I couldn’t sleep last night. Not because I was worried/excited about anything or because my brain couldn’t calm down. But because there were little wrinkles in the bedsheets. See, when the sheets haven’t been pulled 100% fully taut on the mattress in a while, they start to loosen ever so slightly and these tiny little fabric creases form that send my nerves into overdrive.

I’ve learned not to complain about this often openly, lest I be taunted for being “delicate” like The Princess and the Pea. I know most people haven’t experienced this level of hypersensitivity and probably can’t relate, but little bedsheet crinkles have become one of my many lifelong adversaries.

My eternal battle with sensitivities doesn’t stop with wrinkles, though. If there’s a singular grain of grit, a crumb or anything else on the bed, it’s like a tiny dagger on my skin. And I would be lying if I pretended I hadn’t told my wife on multiple occasions that she needed to stop breathing because the noise was preventing me from falling asleep.

Growing up and going to college, I spent many sleepless nights trying to contort into positions where I couldn’t feel the springs of the bed through the mattress. No matter how sweltering it may be, I always wear a shirt to bed to dampen the feel of the bed on my skin. I also need a fan running constantly at night to cover up the inconsistencies of wind or raindrops outside.

So if you happen to talk to me in the morning and discover I’m grouchy or not fully with it, it may not be that I was up super late devising Pokémon movesets or obsessively reading about some fascinating new toy line—it may just be that I couldn’t sleep because of benign-looking little spikes impaling my body and keeping me awake all night.

These sensitivities are a big hindrance in the waking hours of my everyday life, too. I used to cut the tags off all my shirts so I couldn’t feel them “scratching” my back, I generally won’t wear long pants (AKA non-shorts) because I don’t like the fabric feeling constrictive on my body, and oscillating fans that move on and off my skin intermittently every few seconds make me want to hurl the fan through a window.

Our first DVD player had a little red dot-sized light that lit up whenever it was in use. I couldn’t handle that pinprick of light, so I’d pile anything I could in front of it to block it out fully: candles, action figures, matchboxes… whatever. Losing most of my sight has helped with this sensitivity to lights a lot (the sugary silver lining to a shit sandwich), but my touch sensitivity has either gotten worse than ever or I’m just noticing it a lot more now.

Despite how much my life has suffered as a result of losing the majority of my sight, I can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off if some of my other sense hadn’t diminished as well.