I've encountered the opinion a couple of times in my life that sleep apnea is some kind of nerd or geek failing, like allergies or poor eyesight, rather than something that humans just sort of have without consideration of social standing. It’s a bit hilarious, actually, because it’s like saying only certain types of people grow to over 6'' or under 5’5”, or have red hair.

That’s neither here nor there, though. This is about CPAPs, the bane of my all my sleeping and waking hours these past few weeks. You can’t really talk about continuous positive airway pressure machines without referring to sleep apnea, though, so just briefly: I was diagnosed about a month and a half ago, after doing two sleep studies and some blood tests to figure out why I'd always been so tired all the time. Ever since then, I’ve lived with the constant frustration and irritation of the CPAP.

Essentially what it does is push air in through the nose and/or mouth continuously throughout the night in order to maintain an open airway. So, aside from making sure that I don’t stop breathing, it also fixes my snoring. Yay!

Now, in order to make sure a mouth-breather such as myself uses such a machine effectively, I have to have the full mask (not that the nose ones are necessarily much more comfortable).

Here’s what that looks like:

So cute.

I actually went into this thinking it would be a little walk in the park. I’m a heavy sleeper and I thought the mask would be the least of my problems. In a way, I was right: the mask seems as comfortable as it can be for what it is.

The first problem was the air pressure. Literally the function it was designed for is the most uncomfortable part about it. It changes the rhythm of my breathing, and the first night I wore it, the change was so uncomfortable I laid awake for an extra hour trying to overcome this new source of anxiety. Once I got over that, I started noticing how uncomfortable the mask was.

Once I got over that, I noticed that the humidity from the air blowing through the tube connected to my face via that uncomfortable mask made my skin damp. At least it didn’t slide around on my face. Oh, wait. It did.

Then, I started getting tangled up in the tube as I tried to figure out the most comfortable way to lie down.

Then, I discovered (way too slowly) that I couldn’t sleep on my stomach at all, because either it moved my mask to where the air leaked out or dug painfully into my face.

Then, I kept moving, in my sleep, to the far side of the bed out of range of the tube, which was just the final thing on a list of reasons that I kept ripping the mask off my face, rendering the whole process pointless.

So, to cap it all off, I continued to be exhausted every day. I kept wondering why I was bothering and when this all would stop: the constant exhaustion which was more and more aggravated by this daily frustration and irritation, on top of my normal sources of anxiety and depression.

As a millennial, I feel embarrassed to confess that it took about five weeks for me to Google “tips for keeping a CPAP on.” When I finally got around to it, I stumbled on this simple trick: Wear it for a little while during the day (and as I ended up doing, an hour or so before going to bed), in order to get used to it. Now I actually get a few good nights of sleep per week, and I don’t wake up feeling like I need to immediately go back to sleep for an extra couple of hours just to feel like I haven’t been up for 24 hours already.

The lesson is, if you want anything to get better, you’re probably going to have to slog through some uncomfortable shit to start seeing any kind of progress. Fat lot of good this advice was to me before I became an adult. I never believed that everything could be so hard. I think a lot of us were given the impression that life was as easy: go to college, get a job, “work hard” and die... satisfied. And I think, for some of us, it’s hard to believe that that idea could be so wrong.