Always Exhuasted
I am a Mechanical Engineer who was diagnosed with Narcolepsy back in 2003 at age 24. In hindsight I had symptoms in early High School, possibly in Middle School. I married my College Sweetie and we have 3 sons. They are all really supportive of me. I'm big into tinkering and working on cars. My Narcolepsy has affected me differently through time. I used to travel to Asia a lot for my job and I would joke that Narcolepsy was wonderful because I would sleep through all the flights and then take my medicine to adjust to the new time zone. In the past 2 years my Narcolepsy has been getting much worse and I have had to come to some hard realizations. I have been lying to myself about how much my Narcolepsy has been affecting me and trying to hide it as much as possible. That finally came to a disastrous head in the past couple months when I basically became paralyzed in my life. I am learning a lot, seeing people for help. I've realized that things that I thought were one way are really another (such as my depression is really much more anxiety). I am on Short Term Disability while I try to get my self together. My mental fog was not a good fit with my job that involved safety and working with dangerous gases. I'm currently trying to get back to basics, and trying to get my life to point of structure and order. I'm tired (ha, get it) of hiding my Narcolepsy and pretending things are normal.
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