Resting With the Fishes

Over the course of the last eight years, my typical sleep cycle and times of rest have been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, from insomnia to sleeping a staggering sixteen hours a day. The problems with sleep affected my mental, physical and emotional health, requiring hospitalization twice and the necessity to leave my part time occupation as an organics garbage sorter. Presently though, I am sleeping quite well and had just gotten a brand new tropical freshwater aquarium, which I am including in my new year’s resolution. I plan on spending at least an hour a week calming myself down by observing my fish and watching them perform the most mundane of tasks like searching for food or exploring the tank. Indeed, watching the fish makes me feel satisfied that I am providing for and protecting other living creatures who depend on me to take care of them. Seeing them live out their happy lives brings joy and excitement to an otherwise average typical week. However, it is interesting to explain how I have gotten to this state of peace, and to discuss the past problems that plagued my rest.

The first problems with sleep stuck with me from my early childhood to my late teens, and it was always somehow related to fear. I would have trouble sleeping for fear of the dark, dinosaurs, man-eating worms or supernatural boardgames that materializes your worst fears. Often at night, I couldn’t bring myself to even walk close to the room on the bottom floor, let alone the garage with its many frightening shapes and shadows. To counteract the fear, often as a child, I would have to move my mattress to my parent’s room and hold onto my mother’s hand while dozing off. She was my sense of security, and this fear of sleeping continued well into my teenage years.

As I aged and matured into my late teens and early twenties, I was able to overcome my fear of evil or darkness and thus, was able to enjoy a fairly regular sleep cycle, but with a shorter duration. I worked hard on my academics in university and the toll it took on my body was profound as I stayed up late many-a-night to cram for exams, finish projects, or complete essays. After nearly five years of tapping into the seemingly inexhaustible work ethic, my mental health suffered and led me to drop out of a graduate university program. I felt alone and hopeless that no matter how hard I worked, I could never escape the problems facing me. Tired and burnt out from spending years in school and having nothing really to show for it, I almost gave up looking for a job, as it seemed no one would give me a chance.

This lack of sleep may have caused my third stage of rest problems, which consisted of mania and depression phases, typical of a bi-polar mental disorder. I would stay up to four or five in the morning playing videogames, without feeling tired, or I would be a complete opposite and be entirely incapacitated with depression and suicidal thoughts. It was during this stage that my mental health finally crumbled under the unhealthy and damaged sleep cycle I was having. I was eventually diagnosed with a mental illness and was given sedative medication to dial down the symptoms of my disorder. Throughout my early twenties till I was twenty-eight, I juggled the schedule of sleeping for twelve to sixteen hours a day, working part time on the weekends and trying various jobs but failing because of my sedated state. Grateful that someone took a chance on me and gave me a job, I tried my best but could not escape the side-effects of the medication, which I felt like was the worst period of time in my life. I would get anxiety attacks, forcing me to be bed-ridden, unable to concentrate and forced into a state of panic with some similarities to obsessive compulsive disorder.

Working with my doctors, we agreed to try a new medication and it has led to the most stable and healthy sleep cycle I’ve had for years, helping me get roughly twelve hours of sleep at most, but not any more in excess. I’ve now been working on freelance writing, finished three novels yet to be published and still actively paint acrylic paintings in my time off. So, I hope that as the year twenty-twenty-two comes around, I hope to further work on regulating my sleep, and to complement that by finding rest and relaxation from my buddies; my aquarium fish.