I have a new Blog for my Louder Now Podcast. This is from that.
I have a problem. I don’t like my bed. I really don’t like it because it reminds me of a dark and hard time in life in the past.
I had a problem. I should be over this by now but when you go through the hardest time in your life and you still sleep in that same bed you want a change. I need a change. I need a new bed to sleep in. This is an ongoing conversation that I have with myself about my bed and about my sleep. In the fall of 2007 I had my first mental breakdown. It started with not sleeping and resulted in sort of sleeping and eventually sleeping. I had many nights where I would sleep on the floor. I would start in my bed and the winding down process became to much to bear in one place, so I would find myself on the floor and I slept better not in my own bed.
12 years later I am still struggling to fall asleep and I am wishing I was sleeping somewhere else. A different bed cause the bed that I have now reminds me of 2013. I went through the worst of all episodes in 2013. I was severely suicidal daily and it was inescapable the thoughts and urges that I felt. The medicine that I had weaned myself off of so easily a year earlier was turning on me, and even betraying me. What once worked was now a hopeless mess. I dreaded each night of bed time and each night of sleep. I slept on the floor. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle my bed so at least I had the floor to sleep on.
How did I get here? How did so many years of childhood go by where sleep was not a problem. I was a heavy thinker and I had a soft and sensitive conscious. I remember feeling like my tossing and turning was from hiding something from my mom and my sleep was better if I confessed what I was hiding. I moved to Kansas City after high school and I stayed up all night. And as detrimental as that was to my mental health I still slept. I started growing in understanding and learning so much in such a short amount of time. I would have to journal myself to sleep. I would have to write out everything that was on my mind just to get it out of my head. Kind of like exercising until you are at the point of exhaustion. I would write until I fell asleep. Except I was on the floor. Writing. Seeking. Praying.
Sleep where you are, not where you want to be. I have learned a few lessons in being someone that struggles with sleep. I take medication. It helps, but it doesn’t change my perspectives and my faith and my thoughts. I am stable with the help of medication but to be honest sleep is still a struggle. I hate my bed because it reminds me of 2013 when sleeping on the floor was a place of discomfort and torment. My artsy self wants to make a dramatic video of me throwing it away and have The Lumineers song Sleep On The Floor playing in the background. Like the song I don’t want to leave this town..but I do want to leave this bed.
Do you like where you sleep? Do you find yourself at war with the place of rest? What you are at war with is where you are at in life. I never thought I would have ended up going through the pain and suffering of bi-polar depression when I turned 21..no one plans for it but it happened. Sleep where you are at. Face the anxieties of life where you live and the city you are in. Often we are plagued with wanting to be somewhere else because we can be if we want to be. We have to much freedom that leads us to live halfway. Half of you is here and the anxious part of you is always somewhere else. I have thought recently that the idea of the floor is not the place of peace in our lives. The floor( for me) has represented survival and a temporary feeling of needing to belong in a safer space.
Sleep where you are at, not where you want to be. Live where you are at, not where you want to be.
