My experience with having deadly chronic insomnia

[00:00:00]Hey guys.

[00:00:02]The video is about insomnia. Just cue the Fight Club style monologue.

[00:00:08]For 18 years, I couldn't sleep.

[00:00:10]With insomnia, nothing's real.

[00:00:13]Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.

[00:00:17]Having insomnia is like playing telephone with yourself.

[00:00:20]>> [music] >> Trying to understand the vague hints of yesterday.

[00:00:22]Nothing feels concrete. It all passes by so rapidly, yet so agonizingly slow.

[00:00:28]You isolate yourself out of the sake When you have such extreme insomnia as I do, you're forced to stop being extroverted. Not just out of the sheer tiredness that weighs your body down, but out of fear. Fear that interactional piece of information you received was just something you had dreamt or hallucinated.

[00:00:47]When my symptoms were at their worst, this happened almost daily.

[00:00:51]The amount of times I'd relay information about a subject, a person, a place, only to be looked at like I'm crazy.

[00:01:01]>> Rocco.

[00:01:02]>> Huh?

[00:01:03]Oh.

[00:01:04]Yeah. Uh your sister.

[00:01:06]You discussed planning her birthday party recently.

[00:01:09]>> I don't have a sister. Are you thinking about someone else?

[00:01:13]>> Uh >> [music] >> You see, this wasn't uncommon.

[00:01:30]I'd get used to not being able to trust my own sense of reality. I'd recap my steps and realize those moments didn't have a before and after, only a present.

[00:01:39]I must have dreamt about that interaction during my 30 minutes of sleep per day.

[00:01:43]Part of my memory were constantly missing. My life reflecting someone earning hundreds of puzzles that each had a few pieces missing.

[00:01:51]It felt like I never traveled places.

[00:01:54]Instead, I was randomly showing up at different areas simultaneously.

[00:01:58]Everything was changing all the time.

[00:02:00]I would even forget childhood stories when the hallucinations were at their worst. Sleep is one of the most vital things in your life. A third of it is spent sleeping. So naturally, my physical health also declined alongside my mental health.

[00:02:13]But the physical things I went through will have to be a separate story, I feel.

[00:02:16]Now, you may be asking, if I've been dealing with this for 18 years, how am I still alive?

[00:02:23]To that I say, like how an onion has layers, insomnia has layers. Yes, dear viewers, it's that time to get into the educational part.

[00:02:33]Around half of the population will deal with insomnia at some point in their life. The difference is those who have it long-term that may need to get diagnosed with something extreme.

[00:02:42]It can also be inherited.

[00:02:47]You see, I inherited chronic insomnia from my father.

[00:02:52]Just like him, I struggled to go to bed.

[00:02:55]I was always labeled a night owl as a kid.

[00:02:58]However, our issues were actually the opposite. I couldn't get to sleep and my dad couldn't stay asleep. A lot of my symptoms came off as quirks and only until I left home at 16 and had to try to be responsible, cracks didn't just start to show. The whole damn damn came apart so quickly. It was honestly overwhelming seeing every mental issue just be spotlighted so quickly. I tried my best to talk to others about my concerns, my bad memory, my nosebleeds, the way everything felt neither real nor fake, but it was never taken seriously.

[00:03:29]Just get off your phone. Just sleep earlier. As if it was that simple.

[00:03:33]So because of the dead ends, like anyone else would, I turned to the internet. And everything I was experiencing perfectly fit into symptoms with fatal insomnia, which is an untreatable condition that eventually causes death. So obviously, I began to panic.

[00:03:49]So, what does this all lead to? Well, >> [music] >> like so many others, I had become a slave to the modern consumerist era.

[00:04:01]Maybe this is just me, but when you're constantly sleep deprived, simple moments of pure positive stimulation can make you feel like you're on cloud nine times a thousand. It becomes an addiction. Grinding games I didn't even enjoy, buying snacks for their popularity, purchasing my 50th green sticker sheet to eventually use on something. And to avoid sleeping in the day and make my life even harder, I'd stimulate my brain as much as I could throughout the day.

[00:04:26]>> Balls.

[00:04:27]>> This is where there were some outside issues making everything worse, and I had to get hospitalized. Unfortunately, for something that wasn't insomnia, which I might talk about one day. But during my stay, I remember thinking how I couldn't live like this anymore. And eventually, after two whole years of dealing with my insomnia at its worst, I decided to see a professional.

[00:04:48]I laid out all the info, got a brain scan, blood test, and psychological evaluations. It was clear I was going to likely deal with this for the rest of my life, but there were solutions to ease the dangerous symptoms. So, I was prescribed multiple sleeping medications to try out. However, none of them were powerful enough. I had to turn to a horse tranquilizer in a tablet essentially. And this medication is so intense many people get addicted to it.

[00:05:11]Not me.

[00:05:13]It only just works enough so I usually fall asleep consistently enough for it to be deemed a suitable option for me.

[00:05:18]Where am I on my insomnia journey now?

[00:05:20]Well, I'm still a chronic insomniac.

[00:05:22]Though, only good thing is that I discovered ASMR, and I like it all, including the weird ones.

[00:05:28]>> People always calling me names like paranoid and schizo.

[00:05:33]Every time I rent a Airbnb, I'mma always check the light switches.

[00:05:38]>> And like I said before, I had a brain scan, and it appears there's no direct issue in my brain. However, it may be a neurological one. My brain simply cannot produce much melanin, nor any other chemicals that help the brain fall asleep or stay sleepy. I take cannabis to sleep now, and I hope that there's a day where I can simply sleep when I'm tired. However, I'm just grateful that there is a solution to my insomnia. So, I hope you learned something. Turns out Fight Club wasn't that far of a stretch.

[00:06:04]I put some new prints up. These all go towards medical bills, vocal surgery, and just meds in general, because well, I have to take them every freaking day to sleep.

[00:06:13]Bye. Go to bed. Go to bed. Bye. Bye.

[00:06:14]Bye. Bye. Bye. Go to bed. Bye. Bye.