A Night I Rely on Medicine to Sleep
I still don’t know the exact clinical name of the condition that developed because of CPTSD. Think of it like this: imagine you have diabetes, and complications have appeared—but you still haven’t identified what those complications are. Mental disorders are especially influenced by a patient’s personal memories and thoughts, so it can take a long time to arrive at a clear diagnosis. It could be major depressive disorder, or bipolar II disorder (a form of bipolar disorder). So I’m still searching for the right medication.
Even so, the one thing I’ve consistently been prescribed is medication with sedative effects. At some point, sleeping became difficult. When I lie down to sleep, the stillness and the darkness make me so anxious and restless that I become more awake instead. And even if I try ASMR or white noise, the very thought that I must sleep makes me hypersensitive—the sound irritates me, and I end up more alert again. Even if I manage to fall asleep somehow, I keep waking up every 30 minutes or hour. I can’t get deep sleep.
After painfully repeating that cycle of sleeping and waking all night, I would eventually give up on sleep altogether. So I decided to accept help from medication. I started with sleeping pills, but now I’ve switched to an antidepressant that can induce sleep. And honestly, it works quite well. If I take it, I can fall asleep within about 30 minutes. And if nothing extremely stressful happens, I can sleep for about 6 to 8 hours.
A Night I Refuse Sleep
But separate from the fact that I can sleep, I keep refusing it and delaying it. I know I can’t sleep without medication. I know that even if I do sleep, it isn’t easy—and that I can’t get deep sleep. And I also know very well that if I take the medication, I can sleep more smoothly and reach deep sleep.
And yet, I keep postponing it. I could go to bed around midnight or 1 a.m., but I delay and delay until it’s past 3 or 4 a.m. before I finally take the pill and try to sleep. Some nights, I delay until I end up watching the sun rise. On those days, I can’t even take the medication—because I worry it will ruin the day that’s already beginning—so I settle for forcing myself to sleep for just one or two hours, somehow.
If I know the medication will help me sleep, why do I keep putting it off?
Resistance to Sleep
Sleep means “stopping” and “letting go.” It’s the act of pausing the day and shifting into recovery. But people who carry trauma or anxiety are not good at stopping or letting go—especially when they can’t even manage daily life well in the first place.
When it gets quiet, intrusive thoughts flood in. Sometimes they terrify me. In the dark, I feel defenseless. Even though it’s a closed, safe, comfortable moment, it feels—as if paradoxically—I’ve been opened to something infinite, and I fall into anxiety. Ending the day sometimes feels like death. Turning off consciousness and switching into recovery feels like abandoning myself in a crisis, like an act of “throwing myself away.” Like lying down on a highway where cars are speeding by. That’s why I feel so anxious and restless.
But even doing something makes me anxious and restless. The fear of “What if I fail?” makes me hesitant to even begin trying. So I suffer inside a feeling I can’t quite name—whether it’s laziness, lethargy, or fear. If holding onto something during the day is painful, and even stopping and letting go is painful, then isn’t this life filled with nothing but pain?
Wanting to Hold On to Today
Today is so painful, but maybe I’ve already grown used to this pain. And maybe the fact that I can feel it—and control it to some degree—makes me believe it’s predictable. The moment I take the pill, I have to let go of “today,” which I could predict and partially control, and face “tomorrow,” which is uncertain and uncontrollable.
The truth is, time is just a system humans decided on: an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year. It isn’t nature as it is; it’s a human-made convenience. That’s why some countries shift time every few years, and why months have different numbers of days. Even “today” and “tomorrow” are imaginary rules humans invented. They aren’t physical realities.
And yet, I relax because today has already passed—because it became the past and therefore feels predictable—and I grow anxious about tomorrow, where uncertainty waits again.
I Didn’t Complete Today
I have a perfectionistic kind of compulsion. I can’t always specify exactly what must be perfect, but in certain areas, I feel obsessed with being flawless. And that includes how I end a day. If today wasn’t satisfying enough, I feel like I have to stretch it—stay up later—do something, anything.
But as I said, for reasons I can’t fully untangle—laziness, lethargy, fear—I find it hard to do anything at all. And even when I do start, it’s incredibly hard to sustain. So most days, I do nothing. If it isn’t raining, I take a walk, and I write a little every day—just scribbles. And even the writing often ends halfway, unfinished. The studying and work I want to do either don’t happen, or I glance at them briefly and stop.
When all those fragments add up into a day, I usually feel the same failure: I didn’t complete today again. I feel unsatisfied, so I postpone sleep. And that leads to worse condition, sleeping in late, and an endless cycle.
Someone Who Prays I Sleep Well
I know the medication can help me sleep properly. But I’m afraid even of taking it. In a way, only the object of my fear has changed. Before, I was afraid of the act of trying to sleep itself. Now I’m afraid of the act of taking the pill.
Of course, sleep helps health—but my essential problem hasn’t been solved. And medication alone will not solve my sleep issues in the long run. Fundamentally, I have to change. I have to accept the transition from daily life to recovery as something positive. I have to stop being terrified of what I cannot predict. I have to be able to sleep by remembering what I did manage to do—even if the day wasn’t satisfying.
This behavior doesn’t improve easily on its own. That’s why it’s an illness. That’s why I go to the hospital and take medication.
But there is something even more effective than treatment like this. It’s people. On days when I spend time chatting freely with comfortable acquaintances over the phone, I feel sleepy even without medication. I can take the pill at the planned time and rest with an easier heart. In the end, the most effective medicine for mental illness is people—people who tell you it’s okay to be exactly who you are; people who believe you’ll be okay, but more than that, people who simply wish you a good night’s sleep today.
I want to become someone who can wish sleep for someone else, too.
#Thoughts_No_20250614
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