#my mother kept being like 'don't take melatonin it's a hormone!'

[mashkaroom]

huh, so sleep has improved quite a bit over the last few days. i’ve started going to bed around 12 and waking up around 9, though all the times i stayed awake after 9 i’ve gotten really tired again around 11 and fallen back asleep until my like 4th alarm goes off for yiddish class at 2:30. Nevertheless, this is more tenable than The Morning being the core of my rem sleep lol -- in general, based on when dreams happen, my rem sleep seems to have shifted earlier as well, based on when my dreams happen (my sense of time in dreams has actually always been quite accurate -- like if i wake up, check the time, go back to sleep, have a dream, and then wake up again, i can generally tell how much time has passed at least as accurately as during waking hours -- which, granted, is not that accurately). interestingly, my dreams between 5am and 8am ish have started being slightly more unpleasant than usual, which is not affecting my quality of life at all and might not be a long-term phenomenon. anyway, the rem-shifting’s great, and might also explain why it was always so difficult for me to wake up even if i was otherwise well rested. (tho in high school, where did i NOT sleep to make up for lost hours. on a toilet seat, on the train, on a park bench outside. u know where it was forbidden to sleep? the boston central library. and they enforced it too. why.) anyway, what seems to have helped the most is taking a melatonin pill at around the same time each day. hopefully this trend will continue, and at the very least i’ll be awake right around when my 10am classes (grumble grumble) are. also, i learned that epileptics tend to have lower melatonin levels than the average person! not sure if this means i should take more than the recommended dose or na oborot less bc it’ll take less to simulate a natural spike. i guess i will speak to my doctor. also, melatonin levels spike during seizures, which makes a LOT of sense. before i was diagnosed, i called absenses “being asleep”, bc that’s basically what it felt like. same effort to produce utterances with my actual mouth as in a dream, same sense of connectedness to reality and understanding of what it is i’m supposed to be doing as appears in certain dreams. also explains both why i’m always exhausted after tonic-clonics and why both absence seizures and tonic clonic auras manifest like that, where in auras i can barely speak and process information and have, like once or twice, actually had no recollection of anything that happened during them, then in mid-grade absences, i’m usually like, idk, 10% more aphasic than my normal Very Phasic (can u tell by how long this post is lmao? i hope nobody reads it through, this isn’t interesting info) and also, which is how i usually notice that something’s wrong, i can’t process any information that i read, and the most mild of absences manifest so close to tiredness, with maybe just a bit more heaviness in a particular place behind my eyes, that i often can’t tell until later, when i’m like “oh, the characteristic ‘not feeling connected at all to what happened this morning’ sensation”. (i’ve apparently gotten pretty good at producing minimum viable sentences and, like, Doing Activities, during auras which is actually not great bc it takes more for someone to notice that something’s off, which is relevant at least as long as i live with people i interact with in the mornings [extra parentheses, my parents whenever they were suspicious kept asking me to do multiplication, even tho it was not once effective and i kept being like. guys. we learned the multiplication table in 2nd grade. 11x11 is not information it is taking me any energy to retrieve. ask me to summarize a paragraph. they did not do this once! why?). also, studies have shown that teens who regularly take melatonin have both more and less seizures than their counterparts, which i think has much more to do with the type of kids who tend to take melatonin regularly than with its actual impact on seizures, since most of these studies were questionaires and not clinical trials that tracked how many seizures you had before and after starting regular melatonin doses. also, sleep deprivation and other sleep fuckery is a known seizure trigger, so it makes sense that depending on why and how you take melatonin it could affect seizures. anyway, future masha can use this as testimony to doctor in case “tell me all about your sleep on january 22nd” is a question that comes up