12 years of no rest and I'm at the end of my rope

Here's my tale of woe, and I just cannot seem to get it right:

I was born an insomniac. I struggled sleeping deeply as a young child, which bled into my teenager years. I became a junkie (my term of choice) and began using nasal cocaine like it was nobody's business.

When I was 18, I spent a year in rehab getting clean. It stuck. However, after detox, my appetite came back and I gained a good chunk of weight. The "techs" at the rehab would wake me up nightly because I was choking in my sleep and they were worried I was going to die. I was also sleeping with my eyes open and having ultra vivid nightmares. But not much else was done about it. As you can image, much trauma was had during the roughly 6 years I was using. Well, God sends funny gifts; I was raped at my halfway house at the tail end of my rehab stint. So, you know, more trauma. I am a male, for those pondering.

My parents thought it wise that I immediately attend college. I had been the deeply damaged, smartest kid in the room trope for my whole life.

During my first year of college, I was in a very minor plane crash that scared the living hell out of me (and everyone else on board). I already had a severe fear of heights and flying in particular to begin with (my nightmares often involve being in or watching a plane crash).

All of college was exhausted 24/7, choking so loud in my sleep I could scarcely have apartment mates. A brilliant small town doctor prescribed me seroquel, which would knock me out like a light, but still with the choking and vivid dreaming and no rest had.

Let me take a pause here and say, like many, I come from a severely dysfunctional family. During college, my father, a raging narcissist with a god complex, ran away and married a woman my age. My mom, who is severely, severely borderline, was left to care for my brother who has debilitating cerebral palsy (think cant walk, can't talk, diapers, can't eat through his mouth). She is god awful with judgment, particularly money. During this period I went broke giving her every cent I had and I was driving 2 hours back and forth to help her manage (she is crazy lazy and delusional...for example, she currently has 17 cats and there are at least 10 buried, by me, in the backyard). I had severe depression as a kid/teen but not really anxiety. As soon as I came home from rehab my anxiety grew exponentially with each passing year.

Well, the smart kid, iron will thing kept playing out. I did great in college. Hilariously, my crazy mom ruined my morning taking the LSAT's and my average score dropped 12 points down to the initial base score I got when I started a prep course. Long story short, still high enough to go to a good law score.

I started my first year of law school, stopped taking the seroquel. Still choking, still vividly dreaming, still never resting. The levels of anxiety I felt during my 1L year were...indescribable. I started drinking heavily every night and eating fast food, 3 meals a day. I gained over 100 lbs. in less than a year. I was even going to class still drunk some mornings. Well, the smarts paid off and I was at the tippy tippy top of my class and managed to transfer to my dream law school, which happened to be in my home city.

Well, I refused to live with my family, and I managed to score some ridiculously prestigious and high paying jobs just as a law clerk/intern. Every penny was given to my mother in some borderline situation, which now she has no recollection of.

I stopped drinking and started eating better but I was still choking and vividly dreaming and getting no rest.

Then I started fainting. And once, it was alone in my apartment. It scared me to death. I didn't have any money and honestly I was doing poorly in school so I talked to a very caring dean who gave me a medical LOA to try and fix my situation. I deduced from internet research that I might have sleep apnea, so I went to see a sleep specialist. He was entirely disinterested but he did have me do a sleep study and I had obstructive sleep apnea. He prescribed me a tiny pressure setting on a nasal mask. The first issue was the machine was actually dysfunctional from the get go. A second machine proved fruitless. He was very disinterested given my lack of insurance.

I then figured out from internet research that I was definitely a mouth breather and needed a full face mask. I ordered an Airsense 10 machine, downloaded sleepyhead, perfected my pressure range. Most night my hypopneas/apneas are literally zero.

And yet, I still never felt rest and was plagued by horrible nightmares so vivid I was confusing them with reality. I went back to law school giving it everything I had with one last push. Rocketed to the top 1/3 by end. Highest grade in a bunch of classes. And during 2L and 3L, the anxiety and exhaustion grew to untenable proportions. It was like I was running a race and I graduated and that was it, that was all I had.

