Sleep Deprivation

I have spent most of my life, like most people, being sleep deprived. I am a night person living in a morning world. Until the last 12 years of my working life, I always worked days. I have always put off going to bed. I knew I needed more sleep but I hated wasting all that time getting it when there was so much I wanted to do.

Over the years I have done about every type of needlework there is, I have taken classes in everything from blacksmithing to electronics to sign language. I have volunteered at church and in the community. Sleep and work cut into that time. Since I had to work, sleep was where I cut back to gain more time. We only have so many hours on this earth, why waste them sleeping.

There are consequences though. I have started nodding off in class and ended up with scribbles instead of notes. You know that feeling that you have heard everything that was said and you have been writing the whole time? Well I really was writing the whole time. The problem was that it was all in one spot. I had one spot where I had piled letter after letter on top of each other. If I had been in a cartoon I could have grabbed the tail of it and pulled it out to make sentences of it. But, I just lost all those notes.

When I was working, there were nights that I would fight sleep all night. Most of the time I was OK as long as I didn't sit down . There was one night that I was so tired and running a line that ran continuously so you didn't sit down to do paperwork, you stood at a table designed for that. I was standing at the table writing and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the floor and the guy from the next line was hanging over me saying, "How did you do that?" Fortunately, the floor at that place had one of those heavy rubber mats on it. I had dropped off to sleep in an instant and one knee buckled and I just dropped down and rolled out flat on the mat. He wanted me to demonstrate it again! Apparently, it was pretty funny to see.

I learned the hard way to put down my knitting when I start to nod. I didn't at first and I would wake up with a jerk and still having a needle in each hand, I would jerk them out. It wouldn't have been so bad if that is all that I had done but I had pulled the knitting so hard that I started a run in it and sometimes I had to rip back to bottom of that and start again.

I also have a tendency to think I know what I am doing in a pattern when I am tired and I will check it to make sure it is right. The next day when I look at it I wonder what I was thinking when I did. It sometimes is so far off that I could swear someone messed with it after I quit.

Now that I am older and wiser(?) I still put off going to sleep. I can't change a lifetime habit but I found that when you retire and don't have to get up early every day I can finally enjoy being an owl.