Another Self-Induced Sleepless Night

So, I have a tendency, sometimes, to fall into a bad pattern of insomnia/mild caffeine abuse that just perpetuates itself and becomes an annoying vicious circle. I'm on, I don't know, day four or five of running with three to five hours of poor sleep per night. This isn't terrible, but it isn't exactly great. I can feel myself headed for a monster crash... it will most likely involve a crippling migraine, hallucinations and a whole hell of a lot of being ridiculously crabby.

I almost feel like insomnia is a character trait of mine, a sort of shorthand for the type of person that I am. I know that's a bit silly, but it reflects two important things about me: When I'm excited to do something, I will put everything else, especially sleep, on hold to do it; and, when I'm dreading something, I will do everything I can to postpone it for as long as possible. These two facts, flaws you might call them, create a sort of perfect storm of insomnia.

Currently, I'm working on consolidating all of the creative aspects of my life into one nifty little website hub (www.jasondangerblock.com, of course). And it's going pretty ok. I like doing it and I feel like I'm accomplishing something and I like that there will be something to show for my work when it's done. It also means I want it to be done as soon as possible. I'm not patient, especially when it comes to my output, and I am a much bigger fan of the product than I am of the process. So I want to finish it. So I've been putting in late nights trying to get the thing to work and drawing up nifty little pictures for it and reconfiguring it and so on and so forth.

This, coupled with my increasing disdain for the vapidity and stagnation of my day job (and the rapidness with which slumber brings on a new morning), makes sleep seem like an obstacle to my goals and any hope of a measure of success. So I stay up all night, working on things that will likely only ever be seen by a handful of people, trying desperately to keep my dreams alive while staving off another fruitless day of mediocrity. Eventually, of course, morning does come, and bleary eyed and still gauzy from my ceaseless parade of whacko wee hour dreams, I wake up, muddle through a shower and riddle myself with caffeine in an effort to join the living for the day. This, of course, isn't novel or unique or anything, but it does, I think, go a long way, in tandem with the factors listed above, toward hampering the next night's sleep and the cycle continues undaunted and unbroken until I have a whopping meltdown and fall into a twelve hour coma. This can take weeks. And when the coma ends, the whole process starts slowly up again.

I wonder, sometimes, if the majority of my normal waking hours were spent doing something even mildly fulfilling, would I still have this problem? Would I still push myself in an all-too-likely futile march toward some sort of achievement? Or, would I be content with my day's accomplishments and go to bed looking forward to the possibilities of a new morning? I can't even fathom what that would be like... the concept is so alien to me. I imagine, though, under those circumstances, that my output would be quicker and far more competent. But maybe it's the feeling of being trapped in such abject mediocrity that spurs me to try to do more, even if there's little hope of success... I'd like to think that I'd try to do better no matter how well I was doing. And that, I suppose, is good and bad. Contentment is murder to improvement, but it's still something we all strive for, isn't it? Is a life of always pushing against what you've done to achieve something more inherently better than just accepting a life that's fine, but not as good as it could be? My official goal, I guess, is to aim for the middle of those extremes, but I can't really see ever being content even if I wasn't just treading water every day.

Still, this sort of behavior, as self-aware of it being self-induced as I am, probably can't continue. I need to find a better way, at least for now, to balance what gives me substance with what pays the bills. Luckily I've got all night to think about it! Just let me crack open another Diet Coke...