I started becoming a useless zombie from the exhaustion. Between foggy brain, exhaustion, and anxiety, I couldn't handle law jobs were you have to be quick and thick skinned and move real fast.

I took a bar prep course, but I never studied because I knew I just didn't have it in me. Never took the bar.

The anxiety and exhaustion began to plague every aspect of my life. Paranoid, temperamental, constantly angry, i literally cut most of my friends (including some lifelong friends) out of my life without a word. I was just too tired to deal with anything or anyone. Heavily isolated. For awhile I did remote work from, little law clerk duties, but that dried up. And I should mention the last 2 years of law school I did therapy once, sometimes twice a week. It was utterly useless - she was smart and meant well but she was brand new and I was too much.

It's gotten to the point where I cannot function as a human being. I am someone that graduated in the top 1/3 from a top 40 law school and I live at home with my borderline mom. It's shameful for me and horribly toxic environment. I started developing an online gambling problem because it required me to do nothing but sit half awake for awhile.

I can't drive. My memory is unbelievably bad. Short and long term. I get mixed up and confused and angry. My brain is a constant dense cloud.

In the last year, I have trimmed down my weight to 209, which is still definitely overweight for 5'9 but big improvement. I eat healthy. I started seeing an extraordinarily expensive, renowned sleep doctor but I get like, 1 appointment every 6 months. I started seeing a new therapist, who I found very helpful. I also started seeing a psychiatrist. I've seen a bunch of them and have been highly disappointed. Been on way too many meds that did next to nothing. This woman is the perfect fit for me. I had always turned down any psych's offer of benzo's out of a fear of relapse. She convinced me to take them. Given the severity of the issues, she started me of at 2mg of clonazepam (klonapin), once in the morning, once in the evening. Honestly hardly phases me. And she had me taking 350 mg of trazodone and it was PERFECT for like 2 weeks. I went to sleep, blackness, woke up, no nightmares of traumatic memories or being tortured. I was of course continuing my CPAP therapy and my sleepyhead numbers were amazing. And then the bottom fell out. I started feeling unbelievably groggy all day all of a sudden. Not the same kind of tired, just pure haziness and groggy. Not functional at all. Any less than 350mg on the trazodone and I have the light sleep, vivid dreams, no rest sleep i've always had. She prescribed me 50 mg of hydroxyzine HCL to supposedly help with the grogginess. The instant I take that stuff I was the worst nightmares and the lightest sleep. I am calling her on monday and I suspect her next move is to try amitryptiline/elavil.

Not that I had any rest as a kid or teen, but I was young then and lived fast and it didn't affect me so much. My days are now utterly pointless; I'm so exhausted I can't do basic tasks, I can hardly take of myself at all. My family is entirely disinterested in my situation and has made that abundantly clear. I'm to the point where I feel like someone who was severely beaten in the head with a baseball bat but survived somehow. I can do nothing. And I try. I try my ass off. I go on long walks. Make sure my circadian rhythm is right. Drink water, cut down caffeine, avoid napping, etc etc. But 12 years later it is just a living hell and not even a half-life, a nothing life. I stay strong for those around me because to my sister I'm her dad and to my mom I'm her husband and I've been psychologically trained to be a caretaker and appear strong as I can. It takes the anonymity of the internet for me not to admit some odd sexual fetish or encounter, but just that I am in pain. All the time. My days are painful and I feel like I go to Hell each night and I just cycle again and again. X-files - I want to believe. I want to believe some magic combination will restore my health after a long time of clearing up the sleep debt. I used to be the smartest kid in the room. Now I can't answer basic questions or take care of myself. And on top of it, I've got some weird horrible gastrointestinal problem going on that predates all these medications I've been putting off seeing someone about because I just don't have the money. But I'm just gonna go to the hospital for that on Monday.

Some days I feel this is karmic justice for the s**t I pulled as a junkie. But I want to believe. But it feels like there aren't many more days in me. I just want to sleep.

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