luna-azzurra:
Quick tips for writing Sleep Deprivation
☽ Memory becomes absolute garbage. Like “why am I in the kitchen?” garbage. “What was I saying?” garbage. Their brain is running on buffering screens and regret.
☽ Fine motor skills? Ha. They’re dropping everything. Pens. Phones. Entire moral compass. They’re basically a malfunctioning claw machine.
☽ Hallucinations creep in. That jacket on the chair? Suddenly a person. That noise? Definitely doom. Everything becomes mildly haunted.
☽ Time gets weird. Five minutes feel like a year. A full hour disappears and they swear they blinked wrong.
☽ Irritation skyrockets. They get mad at chairs. At air. At gravity. At the audacity of other humans continuing to exist.
☽ Their voice sounds weird. Slow, scratchy, like they swallowed sand.
☽ They walk like a drunk baby giraffe. Walls suddenly jump closer. Floors rise unexpectedly. Coordination said: “I’m out.”
☽ Zoning out becomes a hobby. They stare at random objects like they’re trying to understand quantum mechanics.
☽ Vision blurs in and out. Like someone smeared Vaseline over their eyeballs out of spite.
☽ Their body just hurts. Not a dramatic pain, just the “why does my skeleton feel like it’s buzzing?” pain.
☽ Food cravings go feral. They’d fight someone for a stale cookie.
☽ Terrible choices. They will absolutely say “I’m fine” while making decisions that end in disaster.
☽ Random emotional implosions. Crying because their sock feels wrong? Yes.
☽ Cold hands. Cold feet. Cold heart. (Okay maybe not the last one, but it feels like it.)
My partner just sent this post to me and pointed out that a lot of these are also how you’d write chronic fatigue.
(via i-will-write)