My mother always said I was a "night owl". I was never easy to put to bed and even in bed I never went to sleep. From as long as she could remember till the day I moved out. I went to live with my grandmother during college and she uses the same term, "night owl".
I can be exhausted all day and not get to sleep until 2am. I can do absolutely NOTHING all night, but still not get to sleep until 3am. Why? Well, could be quite a few things I guess.
I always have this feeling that if I just go to bed, I will be missing out on something. What? Seriously, I have no idea. What do you miss out on between 11pm on a Monday night and 3am the following Tuesday? Sleep. That's what you miss out on.
But this is sort of a character flaw I have. I am afraid to miss out. I have anxiety about things I cannot control. I try to control them anyways. At least if I'm awake, I can make every effort to not miss out on something that comes up, if it does. Staying awake is that effort in itself.
So all throughout high school I would be up in my room, hacking away at my keyboard as I am now(I can type up to 120 wpm thanks to my anxiety ;). I would be up, not able to sleep and not doing a damn thing. But more often than not, this was true anxiety. Over a girl, over a test, over my father, over whatever, it was high school and your emotions are a mess. It wasn't until well through high school that I actually realized this was a medical condition and not just how everyone feels.
If you have never had an anxiety attack, let me take a minute to describe one for you, and of course they can be different for different people. But here is a scene from a night in high school, when I had no control over it:
It's 2am on a Tuesday night and you are up, in your room with school the next day. Your mind is racing about a girl you like, something you said, something you could've said, something you did, something you could've done, running it over and over in your mind until you aren't even registering the thoughts, just thinking them because you have to, you need to, your anxiety is MAKING you.
Meanwhile, on a physical level, your hands shake, you take short breaths over and over, never fully catching your breath, but breathing a mile a minute. Your body forcing you to take a million short breaths when all you really need is one deep breath. You feel as if your heart is in your throat and that is physically what is keeping you from taking deeper breaths, your heart is actually in the way. And boy is it pounding.
Trying to concentrate on a deep breath without losing your repitition of thoughts. If you run them through your mind enough times, maybe you can be ok with them. It hasn't worked yet, but you desperately need to keep trying. This could go on for hours or in extreme cases, days.
Now at this point sleep is out of the question. You lay in bed shaking, with nothing to do but think.
This is how bad it can be. It's not always this extreme, but you have no control. Most of the time it is over something that doesn't really bother you that much. I know that makes no sense but thats the whole thing. Sometimes your body doesn't understand what your mind does. You can tell yourself everything is alright and actually believe it, but the anxiety has already been triggered in your body.
Other times its enough to keep you up, but not necessarily paralyze you. It almost makes you feel alive, the way some manic depressive people describe their manic stages, except not as extreme.
Anyway, I came to enjoy these late nights by myself. I enjoyed the alive feeling from all the emotions shooting through my body. I wouldn't have known it then, because I was straight edge, but it was almost like a high. And at 330am on a Tuesday night in suburbia, you literally are one of the very few people awake in what seems like the world.
I'd get up and go to school on 1-3 hours sleep, but those nights were mine and mine alone. After everyone had signed off of aim, it was too late to call anyone and all you could do was sit in your room, think and feel. I felt like it was my time. Like I was taking advantage of time others were sleeping away. Taking time that I wasn't supposed to have: STEALING MINUTES.
It may seem like a childish concept, but this anxiety has shaped my life. I have continuously chosen not to medicate myself, well at least not from a daily prescription. I have made a conscious choice to live with this anxiety. To feel it, to experience it, to suffer from it and to live with it. I have nothing against medication and have seen it work well for others. I just have this stubborn attitude of "this is me, for better or worse".
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