Nineteen
When I was a kid, my mum would push the bedside drawers against the bed to act as a barrier because I tended to roll out. I eventually outgrew that, but it was a sign of the sleeping troubles I would always have. In my twenties, I had bad insomnia. I grew tolerant to sleeping tablets. My GP tried a range of other medications where drowsiness was a side effect. For a while, I had success with an antihistamine, but once I grew used to those I went back to (one set of) sleeping tablets and briefly grew addicted. The thing with the sleeping tablets is I liked the way…
Eighteen
From 2009 – 2013, I had constant health issues, starting with neck problems (that would become chronic), to back problems, to repeated ear infections, to a chest infection, to a bad sinus problem where I couldn’t breathe through my nose for months, to digestive issues (involving excruciating stomach pains) that took six months to diagnose, to bad anxiety and depression (related to starving myself because anything I ate caused pain), to reactive hypoglycemia (that took months again to diagnose), and then all the way back around to the neck and back problems. Every morning I woke and my mind would automatically perform a self-scan to see what might be problematic.…