Posted By Kristabella on August 18, 2009
I never drank coffee regularly until I was almost 27 years old.
It might come to a shock to most people who know me because I love my coffee. (See all my whiney posts when I had to cut out coffee when I started getting acid reflux.) But up until the summer of 2004, I didn’t need coffee to jolt me awake in the morning. I didn’t need caffeine to start my day. Plus, I really hated the taste of it. Now, I had tried coffee and mochas and lattes prior to 2004, but if I needed caffeine, I was more likely to grab a Mountain Dew or a Diet Coke.
That all changed five years ago when I had no choice but to start drinking coffee, and lots of it. Some time that summer, I started to have trouble sleeping. At first it started off with me getting enough sleep, but clearly the sleep was restless because I woke up exhausted. It didn’t matter if I got 4 hours of sleep or 14, I would wake up so tired it was as if I had been up for 42 hours straight.
I figured it was all due to stress. I remember the first weekend I felt that exhausted feeling upon waking up. It was 4th of July weekend and I was house/dog sitting for a friend of mine. I normally slept so well in their house, but this time was different. I blamed it on the fact that I fell asleep every night proofreading the 49ers media guide, which is not entertaining reading in the least. But it meant that I went to bed stressing about all I had to get done in a short period of time (editing and putting together two major publications all before the start of training camp) and not having enough time during the work day that I had to bring work home with me. During a holiday weekend.
But then July ended and August was here and I still wasn’t sleeping. My publications were put to bed. And yet I, was not getting any sleep. For the next few months I battled sleep. It was an epic battle and I lost. Every. Single. Night.
For months, I would generally get about 3-4 hours of sleep. Nothing worked. Not Benedryl, not Nyquil, not Ambien. I would fall asleep OK, get about three hours of sleep and then I would toss and turn until it was time to get up and go to work. Usually I would fight it and force myself to try and rest my eyes and not watch the clock. As the weeks went on, I gave up and just ended up watching Nick at Nite and reliving my youth through Three’s Company and The Cosby Show.
Needless to say, I was a hot mess. It was the middle of football season and I needed energy. I worked long days and long weeks, with the only end in sight being January when the season was over. Mountain Dew and Diet Coke weren’t doing the trick anymore, I had to switch to the hard stuff. JAVA. JOE. LIQUID CAFFEINE.
It helped. A little. When you’re not sleeping at all, you can only use caffeine to push you through so far. It just dulls the pain. It didn’t help with my irritability and my disdain for most things in my life. I hated my job, hated my life and just wanted a good night’s sleep.
I’ve never really talked about my battle with depression on this site. It doesn’t really fit in with the “Full of Snark” name in the URL. It’s not funny. The period of my life from July 2004 until early 2005 was not a good time. It is a time period I would much rather forget and erase. It was a period I hoped I would never have to go through again. I hoped that my depression was a one-time deal. After I got better, I would never need the medicine again.
I was wrong. Things have happened recently that have made me recall that dark period in my life, that time when I snapped at the people I loved and turned into the worst human being. I was a bitch to everyone and I am lucky, to this day, that those people are still my friends and are willing to look past that bad time in my life and see that I was going through something, even if I didn’t tell them all about it.
A few weeks ago, I found myself doing some of the same things. I was irritable, insecure and I lashed out at the people I love. It was part of my personality I was hoping never to see again. But there it was, rearing that ugly head again. But this time, I knew what to look for. This time, I knew how to fix it. This time, I vowed, I would never hit rock bottom again, like I did that last time. Once was enough.
Anti-depressants helped me get better last time. But there will always be that stigma related to these medicines. Depression to some is just being sad or down in the dumps. To some, fixing depression just means turning your frown upside down and being happier and just moving on in life. If only it were that simple.
But in my head, the stigma stays, even though that medicine helped me in so many ways. I didn’t want to admit I was depressed. I didn’t want to go back on medicine. I didn’t want to be weak. I didn’t want to have my happiness in life depend on a pill.
But when I’m not myself and I’m hurting people around me because of it, stigma schmigma. It’s time to stop those synapses of mine from misfiring. It’s time to get me better.
I started back up on medication two weeks ago. It has taken me that long to write about it here, to let you in on my secret. But I needed to tell you all because you are all part of my life. And you need to know what’s going on, why my posting has been sparse, why some days I’m going to have to choose sleep over posting, why some days, I’m just not going to be funny.
I will be better, will feel better, soon. I caught it this time way before that rock bottom stage of last time. And for that, I am thankful.
So hopefully you’ll all bear with me while the medicine does its job and I get back to being healthy and feeling more myself. So I can get back to being Full of Snark and not just managing on a quarter-tank of Snark.
Category: The Sads |
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