Insomnia

There seems to be an ongoing need for my mind to keep my body awake long after my body would rather be asleep. I know people have a tendency to suffer from insomnia as they age, and believe me, I have aged. Nonetheless, it seems unfair to suffer this ailment, if indeed it is an ailment. It certainly feels like an ailment, I usually feel pretty wiped out in the morning and have trouble getting started on the simplest of tasks. Often it is accompanied by headaches and generally feeling crappy. While I'm awake, however, I feel like I should be doing something constructive, working on a project, writing, painting, cleaning, doing laundry....something, anything but sleeping. To be honest, most of my insomnia is brought on by an innermost feeling of guilt, tortured soul of mine filled with regrets, fear of having done wrong in some aspect of my life, knowledge that I absolutely did do something wrong in my life, a wish that I had been better equipped to live my life better. I really don't want to purge myself here. It is too public, even if no one ever reads this bumbling rambling nonsense, I could never reveal my real self here. I have great difficulty revealing my real self to people I love and trust. Hmmm, trust, now that is something very rare for me. Only one person comes to mind when I think of who I truly trust with my innermost self. My oldest and closest friend, whom I consider to be my sister, is actually the only one that I can think of that I really trust with my secrets. My real sister, the one I grew up with, who shared a bedroom with me, I really don't trust. Not really. Certainly she knows a lot about me and has shared almost every aspect of my life over the decades, but I have too often felt an undercurrent of her dishonesty towards me. Ooops! I've already said too much. This is how my tricky brain works...I run off into tangents of thoughts and memories, uncontrolled, and it gets me into trouble. I focus on some long past 'wrong' I have felt either done towards me or that I've done. I am a firm Christian and know Christ as my savior and my forgiver of all transgressions, but, even though it is my duty to forgive, I find it enormously difficult. It takes me years to forgive others, after much hard work and prayer. I mean to completely and thoroughly forgive. I am quicker to accept fault in others than I am in myself and even though I REALLY try, I can't seem to forgive myself, hence the breeding ground for my insomnia is kept fertile and well plowed, as I seem capable of digging up every detail of any shortcomings I recognize in myself, turning them over and pulling them to the surface for examination and scrutiny. Then, instead of weeding these thoughts and memories out of my heart and mind, I carefully replant them and feed them, either with self loathing or some twisted need to "never forget so as to never repeat". My best medication seems to be the television, where I can mindlessly engross myself in a program that fills in the voids of my brain, or numbs those electrical impulses that keep digging up the crap that I try to keep buried. In any case, I think this will be my best prescription for tonight's malaise. With that, I will quit my rambling and turn on the boob-tube and drift off, hopefully to sleep. Even if only for an hour....