blogsleep
I just discovered the “Details” dropdown in my feed reader. I am well aware that there are heaps of functionality in Google Reader that I completely ignore, so no need to confirm that little chestnut, but this one kept me interested for several minutes by clicking down the details for all of the blogs I subscribe to.
This was, erm…humbling. The detail shows how many people subscribe to the feed of the blog. The non-anonymous writing blog that I keep – well, I don’t really keep it, it’s more there, and I very occasionally write a post in it when the mood strikes me to write about writing – had only a single subscriber: myself. Mars is Heaven had the third-lowest number of subscribers of any blog in my feed (not counting the writing blog, which means I have two spaces in the bottom five, awesome). So I guess it can be confirmed that very, very few people actually care about what goes up here.
I realize this should not matter much. During the short sabbatical I took earlier this year, I continued to post my thoughts privately when they occurred, and this was helpful in recording and purging but did not satisfy me. I need to feel that I’m putting something out to the world. Of course, thinking about it, perhaps the reason I’ve gotten away from writing fiction and trying to publish it is because I have this blog: giving it away for free, using up all my creativity here. It’s a help to put down my thoughts every day, or, like yesterday’s post, to do a writing exercise. But it may also be a mistake. My brain will not stop nagging me about fiction writing and how I have to get back to it, but every night I just don’t do it. Every morning I come here, instead.
I find myself unsatisfied with the blog, in general. Not what I’ve written, but the reaction: I have failed to set the world on fire. I guess that will always be so; I don’t want to market or promote myself (what would I market or promote, anyway? I do not have a single topic that would draw people), and comments will never be a sufficient number or contain a sufficient understanding of what I was getting at. I am too much of a control freak and a perfectionist, I will always be looking for the perfect comment or the perfect number of them that never comes.
That is my fault and no one else’s, so please do not take offense.
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In my youth, I struggled with insomnia, from elementary school all the way through college. When I was in high school, I discovered the melatonin in my dad’s medicine cabinet. (Valley of the Dolls I have never been.) I took it occasionally and was amazed at how in twenty minutes I dropped right off to sleep, when normally it would be an hour or two or three before I finally dozed. I never took it very regularly, though, just when I absolutely couldn’t get to sleep and I hoped Dad wouldn’t notice me swiping a couple of his pills. During college, I found that a more active day helped me to sleep more deeply, and with a few periods of exception, the sleeping mostly went well for several years.
About a year ago, I started having trouble sleeping again. This time it was not sleeping through the night – suddenly being dead awake at 2:30 AM, 4:30 AM, etc. – and early waking, dozing unsatisfyingly for an hour or longer before the alarm went off. It led to a lot of weary afternoons. So I started taking melatonin regularly, as a supplement, every night before bed with all my other pills (fish oil, magnesium for my heart, good ol’ progesterone). And I slept well, through the night, happily (whatever my dreams may have been).
I started to wonder in the last couple of weeks whether the regularity with which I take melatonin is what’s causing me to be so tired lately – whether my system has become so saturated with the compound that I’m not fully awake. (I’m trying all kinds of variables to pull out of this fatigue before I surrender and go to the doctor.) So, at the beginning of this week, I stopped taking the melatonin. And of course, sleep has become the same frustrating struggle it used to be. I can’t drift off easily, I haven’t slept deeply, I’ve woken too early, and I’ve become sleepy at strange times (nodding off at 6:00, for instance, but wide awake at 10:00). It has been a tiring week. During the day I feel jumpy, distracted, and over-wired, as if I’ve had caffeine.
I don’t know whether this means that it was a good thing or a bad thing to go off the melatonin. It’s possible that my brain just does not secrete enough of it, and not being on it is fucking up the synthetic circadian rhythms that the supplement has helped to create in me. On the other hand, maybe being on it has caused a dependency in my brain, and I don’t secrete enough because I’m getting enough through the supplement, and I’m feeling the jolt of my body not being able to catch up just yet.
I don’t know. I just feel like crap and want to be able to sleep without being fatigued all day.
July 28, 2010 at 11:30 am
Have you tried valerian to help you sleep? Some people who have a hard time with melatonin do well with it. I’ve used valerian as needed because it didn’t cause the groggy, I-just-can’t-fully-wake-up feeling melatonin did for me. It might be worth a try for you.
I have not tried valerian, in part because melatonin has always worked for me and never given me the grogs until now. I might try it, thanks for the suggestion!
August 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm
I don’t think my feed reader has those features, and I think I’m glad.
Obvious and obligatory disclaimer “a number of things could affect the feed reader stats causing an undercount of your regular readers” goes here.
My daily hits don’t at all match the number of subscribers I have – that number is much higher. However, the plain fact is, only x number of people have subscribed to my blog via Google Reader, whereas x thousand number of people have subscribed to, for instance, Sundry’s. That’s what was getting me down.
My readership is down to something like 50-60% of where it was last year. I think a significant portion of that is Vix’s blog dying a slow death, and thereby nobody’s reading my comments there and clicking over. But aside from that I really don’t know what to make of it. I worry that I’m not saying anything important and/or interesting, and that may be partially correct, but I think that’s also my default blame-myself mode.
I think it comes down to what I expect out of my blog, and part of that is realizing that I had expectations that I hadn’t acknowledged. I didn’t see anything out there that was writing precisely the sort of stuff I wanted to see, the sort of stuff I’d write, so I filled that gap. But beyond that, I wanted others to come by and say “Gee, I’d been waiting for somebody to write this sort of stuff, too!” and while some have done so, I guess on some level I was hoping there would have been more of us.
I look back now and my blog is both a lot more trivial and a lot less amusing than it has been, and than I’d like it to be. I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of people this way that I’ve grown to consider friends, and they keep me amused and involved enough (by indulging my petty vanity) that I’m not in any danger of reaching the pull-the-plug point, but I have that vague midlife-crisis feeling of “is this it? Isn’t there more to it? Can’t I do better?”
Like you, I’m realizing that there never will be a perfect point – the one time I had that post about sex and the comment section lit up, I was thoroughly excited but by the end of it I was also exhausted! – so I’m wondering where my equilibrium point is, and how I can fumble my way in that direction.