Trying to explain what most can't understand

I've mentioned before that I have insomnia. I often feel like people either 1. don't get the severity of it at all or 2. think that I'm talking about some short lived fling. I'm not. I'm talking about one year ago not sleeping a full night in over a year (and not because I had a baby) and then for 3 of those months sleeping maybe 4 hours a night (every single night) and being awake for 2-4 hours (again, every single night). This isn't something that's easy to get over. Near the end I literally thought I was losing my mind. It got so bad that I would scream and throw things around my room at 2 in the morning because I hadn't slept for over a year. Nothing I tried helped. I tried every single over the counter medicine there was on the market. Every One. I also tried several prescription medications, including a few that were very strong. Did not work. Even those specifically for my type of insomnia. Even writing this I feel like most of you don't get it. And that's because unless you've lived a year of your life without sleep, you don't know what it's like. I understand how sleep deprivation is torture because I've lived it.

After going to several doctors I finally went to a behavioral psychologist who suggested a simple behavioral change that worked within a week. Finally. I could sleep the entire night and not lay awake for hours on end. There are a few catches though. Like I basically can never sit on my bed again. Strike that, I can never do anything on my bed again unless it is sleeping. This might not seem like a big deal, but think for a second about all that you do on your bed. Watch TV. Fold laundry. Have sex. Nurse a baby. Now imagine you can't do any of that anymore. You have to move to a new place in the house. Not a horrible situation, but when the rest of the world can do these things and for the rest of your life you can't, it sucks. (And the research shows that once you get insomnia, you'll always have it.) I also have to have a strict bedtime and wake up time. This isn't horrible since I love schedules but it means any deviation from it for any reason causes me a lot of stress.

I've been doing well for a year. I haven't really had many nights at all that I couldn't sleep. 2 nights ago I was awake for maybe an hour. But it was the type of awake where you aren't sure if you were asleep or awake. Then last night I woke up at 3 am and never fell back asleep. So yeah, I've been awake since 3 am. What sucks is that I know I'm going to be dead tired this afternoon but if I take a nap it means I can't sleep tonight. So basically I have to slog through today on less than optimal sleep. (4.5 hours of it.) What also sucks is that since it's been 2 nights in a row that I've been awake, I'm pretty sure it means I'll be awake tonight. As long as I stick to the behavioral stuff that the psychologist told me about last year, I'll be okay but it sucks knowing that I have to go to bed knowing I'll be awake in a few hours.