Work, Mental Health, and the Occasional Sleeping Pill

Downtown Edmonton during our winter deep freeze

     Hello my good readers! No poem today. I have been writing poetry lately, but all of it is for a cool contest I am helping to get out to the public. It is called “Word On the Street” and it is a contest to win a little money and get one or more of your poems engraved on the sidewalk. I think it is just about the coolest idea to come along in some time.

Well, along with working on this poetry project, I have been doing a number of things. One of them is going to occur in just a few hours, I am on a working group to help determine human resources needs for a new Edmonton project called a “Recovery College”. I have done some things before relating to this type of thing, there will be a number of courses people can take to get themselves on the right track to mental health and wellness. Because of my experience for this sort of thing, I have been asked to put together a course of my own right in the building I live in.

There are just so many things going on in my life it is hard to accurately think about all of them. In a couple of weeks I am going to give a presentation to the Edmonton Police Recruit class about mental illness and they have expressed interest in purchasing a number of my books to provide to cadets. It really feels good to be a part of something like this. I feel a special kinship to police because I was a security guard for such a long time and I grew up with a strong military influence in my life, doing these talks is very rewarding and I get to understand that police are just regular people, sometimes with preconceived notions. What I often like to tell them is that a good number of the cadets in the class I speak to are going to experience things like depression and PTSD. I think this helps them to be more empathetic to people who have a mental illness, and no one encounters more people in the middle of a mental health crisis than police.

Along with that I am trying to keep up with my writing, working on a short story collection with a friend, and doing my best to maintain good mental health. One of the problems I am having that I wanted to discuss is sleep and sleep medications. I am very reluctant to go on regular prescription sleeping pills because of two things, they are addictive and they can affect a person’s memory. So I have been using different things that are hopefully less harmful, from melatonin to over the counter sleeping pills. One of the side effects that seem to come with this method is that on the weekend I will often sleep way too much perhaps to catch up on REM sleep. I am grateful though, I have been really good lately at getting up in time for work and other things that I need to do. As a kid I needed an alarm clock and even that was no guarantee I would get up on time.

It is scary to think about my lack of proper sleep when I was a teenager. I was constantly tired and was drinking coffee at the age of 14 and up to try and cope. There were times when I would stay up late watching TV or go out to drink some alcohol until very late and then have to wake up in just a few hours to work and it must have taken quite a toll on me. That was one thing I liked about being considered disabled when I first lived on my own, I could sleep all I wanted and it seemed that it was a healing process.

It is so hard to try and crack the code of my insomnia. For a long time I was getting a lot of strenuous exercise working setting up stages, but that didn’t always guarantee me a good sleep. I am actually starting to think that exerting mental energy is just as important as physical energy in getting yourself tired enough to sleep at a proper time and also sleep through the night.

I don’t recommend it to a lot of people with mental illnesses, but I am finding that living on my own is an incredibly rewarding experience. I don’t know if it would be if I didn’t have a very conscientious approach to my work. I am able to keep up with writing work and presentations and classes I teach very easily. But all this doesn’t come suddenly. I had to build up to it. A good number of years ago when I was a younger man I had very little faith or belief in work. I saw things like working in a coffee shop or gas station as menial work that was so beneath me that I would go out of my way to do such things as shirk responsibilities and do sloppy work, even steal. I am definitely not proud of that, but I am proud I have gone through enough changes so that I can get jobs, do a good job and feel good about doing that.

Well, dear readers, that was a bit of a long post that didn’t talk about too much. I hope you enjoy the photo I took, I am really looking forward to the weather getting better here in Edmonton and then I will be out taking a lot more photos. All the best and thanks for keeping in touch with this blog!

LG