Inktober 2019 Day 3

And It Makes It Harder To Yell At Your Kids. (Though you might be surprised)

Inktober 2019 Day 3

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Maybe

Continuing onward on my Inktober theme of hapless attempts to improve my sleep: we arrive at a more troubling intervention: mouth taping.

If you are horrified at the idea of taping your mouth shut at night, and consider me a crazy zealot, google it. I may well be trafficking in zealous craziness, but you will discover that I have a lot of company and that there is an annoying army of wellness experts and bloggers happy to describe the benefits in exhaustive detail. 

There is no doubt it is weird, inconvenient, and more than a bit demeaning: look at me, I can’t even keep my own mouth shut. And I have ripped the skin off my lips more than once.

The taping practice hasn’t fixed my sleep or my health in general, but it has definitely kept things from getting worse in several departments. It does have all those benefits. I don’t like to sleep without my tape. Ever. Really.

But when your mouth is taped close, it is challenging to yell at the teenager who has just opened your bedroom door to tell you something you did not need to know while you were sleeping, and then has left the door ajar, revealing that he has also left all the lights in the apartment on. 

But as suggested above, I have learned ventriloquist-like skills, (another benefit!) though there is reason that the tape in the drawing is puckered and crumpled. (Of course, there is the possibility that not yelling at all might be more beneficial for sleep...but more on that question later.)