For years I loved missing school.

From elementary to middle, you could find me faking fevers and conjuring stomach aches about every other week.

This was how I avoided the bullies, the insecurity I found in the mirror, the lack of friends, and the FitnessGram Pacer Test.

Looking back, I missed a lot that could have helped me, like opportunities to make new friends, or trips to the inside of the Somerset clock, which every student in my class got to see in first grade, but remains a mystery to me up to date because I was at the nurse with a “headache”.

Now, I find it ironic that I ever skipped at all, since I can’t go to school no matter how hard I try.

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Seven minutes ago, I got up after three hours of lying down with my eyes closed and flung everything on this bed to the other side of the room. I was screaming, and crying, and yelling at everyone who tried to help me to just leave.

When I ran out of things to throw, I sat in the corner and stared at the wall, still immeasurably angry and overwhelmingly hopeless.

Hopeless is disappointingly familiar to me these days. Hopeless is the feeling that comes with insomnia. It’s watching your grades drop two letters when you can’t wake up in the morning. It’s looking at your 30th absence in 1st period. It’s typing a blog after having a breakdown in the middle of the night, or should I say morning. It’s feeling sick to your stomach with physical exhaustion, and looking at the screen through eyes heavy from crying.

I carry hopeless in my backpack every day.

But anger is terrifying. Anger is something I have felt very few times in my life. I haven’t looked at a person with hatred for three years, grudges do not stick easily to me, and animosity is not among my stronger character traits.

Now, however, I am typing this post feeling about 84% irritated, just coming out of a fit of the most pure, uncontrollable rage I have ever had, feeling mostly psychotic right now, and also just a little sorry for myself, absolutely exhausted, but not tired enough to sleep.

I am writing this sitting on a completely bare bed, with everything that was on it less than an hour ago strewn across my bedroom floor; three pillows, two blankets, and one pair of glasses which I can’t find anywhere.

That leaves, me, the thin pink laptop, pistachio green bedsheets which make me want to throw up, aching eyes without glasses, mental instability, insomnia, and a half finished blog post.

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Though the exasperation and the will to write a blog post at 2AM are new occurrences, the events of the night have been a familiar, ever worsening cycle for the past few years.

Insomnia visits me almost every other day now, or if I’m as lucky as I have been recently, three days in a row.

I go to bed at a fairly decent time, and lie there for 3-5 hours with my eyes closed, before I have to open them and realize that I hadn’t been sleeping for the past few hours, and I wasn’t going to be able to for the next few hours. This usually proceeds to end up in a sudden mental breakdown, followed by a few more hours of lying awake in bed, and even getting to see a very tumblr pastel sunrise in the morning before hearing my Jonas Brothers alarm go off at seven and trying to stand up.

Shortly after, my body gives me four colorful options:

1. almost pass out
2. throw up
3. have a migraine that gets worse every time
4. literally pass out

All options lead to me missing another day of school, adding height to my impressive tower of absences, which is in theory taller than Suz ( @suedogdropstunes follow her on SoundCloud).

There is a moment every time it happens where I have to accept that I physically cannot make it to school. In this moment I hope that my parents know I’m trying my best, I hope that my teachers aren’t disappointed with me, I hope that the school will start to try and help me rather than encourage me to drop courses, I hope colleges will look past my GPA when evaluating me as a person, I hope my classmates don’t think I’m a slacker who can’t handle her extracurriculars or involvement in the school, and I hope the grade book has mercy.

I hope, and that’s all I can do, because despite the medicine and therapy, the insomnia like a lot of things; is out of my hands.

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Writing helps me reason through my problems, and I usually figure out a solution to the issue by the time I’m ready to wrap these posts up.

If I could reason through my insomnia in 1037 words and call it good, this would have been over years ago.

But I can’t.

Sometimes you do everything right in life things don’t work out. I can drink chamomile tea, and take melatonin, and talk to my therapist, and count sheep, and practice breathing in for five counts and out for eight, and still I can’t sleep.

Something so simple, so necessary; that had I not had insomnia it would have been taken for granted every night that I could close my eyes and rest.

Sometimes you get in bed at 9:30PM and fall asleep at 3:00AM, either missing your crucial classes, or going through the day feeling more like a human bean than a human being, and soon enough, going through weeks feeling like 1/4th of yourself and forgetting what you were like as a well rested person, forgetting that you weren’t usually so annoyed, or unfocused, or dejected, or full of anxiety.

When insomnia makes you feel empty, and depressed, and weak, it’s easy to forget you’re being deprived of a basic human need because you forget your potential and personality on 8+ hours of sleep.

The only thing to do is keep to trying everything, and to hope. To hope that everyone understands, and to hope it will work out.

I can only think of one thing I have absolute control over in this situation, and that is hope for myself; knowing that I won’t give up on myself if or when everyone else does. Knowing that I won’t just accept this as regular no matter how difficult the situation gets. Knowing that I am capable of far more than getting bad grades and feeling sorry for myself. Knowing that my feeling and potential are uncontainable, and that I will not lose myself in my sleeping disorder.

I know I will get through this, because my belief in myself is as strong and unwavering as I am.