Wildcoyote, I am sorry about your sleep problems. I hate not being able to sleep. I woke very early this morning (3:30 AM), maybe the full moon, I never sleep well with a full moon for some reason.

I am coming to terms with the fact that I am struggling more with my eating disorder than I'd like to admit, especially with excessive exercise. I feel I may have some hypomania that is contributing to the excessive exercise. Does the hypomania drive me toward it or the ED? I'm not sure. I am having body image issues feeling too fat even though I am thin, you could even say very thin, but of course, I never feel thin enough. I don't look like a walking advertisement for an eating disorder, but I know I am very thin for my height. I am seeing bones I should not be seeing and liking it. Ugh! For me, an ED is also a life-long battle. You can choose to stop it, but you honestly have to want it to stop. It is a little bit like getting on the wagon for an alcoholic except you have to confront food daily whereas you can avoid alcohol and not confront it daily.

So I walked a long time this morning..very excessive. And I didn't get enough sleep last night. I will try for a nap this afternoon. I can take a whole pill of hydroxyzine (usually I take half, but my prescription is for 1/2 to 1 full pill), and I think I will run lavender essential oil in my diffuser and dab a bit on me. That is supposed to promote sleep, and I know I need it. Sometimes, the lavender helps a bit. I think I am getting hypomanic. As I was walking, I thought of all these projects I want to do today, once my daughter wakes up. She is having bad insomnia lately, and I don't want to wake her. I also don't know what to do about it. She is a pre-teen, 10.5 years old, going into the 5th grade this school year. But why the insomnia? I hope it is not a sign of mental illness to come in her future. I had the insomnia too from an early age, and my daughter never napped or slept well as a baby or toddler either. Though I did have sexual trauma, and she has really been in zero situations where this could have happened to her while it happened to me before elementary school. And I didn't have her social & sensory issues except for being an introvert and being on the shy side, but she also seems to brush off her differences from her classmates (such as having to use the nurse's restroom to avoid the loud noise of the hand blow dryers in the normal restrooms. The nurse obviously has paper towels for washing your hands). The school was supposed to give her occupational therapy for this, but they never did. And she won't wear jeans, any type of pants (thankfully the winter climate here is such that she can get away with wearing long socks with dresses). No shorts or skirts either. School clothes shopping is such a pain for her. Cutouts and things on dresses will bother her. Also, she is tall for her age (my husband is 6'4" so this is not exactly a surprise). She has a lot of dresses from last year that still fit but would be very inappropriate with both arms up, such as doing jumping jacks during P.E. I've got to get her school clothes organized; that is one of the projects I want to start, but her room is so junky, it needs to be cleaned first, and I think I am going to have to do a lot of it because she does not want to part with toys she has outgrown. Of course, I'd keep outgrown toys that were special to her, but a lot of her toys were not. My husband is this way too as far as parting with old stuff (you should see some of the old cell phones he's kept), and I don't think he'd be much help de-cluttering her room. She also really hates change, so that may play into her issues with wanting to keep old toys.