i hate to take sleeping pills, but it's one of the sacrifices you have to make sometimes when you have to start training at 6am but your body tells you to go to sleep at 4am. i got some from the pharmacy a few weeks ago but have avoided using them until last night, knowing i was going to be getting up early to try to get back at least some level of fight cardio, even if i can't do a lot of the exercises.

insomnia is a funny thing. i can be utterly exhausted while running on very little sleep from the night before and still be totally unable to sleep. the closest thing i can compare it to is if you've ever had a muscle cramp that won't let go, that's what my brain feels like. at some point in the night i can feel my brain release its squeeze, and then i can finally go to bed and sleep instead of looking around my room in frustration, focusing on the shadowy right angles of corners until my eyes cross.

sleeping pills shorten or sidestep this period one way or another. some make me feel like i'm sinking slowly deeper into fatigue as my body gets heavy until i am almost conscious of crossing the threshold of sleep, like walking down a nearly level beach into the water. others i won't feel a thing; i'll be lying in bed wide awake wondering when the drug will kick in and then BAM it's morning.

these pills were different than that; i took one around 8pm thinking i would be falling asleep by nine at the latest. eleven o'clock found me lying in bed staring into corners cross-eyed in frustration when suddenly it began to look like coloured veils were being put in front of my line of sight. i shut my eyes but even the darkness went through various shades. i chased the veils across the backs of my eyelids until they floated away over a hillside i recognized from dreamland. i clearly remember feeling relieved in my dream that i was asleep.

so after training this morning (which i thankfully survived without further foot damage and only a moderate sleeping pill hangover) i checked online to see what sort of potency those sleeping pills were, thinking maybe i needed something stronger or at least different. welp, turns out "alprazolam" is xanax ! hahaha this fucking country rules...