i am neurotic.

When I’m lying in bed and I can’t hear my boyfriend breathing, I’m afraid he’s died and I have to shake him awake. The same goes for any sleeping person in my presence.

When I wake up in the morning I HAVE to use the toilet, brush my teeth and swab my ears with Q-tips even if I’m going back to bed. Otherwise I won’t be able to relax.

i have to sleep with my TV on and when i start getting sleepy, i turn the volume down to 3 or 4 and put the timer on for 2 hours, just so i know it will still be on as i’m falling asleep. it’s not the noise, its the light.

I could never stay over my friends houses when I was little, because I would constantly worry that something would happen to my family. I would call home at three a.m. and claim that my stomach hurt. My mom and sister recently told me that they used to bet on what time I’d call home.

I cannot go to sleep without my slippers being right in front of my bed, ready for me to step in them right when I get out.

Before I go to sleep each night, I have to stuff a blanket under my door, and make sure there are absolutely no little gaps where anything could come in. There can be no places where I could even mistake a gap for a shadow, it has to be perfect. If I do not do this, I can’t sleep. I feel as though something will slip under my door during the night and hurt me.

After I learned that REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep is the type of sleep that makes you truly rested and that the first cycle of it happens within an hour and a half of continuous sleep, my naps now have to be a minimum of ninety minutes. If I get woken up in the middle of the nap, and thus am not able to get my daily amount of nap REM sleep, I get extremely upset that I wasted my time and end up feeling especially tired the rest of the day.

The blanket on my bed has checks woven into it. When I make my bed in the morning, I must make sure the lines of the checks run perfectly parallel to the sides and headboard. Needless to say I have to get up extra early every day.

I can’t fall asleep unless the open end up my pillowcase faces the left side of the bed. It does not matter if I’m in a hotel, on a couch, or at home. I have tried many times to fall asleep with it facing the other side and after one or two hours of tossing and turning finally give up and flip the pillow over.

If I wake up in the middle of the night, I have to get up and brush my teeth, otherwise I can’t fall back to sleep. It makes me feel gross if I don’t.