Yeah, my mother in law does that. So check it - you can fuckin' do something about it or you can miss out on your family, your friends, events, gatherings and shit that's important to you well into your 60s. Sitting on the computer until dawn doesn't sound so bad when you're 19. Lemme tell ya - a 68-year-old that can't come to breakfast because she was up until 6am playing Solitaire does not have the same charm. This is the part where we're supposed to be nice and supportive and say there there it's gonna be all right and bullshit like that but I'm not like other mommies. TOUGHEN THE FUCK UP and address your problems. You know what the issues are, you know what the solutions are, you acknowledge that you function with external motivation but here you are, pussing out and begging for sympathy when you've slapped problem AND solution on the page. You could need chemo. You could need dialysis. You could need transfusing. But no, you need a nap and it's too much work to arrange your sleep schedule in such a way that you can get help arranging your sleep schedule. My schedule in college? Wake at 7, go to class, come home at 1, sleep til 4, go to work, work til 3, come home, sleep til 7. That's a max of 6 hours if I had no homework. Then I did 80 hours a week while also spending 3 hours a day working on films. And exercising. So for about half of your life, I held down a job, got a degree, and got a short film into 23 festivals on a whacked-to-shit sleep schedule. But no one's asking you to do that. All you need to do is toughen the fuck up until you can pick up the tools necessary. Hey, read this part again: You've got two choices: you can either meet some lovely girl/boy who will love you and adore you and admire you and help you through life and prop you up and become that external motivation you are no longer getting from your parents, or you can solve your own fucking problems and be on equal footing with the people who matter to you. 'cuz my mom did an exceptional job of staying up 'til 4am drinking and then sleeping through the day and lemme tell ya - this insomnia shit of yours externalizes right the fuck all over everyone who matters to you. Right. And they invited you because they thought you might enjoy it. They really didn't give a fuck one way or the other, right? Entirely up to you, nobody cares whether you live or die, you're just a dude with a sleep problem, it's not like you're being a royal pain in the ass to everybody you know or something. I got neighbors. They got a grandkid who's over a lot. He's 7. His dad's 35. I've known him since he was early 20s. He married a girl in a wheelchair and they clearly love each other. at some point while we were in LA, my neighbors made their entire house wheelchair-accessible. I seriously doubt any of them resent her, and I have no doubt that they're a happy family, working their asses off to make it through. But I also know that it'd be harder to have sympathy if the thing keeping her in the chair were inertia. You got problems. I get it. You hate yourself for it. I get that, too. But there's this core of selfishness at the heart of all "I don't have the gumption to heal myself" that's deeply unattractive to me, and I'm calling you on it. You want some external motivation? look me in the eye, mutherfucker. Get your shit together.The first thing I did when I came here to study was look up sleep laboratories. I vowed to finally get looked at. But being freed from the strict schedule of school and a dozen curricular activities quickly led me to believe that it wasn't all that bad: Just take classes that start later! And holy shit, hubski, it got really fucking bad. Everything I experienced in school was tame. In retrospect, pressure from my parents kept me together pretty well. I might've only gotten three hours of sleep a night, but I funtioned pretty well. As soon I had the choice between skipping classes and activities and getting sleep, sleep won out increasingly more often. And then I woke up so late it wasn't worth it to cycle to uni for one last class, so I skipped that too. I became somewhat of a hermit.
In retrospect, pressure from my parents kept me together pretty well. I might've only gotten three hours of sleep a night, but I funtioned pretty well.
I can't count the times I've had to decline going out or a party because I knew I wouldn't be awake at the time.
It's what I'm trying to do, yeah. Saw the doctor today ("you're probably the healthiest person in here today"), my blood work looks pretty normal. So now I got referred to a sleep specialist. Let's see how that goes.
Good on ya. The first step yadda yadda. But here's where it gets tough: Sleep stuff takes forever. It's often inconclusive. The clinic is going to take on an outsized importance in your life and it will suck down far more time than you think it really should. The important thing is to stick with it until you have a working plan to manage things or until they've determined that they can't help you. Taking it to the end with the clinic will show you new aspects of your disorder and teach you new coping strategies. It will open new paths of inquiry and show you things about yourself and your body's responses. And even if things are a total bust, then you'll have the knowledge that you put forth all the effort warranted to address your problems, which will serve to define their boundaries. This is going to suck, and I'm sorry. It's going to be a frustrating experience filled with false starts and cancelled appointments. But on the other side of it, your problems will not only be more "yours" and less "this nebulous thing hanging over you", they'll also be more manageable no matter what. Gird your loins and see it through. Good luck. I'm pulling for you.