The days are getting longer and warmer already; I’m not turning my lamp on until 5 PM now, and a couple of days ago I took the second blanket off of my bed after several episodes of waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. I’m able to wear lighter clothes with a coat as long as I know I’m going someplace warm, and at least this isn’t New Orleans where the end of freezing cold weather means the arrival of oppressively hot weather; in Seattle, it’ll still be cool until June unless we get another crazy heat wave like we did last April. And of course, in just a few weeks we’ll be subjected to the idiotic annual ritual in which we all agree to lie about what time it is for the next eight months. What all this means is that, while my friends with Seasonal Affective Disorder are beginning to get some relief, I’m heading into the dreadful days where my pineal gland starts engaging in the neurochemical equivalent of running around the house, turning on all the lights and cranking up the stereo full-blast while screaming obscenities, scattering its clothes all over the floor, losing the car keys, making an unholy mess in the kitchen and refusing to do its homework. And that in turn means I’ll need to become much more assiduous in my rotation of sleep-inducing drugs again; in the winter I’ve been able to be kind of lazy about it, but now I’ll need to up the doses and mind that I don’t get too resistant to any one thing for it to be useful any more. Such is the life of a neuro-atypical person, or at least the part of it I can discuss in polite company without giving anyone the vapors or causing nightmares which will ruin their sleep.
Diary #347
February 21, 2017 by Maggie McNeill
At least you’re not back in Oklahoma, where the weather this time of year can switch rapidly from extremely cold to extremely hot and back again. We had temperatures close to freezing around the beginning of the month this year, and within a week we had one day which reached the upper 90s in Southern Oklahoma (only 87 where I am, though). Most days the past two weeks have been in the 70s, but the night can still drop into the 40s, and we had a few days in the 50s right in between the warm spells.
Overall, it’s been an unusually hot February, but not consistently so.
Has your new fondness for cannabis edibles helped with your sleep problems at all? I know it works for a lot of people, and you don’t develop much resistance (at least not to the extent of most sleep medications).
The time-switch is a pain, I agree. I think all the expectations of it saving energy and the like have now all been shown to have failed. Seems just to be a ritual now.