Insomnia

I’ve struggled with insomnia for most of my adult life. Over the years, I’ve cycled through a range of sleep medications. This year, I decided to cut back on Benzodiazepines after getting tired of their side effects—weight gain, dependence, and awful withdrawal symptoms.

At first, things went great. We lowered my dosage, and I was still sleeping well while finally shedding some weight—a personal goal I’ve been chasing. But this past month, the first cracks started showing.

These last two weeks, I’ve been averaging 3.8 hours of sleep. It’s enough to survive, but not to thrive, and it’s starting to affect the things I value most—like my work. I’m crashing instead of sleeping, at random hours, and now I feel forced to go back to my GP on Monday to increase my dosage just to get a semblance of a normal sleep schedule. The reality is hitting hard: I might never be free of some form of sleeping medication.

Also the company I work for has been losing revenue all year, we’ve had 4 layoffs and earlier this month, we were told we are closing. I’ve been trying to find a new job and I’m either getting no response or “we went with another candidate” without interviewing first. I hate this process, I hate not knowing if and when I’ll be employed again.

I really loved the job that is going away. It was more of failed marketing/rebrand and the older generation not willing to adapt and modernize.

The downside of the job was that I was significantly underpaid. I saw income record of one of the layoffs (it was sent to me in error), and the person made nearly double what I do and did far less responsibilities.

It’s just disheartening. I like working. I like being productive. I just hope all of this is very temporary and I’m back on my feet soon.