Sleep: The Final Boss of Recovery

I’ve got the CPAP. I’ve got the sleeping pills. I even gave up my beloved evening Scotch. Latuda knocks me out, sure—but leaves me so restless I’m ready to burrow through the mattress and into the floorboards. And still, I wake up feeling like I never slept at all.

Sleep has become the last missing puzzle piece in my recovery, and like most final pieces, it’s doing its best to be elusive.

Trazodone? That was a cruel joke. Three days awake. Three. Days. No one with schizophrenia should ever be forced to test the structural integrity of their sanity by staying awake for that long. I was told it would help. It didn’t. It hurt. A lot.

Eventually, I found something that works—well, “works” in air quotes. It gets me to sleep, but it doesn’t undo the fragmented rest Latuda leaves behind. And let’s not forget I’m juggling twenty pills a day. There’s no such thing as an uncomplicated night of sleep when your med list looks like a CVS receipt.

Then came Seroquel.

Seroquel is an antipsychotic that allegedly helps with sleep. In reality? I didn’t sleep through the entire month of January. And I’m not talking “restless nights” or “light sleep.” I’m talking should’ve-just-played-PlayStation-until-dawn levels of insomnia. And February? Nearly as bad. I eventually crawled back to Latuda. Had I waited longer, I might’ve crawled somewhere less voluntary—like the psych ward.

This was all happening during the final weeks of my business accelerator, when we gave our closing presentations. Also during this time, I went from working a half-shift a week at Goodwill to three full days. The money’s nice. The toll on my body and business? Not so much.

Add 15 pounds of stress weight, a medication hangover that lasted until May, and the general chaos of trying to bootstrap a business while managing schizophrenia… and, well, I’m still here. And the website is so close to launching I can taste the HTML.

No, I won’t have all my services up yet. But every iPhone repair I offer via mail-in service will be live. I call my shipping packaging RestoreBox™, and my ultrasonic cleaning service RestorePort Soniclean™. I’m not 100% sold on that name, but it does what it needs to do for now—just like me.

Progress is slow, frustrating, and honestly a little messy. But it’s progress. And that’s something to feel good enough about today.

Repair, Resell, Recycle!

This post held together with duct tape, determination, and ChatGPT.