise, Rescue Remedy, breathing exercises, The Power of Now -- before I Uncled and reached for the pills. Those pills got me through a lot.
But I've been giving them up gradually, then cold-turkey, since January 1, and now here we are. I'm free. I'm sleeping!
Yes, this could be hubris, I could be declaring "Mission Accomplished" way ahead of time, but I can't help crowing. That's what sleeping does to a person, to me. I am excited about the day, feeling like I can handle whatever comes.
Oh sleep, you're so dreamy!
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