Insomnia Chronicles Part 2: Dating again & finding community

Image by Jared Rice via Unsplash

My heart doesn’t stop racing. A beating I’ve come to be familiar with since moving into this apartment yet it’s a new beat that I have never felt. Something it’s been trying to tell me that I have not been able to listen to.

My body knows, my heart knows and my brain even knows. All of me seems to know, yet my conscious mind and tender heart seem to throw the pillow down and want me to keep resting, nesting, staying home where it is safe. Even though everything within me is craving more connection, more socialization. Just more.

It’s pride disability month and although I’ve never considered myself disabled, I have come to learn that having an autoimmune disorder is in fact considered to be a disability in many parts of the country. When my racing heart doesn’t allow me to rest in the evenings, which has been often lately, I also don’t recover well or at all during the day. I drag, I am unable to work much and I need a nap.

I am somehow able to actually fall asleep in the middle of the day, despite never ever being a nap person or a person who needed to rest like this before my hypothyroidism became much worse in the middle of pandemic after I contracted Covid for the second time. I rest at home most days in fear that I won’t actually be able to handle going out like I want to - or like I have in the past.

I used to be an energizer bunny - just going and going and going day in and day out from morning until night until my body would just drop at the end of the day. This is how I enjoy spending most of my days, even now, but unlike in the past, now, I don’t go much of anywhere during the week or even on the weekends due to my extreme fatigue. When, I sleep well, my medication seems to work better but when I don’t sleep well (like I haven’t this week), I drag. The bags under my eyes look like golf balls, my skin looks like it’s sagging, though I know I must be the only one who notices the gray skin spots telling me to rest.

I went on a date for the first time in two years a couple of weeks ago. We had about three or four dates in total over the course of two weeks during which time I realized how much I enjoy spending my time with a romantic partner and also during which time I struggled to maintain my energy during some of these dates. I’ve gotten better at holding my boundaries with while dating and asking for what I need despite knowing that what I need is a lot.

This week, I haven’t had any dates. Our romance seemed to dissolve when I got my period last week and it made me realize how much my entire being has been needing (not even craving; I’ve traveled past craving to a primal need) romance, connection and intimacy. Somehow, despite talking on the phone or texting late into the evening which usually bothers me, I was able to sleep better than I have in months during these two weeks.

This week, my heart has felt a collapse of attention. It’s strange to feel this way when you know the person you’ve finished dating is not someone you want to keep seeing but you also feel in your bones how much fun it was and how much your body has needed it.

And it is this loneliness that I realized was spurring me to binge late into the evenings when I haven’t been able to sleep and I haven’t been able to sleep due to an increased sense of dis-ease and anxiety about my social connections. Everything comes full circle. Everything is connected.

To me, being recovered from binging means that I know I could relapse at any time and that I need to keep my environment ready and happy. I need to build a life around myself that is full of activity, love, community and connection. That I need to be of service to others because it is that feeling of being needed by another person that makes one feel like they belong.

It feels like a simple concept but it’s not one I fully understood until recently. I never felt needed or wanted by my family of birth and still don’t in many ways. As I was reading this delightful book called The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi I understood the concept of community and care, possibly for the first time ever - and it altered the way I’ve been thinking about living my life.

The Courage To Be Misunderstood is about making connections with others and that conflict of any kind in ones life is always an interpersonal conflict with another person. The teachings in this book are based on Adlerian Psychology, which I knew nothing about before.

So, here I’ve been focusing on my past so I can better my future and my present when Adlerian Psychology asks one to forget about the past completely and just live from moment to moment. Trauma doesn’t exist, he says. It’s something the mind constructs to give a person what they subconsciously desire. He even goes to say that we desire the conflicts that have caused us trauma. It was wild reading this perspective on trauma and healing at first, yet as I did I began to understand that the present moment and our willingness to let go of the past by accepting ourselves completely is what allows each person to move forward in the continuous present while living “free of trauma”. In this way we move beyond are past and the conflicts that have shaped us and focus on bettering our interpersonal relationships in this present moment instead. This creates room to build relationships and communities that are horizontal and equal to one another, rather than focusing on ego based relationships of hierarchy, which often lead to interpersonal conflict.

The idea, I’ve gathered is that when we see ourselves and everyone as equal beings who are simply here to relate to one another, rather than people who are either better than or less than to us, we are able to embody a sense of joy and happiness because we can understand that building these relationships is what allows us to hold our energy in such a way as not to be discouraged when someone dislikes us.

When I think about my traumas, my past and even my late night binging behaviours this past year, I realize that they are in fact rooted in the vertical relationships Adlerian Psychology labels as unequal and hierarchical. Maintaining recovery of any kind will always be about how I can relate to myself and to others in a more balanced, open, affectionate, helpful and non-judgmental way, isn’t it?