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I step out of the super-modern car park and make my way down the hill.

“Just off to see my psychiatrist,” I had joked on the phone to MindReader. And now I’m back here, at the sleep clinic.

I was last here on June 23rd 2011. There is no significance in me remembering the date; it is just something I do, have always done. It was warm, but raining, and it took me an age to find the building from the car park at least a mile away.

I sat in the waiting room in a black dress and tights, soaked through and grumpy at nine o’clock in the morning, having been to sleep at 2am.

I didn’t know it then, but that appointment would change things for me more significantly than any other doctor I’d seen throughout my entire illness. I won’t re-hash what he said, but suffice to say I’m still doing almost everything he told me to.

While I am sure most of my problems with sleep were very well-disguised psychological problems, I am still taking part in a sleep study for the next two weeks out of interest and to rule out any physical problems with sleep. While my sleep is much, much, much better than it was, it is still rare for me to be able to sleep before 11pm, even when I have got up at five in the morning and traisped around all day.

As I sit, waiting to pick up my device which I have to wear at home for two weeks, which looks like this (but there is only one watch):

(and which I would usually photograph myself, but I am trying to be less of a perfectionist these days), my phone goes off. I look down. It’s five to nine.

“Sleep clinic,” says my phone.

I remember the moment I set the alarm. It was 11am, after I’d seen the sleep man and was sitting in the very swish waiting room, waiting for paperwork. I remember setting the alarm, being unable to imagine February 2012; how my life would be.

Everything was up in the air, then. I wasn’t earning any money. I didn’t know what would be happening with my career, or how I’d cope if I did start that. I couldn’t sleep.

Now, I set another alarm, for April, the next available appointment, for me to review the test results. I wonder how life will be then. It doesn’t seem far away, but thinking of leaving the house without a coat, scarf and gloves, of Easter eggs and flowers popping up through the grass feels years away. I wonder if I’ll still have my clean slate: not a single day off so far, for just a week shy of six months.

Everything has changed since that rainy day in June. It’s raining now, too, but the rain hangs in the air like a fine mist. Everything is different. My career, my finances, my sleep, my health, my state of mind. I used to leave the house sometimes, for odd jobs or for walks or to meet friends and come home. Now, I go out lawyering, sometimes forget to catch my breath, check my emails, for days. My thoughts are less policed; I can’t tell you what I’ve been doing. Things happen on a whim. I go to places. I can’t tell you how much energy I’ve used, how much is left for tomorrow. I am less aware of myself. Indeed, where previously I would come home to an empty house, everything as I left it, I now come home to a very loud orange animal who greets me at the door. I feel like somebody who lost their lottery ticket, and then found it again. But it was close.

I collect the ActiWatch from the receptionist and thank her on my way out.