Senior Year- Is it Bedtime Yet?

How close to rock bottom are you when the only thing getting you through the day is the thought of going to bed at night?

Oh my gosh, my bed. Just typing about it is giving me chills.

My bed is the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s so welcoming and comfortable and warm, and right now I’m just itching to run upstairs and crawl in. I love my bed. I really do. If my bed was a person, I’d be married to it. I swear, I would be.

But you see this all makes me sound like a psychopath. Who sits here and tells the Internet world about how much she loves her bed? Maybe it would be different if I got to spend time with my bed for more than four hours a night.

I don’t really get any sleep anymore. Numerous studies have shown that in order to be healthy, teenagers my age need to get between seven and eight hours of sleep per night. But honestly, if there is any teenager in this world that gets that much sleep every night, I’d be really interested in meeting him or her. Quite frankly, I find it impossible.

It starts out like this. Monday morning I wake up at a ghastly 5:30 a.m. I shower, get ready - whatever - head to school by 7 a.m.

I sit through classes for six-and-a-half hours, and then go to volleyball after school. By the time I get home, it’s between 6:30 and 8 p.m., depending on if I had a practice or a game. Then I have to eat, dig through my piles of homework, and fill out some college application stuff. Then it’s crawl into bed hopefully by midnight, pass out, and repeat until the weekend.

I feel like the ultimate prize in my life these days is getting to go to bed. I daydream about my bed, I yearn for my bed, I think about my bed while I’m writing an essay and end up typing a big jumble of sentence fragments that include the words “bed” or “sleep” instead of my essay topic.

Sometimes I push myself, too, using sleep as an incentive, as in, “OK, Alyssa, just finish these 30 math problems and then you can go to bed.

Or, “if I time all of my homework out perfectly, I’ll be in bed by 11:25pm and I’ll get six hours of sleep!”

My life revolves around that prized few hours I get to spend under my blankets. Everything I do is done with sleep in mind.

Do I sound really pathetic, or do I just sound like a whiny brat? I mean, I really just want to get some sleep in my life. I get to the point where I wake up to shut off my alarm and fall asleep again, all within a minute. Throughout the day, my contacts are glued to my eyes because they’re so dry and tired.

The whole situation is almost humorous to me. Most people work all day for money or food or success or something, and I work for sleep. Sleep is a necessity ... Shouldn’t I get it anyway?

And my parents wonder why I sleep until 1 on the weekends.