Sleeping Beauty

For those of you who didn't know, I suffer from clinical depression. Yep, the clinical kind. I don't get depressed because my dog died or because a loved one is in the hospital. I get depressed because I'm alive. It's all the time. It's every circumstance. It's been my whole life.

But it's not that bad. They make these little things called anti-depressants. They rock my world. Life is most definitely more manageable when I'm on my meds.

Considering I've dealt with this stuff my whole life (only medicated for my adult life) and I also majored in Psychology in college, you'd think I'd know more about depression. I went in this morning for a 2 month check-in with my doc (whom I LOVE, which is significant for me since I have never had a doctor that I've even liked, much less loved) and she asks how it's going. I tell her it's good! I can tell the dosage is working and I feel hunky-dory. Then she asks how I've been sleeping. How I've been sleeping, I think? We've never talked about this before. I've always had more prevalent symptoms to discuss. But sleeping? Yeah, I can't. I lay in bed for 4 hours until I fall asleep. Then I wake up to pee. Then it takes another couple hours to get back to sleep. The getting back to sleep doesn't happen until minutes before the alarm goes off, which in turn causes me to have to fight extreme and pure exhaustion before climbing into the shower (or feeding the dog, depending on what area of the country St Pauly Boy is located that morning....hard to feed the dog from the OC I guess, whatever).

So I tell my doctor how messed up my sleeping has been lately, in particular the last few months. Low and fucking* behold, it's depression. What kind of stupid moron am I, thinking it might actually be my mattress. I was 10 seconds away from ordering the Tempur-pedic because if the commercial says I will sleep better than goddamn I will sleep better (I am a marketing executive's wet dream). I wish I would have thought about the impact of depression on my sleeping behavior a long ass time ago because then maybe I wouldn't be yawning so hard during the day that my jaw is almost stuck wide open. Not to mention how rude it is to be yawning while a colleague is trying to discuss something in a meeting.

Here's hoping that in the next week, our technique to combat my inconsistent sleeping patterns works and that I'm alive again.


* Did you realize that spellcheck from Blogger suggests the word "bucking" instead of "fucking"? Nope, bucking just doesn't do it for me.