Sleeping

I have not been sleeping all that well the past few weeks. Although when I think about it, throughout my life I have seldom slept well. When I was a director of a social service agency, or before that a supervisor and a front line worker I always worried in the dark hours of the night about the case load or about decisions that I was making. If there was no particular crisis to worry over, there were always a multitude of world problems that needed solutions. More recently there were classes to develop and students to worry about to keep my hyperactive mind awake. But for the last year my life has been relatively stress free. There are always the world problems that get solved so easily at 3:30 in the morning (with solutions just as easily forgotten by 7:30) but they don't keep me nearly as awake as they use to.  However in the past month I have reverted to my old sleep pattern of falling asleep very quickly, sleeping for a few hours, waking up around 3:30 and staying awake. Sometimes I drift off around 7:00 but usually I just get up.

The only reason that I can think of is my move out west.

There is no doubt that this moving process certainly feels weirder than usual and I am not entirely sure why. There is nothing particularly unusual for me about this move. I have twice moved across the country, I have moved to places that I didn't know more than once (including twice to apartments that I had rented without seeing) and I have seen my stuff loaded into a truck and disappear down the road, never being sure that if I would see it again. It may be that this move feels more permanent than other times but I don't think so. I have always made my moves with the assumption that the move would be reasonably permanent. Clearly something about this move is causing more anxiety than normal. The simple truth might be is that I have spent far too much time in the past four or do months thinking about this move and all of its complications and ramifications. I may have over-thought this whole process. I may have been better off if I had focused on something else as opposed to spending countless hours worrying about the endless minutia of moving.

For example I could have spent a lot less time thinking and planning what to put in each box. I was worried that I would make boxes too heavy or too awkward to lift. I need not have worried. The movers carried down the stairs my heaviest boxes two at a time. The large boxes, the trunks or large totes at felt awkward for me to manouver were managed without any complaint or obvious difficulty. As I have had people carry my stuff up and down various apartment stairs before, I should have known that they would have managed just fine. In my more rational moments I am equally as sure that all of my petty worries will prove to be equally as silly.

I hope that within a week I will, if not be sleeping my own place, I will at least be in Duncan. That should ease any remaining anxieties and therefore perhaps I will start to sleep through an entire night.

Or it may be that long ago I developed some really terrible sleep habits and up to now I have had created excuses not to accept that. Perhaps I should.

There are of course, all kinds of other reasons for my distorted sleep patterns.