monkeys for another day

how to sleep when you're full of monkeys

I battle with a lot of different illnesses, but I’m starting to think that chronic fatigue syndrome might be the worst of them. Not only that but paired with chronic anxiety, it becomes an entirely different beast. For the past week, I wake up at 9am physically unable to get out of bed. I had plans today, but my whole body aches and my head is pulsating with pain so I have to cancel and fall back asleep. I wake up again at 1pm, at which time I can maybe swing my legs to the ground and get up to have a shower. After that, I either fall straight back into bed, or miraculously make it to the kitchen to make some bran flakes (that is if I have any in, lately I’ve been too exhausted to get groceries and living off cereal bars I stocked up on). Whilst I eat the bran flakes, I consider putting on something educational to watch to wake my brain up, but there’s only fuzz up there, and the fuzz needs something light and familiar. So I put on a trashy podcast with visuals, such as H3 or Brooke and Connor. I finish the bran flakes. I consider opening up my screenwriting software to finish up the draft I’ve been writing, but the thought of using my brain to be creative is overwhelming and painful. I just can’t do it today. I feel the overwhelming urge to go back to bed, even though it’s somehow 4pm. I force myself to at least submit a few job applications, to feel productive, then check social media to see who’s free. If I’m lucky, there’s one or two people who have expressed interest in going to the pub. So I go to the pub, have a couple beers and maybe cheap dinner, mostly listening to my friends’ conversations and having little energy to pitch in. They ask me if I’m ok, I respond with a wry shrug and lie ‘I’ve just had a long day’. My friends leave the pub early ish as they have work in the morning. I don’t, because I’m lucky enough at this stage to be able to survive without a job, but without anything else to do I go home. I make a snack with whatever is left in the cupboard. I consider watching a film, but my brain is too tired to process it. So I stick on the stupid podcasts again to numb my thoughts. I’m in bed by midnight, and even though I’m still tired, a sudden restlessness charges through me. I leave the podcasts on whilst I lie in bed to try and distract what I know is coming. That time where I’m lying in stillness, completely open to thoughts that I’ve tried to fend off for a whole day. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the time of day that’s reserved for relaxing is probably the least relaxing of all for me. At around 1am, thoughts emerge simultaneously. I don’t know where I’ll be living in a few months and I haven’t started looking. I don’t have a job and I don’t know where to find one. All my friends are moving out of the city and the ones staying will live further away. I’m faced with a crippling threat of loneliness and I can’t do anything about it because it’s 2am and I’m tired. But I’m also tired when it’s daytime, so how am I supposed to fix things if I’m always tired? Thoughts start to double and mutate into bigger clusters, my feet start to sweat so that the sheets no longer feel soft and my stomach clenches and unclenches. It’s also not helping that I got out of bed at 1pm, so my body won’t naturally fall asleep for a while. Another thing to worry about. All I can do is remember a CBT therapist I used to have when I was about 15 who I used to talk to about insomnia, and my chronic habit of worrying too much at night. She told me that my thoughts are like a giant monkey chain, each monkey holding onto the one above to stay off the ground. The top monkey is under a lot of strain due to the multiple monkeys hanging down below. The only way to relieve this strain is to pluck each monkey off, from the bottom up. These thoughts are like monkeys holding onto my brain, which in this particular metaphor is the top monkey bearing the weight of the other monkeys. The monkeys don’t disappear onto the jungle floor forever when you take them off, but are simply put onto another chain, to be dealt with tomorrow. I tell myself that all these problems are real and valid, but can’t be dealt with right now. They’re just monkeys for another day. After a few more agonising hours and monkey thoughts, I fall asleep, waking up the next day tireder than before, but hey, at least I slept.

Each night I go to sleep vowing to make the next day better, but with chronic fatigue you often just don’t know how things will work out, and it’s bad to exert yourself. My problem is finding the balance between not over exerting myself and not motivating myself enough, because motivation is still very important. But it’s difficult to find right now for whatever reason. I used to go to the gym every single day without fail, and that was my way of maintaining energy levels. Now I find it impossible to make it to the treadmill without getting light-headed. I just have to keep telling myself that this is a temporary blip, which it almost certainly is. I swear by impermanence as a general life philosophy, that things change constantly in good and bad ways. I think though that I also need to be proactive in these changes, rather than just waiting. That’s all I feel like I do. Wait for things to get better. Wait to fall asleep. But these damn monkeys keep pulling me down. I guess if we were to satisfy the metaphor fully, I have to acknowledge that I can save them for another day when I’m trying to sleep, but when I’m awake the monkeys have to eventually be dealt with. What that entails, I have no idea. I don’t really want to kill the monkeys, and if I set them free they’ll just keep running back. The only solution is to somehow train them to be able to run around the jungle floor without having to pull me, the proverbial top monkey, down further, so we can coexist. None of this is a metaphor anymore by the way, I’m just thinking about monkeys. Anyway, it’s 3am. This is my way of putting the monkeys away, for now. I hope you are all having a restful sleep, whoever you are, wherever you are.

(I’ve attached a picture of a dog that I like. No reason, I just like how full of wonder they are.)