I am a chronic insomniac. I have been all my life. For the first couple years I would fight my parents when they would try to put me in my crib. When my brother and sister were born I had to give up. I began to read at 3 and found a way to pass the time.
I would only sleep from around 3am to 6am so I had a good 8 hours each night to lay in bed and read. The major problem with this was my lack of reading materials. I would read the same books over and over. The libraries at the rural elementary schools I attended were no help. They never held much variety and would only let me take out one book a week. My solution came when my mom asked me why I hadn’t read any of the books she had bought me a few days before. The stack of paperbacks looked brand new.
I have a reverence for books. I don’t break their spines or crease their pages. They look as though they’ve never been touched. This allowed my mother and me to start making trips to local bookstores to exchange the read for unread. Going to bed stopped being as torturous and but sleep continued to be an enemy. It still is. I take medications to sleep now but some days it works better than others. Most nights I still lie awake for a couple hours before slipping into unconsciousness. I’m often tempted to go off the medications and use all that extra time to get things done. But I know I wouldn’t use that time to work. Or to read. I’m afraid of how I would spend those hours. I don’t trust myself.
