I’m back to talk more about sleep. Here is my post from yesterday in which I did talk about sleep and what I was planning to do (for once! I kind of stuck to the topic). I ended by saying I was planning on staying up for 48 hours, and the minute I typed that, I was so exhausted. I mean, I’m fatigued all the time, but there are spurts of extreme tiredness that lasts a day or two.
There are two ways I can go with this. One is to try the 48 hours staying up and no sleeping route. That is a very hard route. Going down that path would be me trying to keep adding to it and reaching 72 hours. That would be pretty difficult, but I think I could do the 48 hours. Maybe not right now because I’m so tired, but at some point.
The other route is just to sleep whenever I’m about to fall over without regard as to what time it is, which would be easier. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair at my computer, and then I do this weird (and aggravating) thing of sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, and repeat.
I’ve also had it where I was watching a video on my laptop (lying on my couch), and I would have to repeat the same section several times because I kept falling asleep in ten-minute chunks. I was too stubborn to actually take a nap, though, because…my brain is broke? I joke, but not really. I would not say my brain is broken, but I would say that’s the way my brain works.
It’s so frustrating. I’m trying to accept that it’s not me being stubborn or a contrarian. It’s not me deliberately sabotaging myself. It’s how my brain works. That’s not to say that I have to just throw up my hands and say there’s nothing I can do about it, but I do think it would help if I didn’t view it as me being deliberately ‘bad’.
It’s difficult because that’s how I was viewed in my family–and how that kind of behavior is viewed by society in general. There is a narrow range of behavior that is considered acceptable, and woe be to the people who strayed too far outside those lines. These days, there seemed to be a little more tolerance of some divergence, but not much. It’s still a very narrow band of what kind of oddness is acceptable, and it’s rarely much.
I have mentioned the double empathy problem before, which is that it’s hard when autistic people and allistic non-autistic) people talk because of the very different mindset. Usually, it’s up to the autistic person to adapt and try to be ‘normal’ in order to fit into society. And if the autistic person doesn’t mask enough, they are excoriated for being weird, not trying, being rebellious, etc.