In(somniatic) Debt

For as long as I can remember I have been adept at sleeping. I don’t mean to brag but I’m one of those people who can fall asleep by choice at the snap of a finger. I think it comes from growing up in the house I did.

I grew up in a small ranch-style house in a small ranch-style town with a small(ish) ranch-style family. My dad was an accountant and my mom was in human resources. We weren’t extravagantly wealthy but we got by.

But my dad had a temper.

He never hit my mother which in hindsight I have to give him props for that. But he did hit me and my younger brother plenty of times. And I’m not talking about the “you did a bad thing so I’m going to punish you accordingly” kind of hitting. I mean the kind where he once dragged me by the thumb when he found me playing with a friend two houses over and threw me to the ground before attempting to slap my face. I instinctively put my arms up so he obliged and deposited the brunt of his rage there, with the occasional smack on my also raised knees.

I remember after he lost his job my brother and I were forced to ride our bikes around the same stretch of street from the moment we got home from school, to the moment mom got home from work. My brother had to use the bathroom once and tried to gain passage back into the house. My father met him with the most blood-curdlingly harsh scream I have ever heard to this day.

“GET OUT!!,” he screamed.

When we shared a bedroom, we weren’t allowed to venture outside even to use the bathroom while dad was in the living room.

So I did what any other kid suffering daily trauma did, I went to sleep.

I would sleep the second I was allowed into the house and then when I was woken up for dinner, I would sleep the second I was released. Not all of the time, but most of the time.

So this taught me from a really young age, that the best way to deal with your problems, is to just go to sleep.

When I was raped by a 17 almost 18 year-old boy when I was 14, I slept for anywhere from 14–16 hours a day, only coming out of my room to use the restroom.

When my fiancee at the time broke up with me after accepting my proposal, I slept.

When the first boy I ever loved didn’t love me back, I slept.

When a job fired me under false pretences, I slept.

So now, I am a 24-almost-25-year-old woman and I don’t know how to process my own emotional trauma.

And worse still, I can’t sleep when I want anymore.

Today I got out of bed briefly to take my hormones and then the pain my brain has been under became too much, and I went back to sleep.

I woke up when my friends texted that they were outside. I let them in, and then I went back to sleep.

But now I’m in my room and I’ve used up all my sleep and I have to wait until more gets deposited.

And all of this has led me to one very distinct fact.

I’m not equipped enough to deal with being alive.

I don’t know how long I have just been on autopilot but now, I’m awake and I wish to the very inner working of the universe that I could just close my eyes and erase me, erase being raped when I was 14, erase having my heart broken once, twice, three, four times, erase knowing I’ll never be able to carry my own children and erase feeling guilty that that matters.

But I can’t.

So instead, I’ll just put on a youtube playlist and get as close to unconscious as I can.