Ugh, the whole world lives like this?

I really dislike the term "brain hack" because of the noncooperative mind/body dichotomy it represents. I prefer to understand and work with systems in a more comprehensive way than the term indicates. However, I've been using a brain hack lately to help sleep and it's been pretty revealing to me about one of the reasons I don't fit into society.

So I guess 85% of Americans use caffeine regularly (not 85% of adults, interestingly) but I had been opting out for the last decade and a half (?) or so because it did bad things to my mind. Caffeine blocks the receptor for your body's sleepiness chemical, so your body can't feel when it's sleepy, which causes your body to build extra sleepiness receptors, so then when you don't have caffeine to block some of them you feel extra sleepy.

I'd been sleeping poorly for awhile and it was messing me up, so I started drinking caffeine many mornings (I think it takes two days for physical withdrawal to finish and for the body to clear out the extra channels, so I'll take it for some days and then do a couple days without, like that). This isn't anything fancy, just a nice cup of tea, which I very much enjoy.

What this does after a couple days is replace my normal circadian rhythms with the rhythm of drinking caffeine. I normally have a bit of a biphasic sleep pattern naturally in the winter, with an hour or two around 2 or 3am that I want to be awake. When I'm stressed or in a bad way I can't get back to sleep after that first wake-up.

With semi-regular caffeine in the morning, 2 or 3am onwards is when there's the least caffeine in my body. The semi-regular use of caffeine is to create extra sleep chemical receptors, so I'm most tired and it's easier to sleep in the morning like that. It's made my sleep a little more solid as long as I time the caffeine correctly.

I also now understand why or how people sleep in. This structure removes the normal way I wake up - going from sleep to waking smoothly and entirely - and replaces it with a bit more struggle to come up out of sleep, and some grogginess even after waking up and going into a lighted place. It also allows me to sleep late in the morning, which I've never been able to do.

I don't really enjoy the feeling; I feel more tired more often than I do on my normal circadian rhythm, and I don't like not waking up cleanly. But I think until I sort out a better exercise and social schedule to support my normal sleep routine, this is what I'll be using. No wonder my normal self doesn't fit in with society properly in the mornings; I've never been correctly drugged to do so before.

Within and before

It was awhile ago I came to terms with my dad living inside me: first my stepdad, charming, insecure, demanding, controlling, smart but maybe not clever, failing his whole life, pretentiously stringing together obscure references in patterns no one else saw, never letting anything go.

Sometime after that I came to terms with my dad living inside me, at least how I picture him from the small fragments I have; he ran off when I was very young so as not to hurt me, mom said. He lived in the bush for awhile in Florida, I was told. He was happy at the end, I was told, and left to ponder the implications of that. Hard relate, to be honest.

It's now, in this spacious winter when I'm alone up in my home, splitting wood and hauling water, that I am finally coming to terms with my mom living inside me. For so much of my life she has been the only parent I know. So much of my resistance in life has been to her voice, has been to learning not to have her voice be mine. It takes a lot of silence for me to finally hear the whispers of her as an accepted part of me. It doesn't escape me, though, that I am so much of her embodied, and with the exception of her marriages my life echoes hers in broad strokes in many ways.

It feels like something profound will happen when I love all the people who are parts of me, as parts of me, fully and without reservation. I'm not there now but it seems within mindshot, a couple glades over, a little ways down the path.