Syndromes, Disorders, and Conditions

Ever since I can remember I've had abnormalities about me. As a child it was anxiety and hypochondria. Reaching into adolescence it was obsessions and mood irregularities with extreme introversion and social phobia. It was always something and I've always had this desire to find a name for whatever my problems were. For some reason I felt that if I could just reach some sort of diagnosis and get some kind of magic pill I could finally be "normal." Unfortunately I can never pinpoint the root of my problems, it seems they change and merge together and slip around until I don't know exactly what is wrong with me. It's never been enough of one "thing" to be a specific problem so I continue going through my days feeling like I'm missing something everyone else has, those bastards.

What got me thinking about this tonight is sleep. My sleep schedule has always been weird. As a child I was forced to keep a somewhat normal schedule but I was never ready to sleep at 'bed-time' and never rested when it was time to wake up. For most of my life I just considered myself a 'night-owl' as many call it. I always wanted to stay up late and sleep in later, and I tend to take that to an extreme. When I'm forced to keep a schedule and wake up early my life is that of a drowsy hell. It's then that I envy preschool nap time. During the week I'll come home and take naps, more like 'naps', for up to 5 hours. Even without those naps, which can only be described as delicious, I fail to fall asleep until a later time each night. It gets to the point where I'm falling asleep when I should be waking up. Then, as the days progress, I'm falling asleep during the day and waking up when I should be falling asleep. And so this cycle goes, always passing the small window of normal.

So, I wrote this wonderfully exciting post about sleeping because I have in fact found out what's wrong with me this time. There's a sleep disorder, more specifically a circadian rhythm disorder, that explains my rotating clock. It is sometimes called free-running sleep, but I've discovered that the actual name for it is non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome. Basically circadian rhythms are the rhythms of the body's sleep cycle. It determines when you're tired, and when you feel awake. A non-24 hour circadian rhythm is constantly moving forward. So a person with free-running sleep becomes tired at later and later times each night, and wakes up at later and later times. If people with this problem are forced to keep a normal schedule, they suffer day time exhaustion and night-time insomnia. So 9 to 5 jobs are cruel and inhumane treatment for the free-running sleepers of the world.

It's funny to find something you've been looking for so long, and find out you have a reason for your insanity. I've long felt as if I can't fall asleep until it's later than the time I fell asleep previously. So when I tell people that it's getting really late at six in the morning it makes perfect sense really.

Call it an intro...

In seeking some form of "hobby", or simply something to become absorbed with, I decided to pick up blogging. In essence this is the outlet of an eccentric, dysfunctional, and chemically induced mind. It may or may not hold interest to anyone else, but I gladly welcome the eyes of the internet a look into my world in words.