his happened continuously over the past year, which contained many todays of fucking up in a row. I was completely oblivious to the cause of my fuckup of sleeping too much until the very end.
My fuckup begins with saying that I normally am a late sleeper, and have worked in hospitality for the entirety of my adulthood, so now going 12+ years. My career doesn't merely allow sleeping past noon, it's almost necessary since currently I work at a bar in a city, meaning late hours. I'm just saying all of this as background because I don't necessarily find it a moral failure to sleep late, a sign of lassitude or lack of ambition. Some people just have later schedules, both naturally, and with their obligations. Regardless, I still like sleeping in, and find it to be one of the best pleasures of not having a traditional schedule. I do relish in my laughter at the corporate drones of the world when I am lying in bed at 11am and I can fall back asleep if I choose. Throughout my life I've never been a morning person, but this year, that seeming predilection reached absurd new heights (or lows).
It started gradually, sleeping til 230pm on occasion, which can still happen after a heavy night out drinking, so I thought little of it. Then "on occasion" shifted to every day. This was still manageable, not a HUGE deal, but kind of annoying and making it difficult to get things done that I needed to do during the day. Then it progressively and relentlessly got worse. You know that you have problems when you can't make it to the post office before they close, and sending something takes you two months, because one lucky day you woke up before 330pm. Fast forward to about 6 months into my year and my schedule is positively fucking FUCKED. I'm talking waking up at 4, 430, and even past 5pm on really, really bad days. I just couldn't lick it, every. single. fucking. day. I tried falling asleep earlier, drinking less, no blue light past a certain time, melatonin, benadryl for sleep, white noise machine to stay asleep, etc, but my effort and desire to change didn't seem to matter. If I tried to wake up at noon (remember this is 4 hours earlier than I am used to waking up) it meant that I was completely fucking useless the rest of the day, extremely grumpy, and not really able to concentrate or focus on anything in any meaningful way. Sure, I worked at a bar, and I drank more than the average bear, but I didn't think it could effect me so heinously to where I was having trouble waking up in time for my 6pm shifts. At this point I started researching sleep disorders, planning a doctor's visit (which is very hard to do if you don't wake up before 4pm most days) and ordered modafinil, a drug for narcoleptics to maintain wakefulness, from india without a prescription because it was more accessible to me since I was awake all night long all the time as opposed to the normal operating hours of most doctors. Of all the problems in my life, this was the most urgent and was nearly destroying every part of my life. Social life, work, future ambitions and dreams, my hope for the future, just everything. I learned that being awake at night means being dead to the world, and it effected my self-esteem massively, making me think I was the lousiest, laziest piece of scum walking all these trash-strewn sidewalks of my neighborhood
I won't drag you into the details, but I was also at the time in a fucking stupid sardine can apartment with 4 other craigslist random roomies and 1 bathroom. It was tiny. We all hated it and moved out as soon as our lease was up. This is around the time that I discovered my TIFU.
While moving into my new much more spacious, for not a lot more money apartment, I realized I needed new curtains because my windows were way larger, and I also had two windows as opposed to one. My old curtains wouldn't fit the window so I had to throw them out. So I ordered curtains on amazon, and lived without them for way more days than they should've taken to come. This is when my pattern of late sleeping, and of broken sleep (not being able to sleep through the whole night) started to alter drastically. I went from it being unthinkable that I could wake up at 3pm, to naturally waking at 1130am feeling rested even after a few drinks from my job. It was amazing, I had my life back and could work on moving in the direction I wanted. You wouldn't think something so innocuous could screw with you so much, but it turns out that having blackout curtains and sleeping in a completely black as night room can absolutely fuck you up. Blackout curtains were the sole cause of delaying my sleep/wake cycle by 4-5 hours per day. So the moral of my whole story is this: FUCK BLACKOUT CURTAINS. SHEER CURTAINS FOREVER. I never thought buying a certain kind of curtain could fuck my life up so massively, and for so long. It was a partial cause in the demise of a relationship, led me to rethink my career and the possibilities of my entire life from here forward, and to thinking that I had a chronic illness that would never end. All because I bought FUCKING BLACKOUT CURTAINS. I'm one month with natural light in my room now, and still going strong with waking up having slept a reasonable amount of time and even wake in the AM now. TEAM SHEER CURTAINS MOTHERFUCKER.
