Night time is not my friend

Sleep has not come easily for me the past ten years, and the impending loss of my job has made sleep even more elusive. I used to look forward to a good night’s sleep, but now I dread going to bed. I suppose that’s why I stay up too late reading most nights. I’m back to taking medication to help with getting to sleep, but even that hasn’t helped much lately. When I go to bed and close my eyes, my brain seems to go into overdrive and I start thinking about everything. In the old days that wasn’t so bad when I was thinking about what I’d accomplished that day and what I had to look forward to the next day. But now my thoughts are mostly filled with fear and anxiety and worry. I try to think calming thoughts, but I just can’t seem to find a place in my mind where I feel calm anymore. I finally started reading during those times when I can’t get to sleep, just to occupy my thoughts and pass the time.

A lot of people deal with stress by turning to things such as drugs or alcohol or food, but I suppose I turn to reading. Reading books is my escape. Getting lost in the lives of other people takes my mind off of my life. My usual book genre of choice is “chick-lit”, for lack of a better term. I enjoy reading about relationships and how people overcome their own struggles and succeed. Maybe I’m looking for hope and inspiration, I don’t know. I just keep reading.

Thinking back over my life, it’s like I’ve lived several different lives. I look back at myself during those times and it’s like I’m looking at someone else’s life. In some ways I miss the old me; the pieces of myself that I’ve lost. The inner pieces of who I was. Not the things that made me male, but the good pieces of who I was on the inside. I keep losing more and more of who I am, but I’m not able to replace those, to grow and rebuild. I feel like Humpty Dumpty trying to put myself back together again, the way I should have been, but I can’t make the pieces work, to get them to fit.

I told my sister last weekend about being trans. I wasn’t too worried because we’ve always been close and she’s a good person, but I was still a bit nervous about it. I’m happy to say that she was completely okay with it and wrote me a wonderful e-mail that brought me to tears. Ironically, she had recently been looking through a photo album of pictures from when we were kids, and apparently she has several pictures of me when she had dressed me up in her clothes (I only remembered her doing that once), and she was feeling guilty about doing that. I got a good laugh out of that! I assured her she has nothing to feel guilty about, because I was a very willing participant, and that those times have absolutely nothing to do with me being trans.

In another bit of irony, I have three personal days I need to use or else I lose them, so I’ll be taking off the next two days, right before I get laid off next week. It seems odd to have to take days off right before I lose my job. I don’t think I’ll enjoy these days off as much as I have enjoyed days off in the past. I’m going to stay busy cleaning and cooking, and getting the garden ready for winter. The garden makes me sad, because I don’t know that we’ll still be in this house next summer to have a garden.