sleep

like you mean it

Ten minutes to midnight. You are sitting on the green plaid couch, writing this under the glow of your headlamp. You haven’t turned on a light because you believe that anything too bright will signal to your jumpy, disobedient body that it is Wake Time. It is not Wake Time. It is Sleep Time: the night is quiet and dark, the week was long. But you are sitting there, notebook in hand, afraid that you have somehow forgotten how to relax.

Lightning flashes outside the window, but the thunder rumbles only occasionally. There is no rain. You like this mood. You appreciate an atmosphere. This will be good for the writing, you think.

You don’t actually want to be writing, but this is how you’ve chosen to pass tonight’s sleeplessness. And if you’re going to be writing, you might as well have an ambiance, you might as well write something worth reading. You understand that this is not the point of keeping a journal. But you’ve never been very good at keeping journals. When you were younger your notebooks were filled with quick, boilerplate entries—“Today was boring”; “So-and-so was annoying”; that sort of thing. When life got interesting (high school, boyfriend) you stopped journaling altogether, because who had the time? Then you went to college and realized that you were almost no longer young, so in recognition of the fact that things were about to change, you restarted the journal. But this time you typed all your entries, you wanted to go fast, to squeeze in as much description as possible. Your journaling was a sort of catalogue of your existence, urgent and excessive. As though if you didn’t write about your life it might not matter, or worse, you might forget. You didn’t trust your ability to remember the important stuff. Writing, after all, is a technology of memory (you didn’t come up with that, who said that?)

You are getting away from the point. You are tired. You are awake. You are feeling incompetent (sleep, girl!) and that makes you want to fight the exhaustion. (Relax, girl!)

Ten minutes to midnight: not very late, some might think. In college, midnight was still earlyish. Back then, nights were long stretches of opportunity, filled with fears to be conquered. Even now, you have friends who go to bed well after midnight, and they’re not insomniacs.

But for a body that wakes up at five-thirty or six in the morning, midnight is too late, six hours is not enough, tomorrow will be hard. You’ve been trying to sleep for a long time—isn’t thirty minutes the threshold at which the experts say: You Have A Problem? Don’t think of it as a problem, that’ll make the problem worse.

You feel your desire for sleep as an ache beating deep in your head. As though your tiredness is a small child locked inside a distant closet. You hear the banging, the yelling, you just can’t find the door, the keys.

You already tried the trick Mom taught you, the one where you count: one plus one is two, plus two is four, plus three is seven, plus four is eleven, and on.

You also tried your own trick, which is to envision yourself as a bird flying over California. The scene starts at Death Valley, then you soar along the coast and cut eastward across Oakland, passing above the fruit trees and the foothills until you are deep in the Sierra. You fly lower until you’re just above the pines. Waterfall, rock wall, etc.

You have tried counting sheep. You’ve imagined distant, foggy childhood days, scenes from TV shows, good moments from earlier in the day, the week. You have pictured a game of chess (that worked once) or swarms of honeybees crawling over a hive, or feet maneuvering around turf. You’ve played comforting songs over and over in your head, Bobby McFerrin’s nauseating “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”—somehow that got you through the pandemic. Or “The Lilac Bush and the Apple Tree,” originally a Kate Wolf song but Mom sang it better, back when you were little and afraid of the night’s soft shapes and distant sounds. A strange lullaby: a lilac bush hopes someone might live in the empty house around which it was planted long ago. No, says the apple tree, the realist. No one will come; it will stay empty, this country’s changed:

…Now there are cities, the roads have come,
and no one lives here today.
And the only signs of the house and the fields,
are the things not carried away.

(Outside your window rain is falling, coming down in a quick burst).

You once lived with a friend who suffered from insomnia. At the time you felt sad for him, sympathetic, but you didn’t really understand it, and how could you?

Now, though, you review your memories of that time with more care: how, in the mornings, he came out of his bedroom looking haunted. How, when he heard you say, Good morning! (you were so chipper, you’d slept so well), he seemed to stare at you with something like suspicion, approaching disgust. This dear friend— you know he didn’t mean it.

(Lightning, lightning).

You understand it, now— the weight of exhaustion; it makes an effort out of everything.

You would not call yourself an insomniac, but three months ago, you stopped sleeping through the night. You started waking up consistently at three or four, not hungry or obviously anxious, just awake. Most days you could go back to sleep, but sometimes you’d give up and decide that you were awake. So you’ve been rising at ungodly hours, reading so many books. You have never felt so indebted to stories. Reading is how you pray.

(The rain has stopped, the lightning keeps flashing).

Ironic, really, that this keeps happening, because twice a day you rock babies to sleep, shh shh shh, you rub their fuzzy heads and let them dream against your heartbeat. You’re good at it, too—attentive, calming, She’s already down? Really? That was so fast, how’d you do it? You swell with the praise.

Earlier today you were prescribed Zoloft, your first SSRI, along with an antihistamine whose name you can’t remember but which you were instructed to take on an as-needed basis for sleeplessness.

You made the doctor’s appointment because two nights ago you really couldn’t sleep. You stayed awake, ruminating over why, exactly, you were awake (PMS, thyroid issues, still sick, still have mono? My own fault?). At three-thirty or four you finally nodded off, and when you woke up at six-thirty, the day was daunting.

You did not expect to walk out of that doctor’s office with anything, much less a Zoloft script. You thought Zoloft was the kind of medication you took only as a psychotherapist held your hand and patted your back. You are a little hesitant to be on SSRIs, the same way you are cautious with all drugs (sometimes you resist Ibuprofen, for no reason except that you aren’t sure that your pain level warrants its use). But deep down, you know you deserve better than sleeplessness. You love yourself enough to notice when you could use some guidance, and, because you feel comfort in a crowd, you Google it: approximately 13.2% of American adults are on SSRIs. Even so, you think, there’s stigma, isn’t there? Right?

But the truth is that you feel very calm about this choice; calm, even, about the sleeplessness. You feel proud of this calmness. You know it as the product of hard-earned growth. You know it as a sign of compassion. Write about it. Shame has rarely inspired good ideas. Shame writes bad stories.

Yes, let’s try Zoloft, you say to this doctor—this doctor whom you’ve only seen once before, for a pap smear, and whom you don’t particularly like, mostly for her conduct during said pap smear: the slightly impatient urging to “just relax,” as she tried again to scrape your cervix, this time without any warning.

You’re making her seem more villainous than she is, yeah, that’s fair, she actually was pretty sympathetic this time around, and when you showed her your cuticles, red and angry, she showed you her pale pink fingernails and said, perhaps as an olive branch, “I paint them, otherwise I chew them down.”

Tomorrow you will pick up the Zoloft and the antihistamine whose name you can’t remember. You will eat your oatmeal and you will not turn on the news. Instead, you will notice the geese, the robins, the wind. You will breathe in and out with your whole battered body, and outside, you will pass by other battered bodies, everyone with their own art, their own sleeplessness. Even children have their hurt, their hunger.

We are a nation of island universes, Huxley said. Late at night, when you are trying and failing to sleep, you might believe this. When you wake you will know this isn’t entirely true.

You will sleep. You write it to make it so.