Insomnia

I wrote this piece about five years ago after another round of unsuccessful treatments for my sleep disorders. Enjoy.

Today, I feel more crazy and broken than usual. Things move in strange ways in my peripheral vision just outside of the line of my glasses, I’m not sure if I’m talking too loud or not at all. I want to lay down and cry like a disconsolate two year old. I want my stomach to stop burning and I want to feel what?

Just not like this.

I would like to say that I partied last night. A wild night of bourbon, DD’s and debauchery that could have only led to my current state of craziness; I could say that. If you knew me well it wouldn’t be that far fetched.

The actual truth is that I did not sleep.

The first time I did not sleep for an entire night I was 6 or 7 years old and terrified. I remember not having my radio on and hearing the sounds of nighttime, secret sounds of things I was probably not supposed to hear.

Some nights I did nothing, I learned to fake sleep and lay still when looked in upon.

I listened closely, sometimes to music and other times to the sounds of other people moving around. I remember knowing it was about a quarter to three when I’d hear my Father getting up and moving around to go to work.

I learned that there are a few minutes just before sunrise happens that the air is made out of light and silence. Even with big roads and the airport nearby that moment is still among my favorites of a sleepless night.

Something about that light makes it just a little better.

Picture me at 22 years old and in possession of the holiest of holy things, good medical insurance. There was an unfortunate ER visit after being found wandering around the Capital Hill neighborhood here in Seattle, an acquaintance spotted me and took me to the hospital.

That time I hadn’t slept in days; I was seeing things and had no idea where I was or how I got there. I remember coming somewhat back to reality in detox. I wasn’t on drugs, I pitched a fit, I demanded a drug test, I peed in a cup and I gave blood. My doctor was horrified that I wasn’t on any stimulants; I wasn’t on LSD or anything else.

I was just awake.

I have been accused of drug seeking when trying to get professional help. I’ve tried drugs, teas made by wise hippy friends. There have been tinctures, sleep hygiene lectures, sleep studies, yoga classes, and hours of exercise done in a day to exhaust myself. Some of these things have worked in the short term.

Most have not.

I have always been leery of sedatives. I have always been afraid of years of prescription drugs, the things I long suspected they might to do me. So, unless it is an absolute emergency I just keep going. I am a fat little war machine built for survival even when the shadows are wiggling in my peripheral vision.

I tucked that fear away; I put it deep down with my other most secret fears. I didn’t think about it. I’m a soldier. I am not just any girl; I am The Mother Fucker. I am a beast.

Fuck it right?

I can function on crazy.

I only start to break down when my peripheral vision is wobbly. When parts of my face are twitching and I don’t blink. My whole body is a grimace.

The days when I want to say awful things to people making them hate me or stop loving me. I want people to tell me they hate me for whatever I just said. I want to die in spectacular fashion, swan dive off an overpass, punching an SUV at speed, setting myself on fire.

Those are the days I put my head down and plow through it all like a little bull. I work. I focus; I hyper focus on small incremental tasks until I am safely home.

Through the nights of no or awful sleep, I have often thought about my fears. I have many, just like everyone else. Birds terrify me, I’m afraid of clowns in a cringing long-standing; I may shit my pants kind of way. Walking around in the suburbs in the dark makes me think of Silence of the Lambs and numerous serial killers who seemed like such nice guys.

And there is the big one, the big fear to end all fears. The real reason I’ve turned down medications and sleeping pills. I’m afraid that I will go crazy. Not just crazy, the kind of crazy that nearly killed William Styron.

The concrete language and image for this fear never came until; I read his book about his battle with depression in his later years. It’s a tiny book; a small, elegant volume and it took me a month to read because I was horrified.

Every beautifully phrased thing, the innocence of taking something given to him by a doctor to help him sleep for so long, the indignities of madness at 60 terrify me.

When things are bad and I know that there is some kind of clinical blow out about to happen if I don’t get some sleep I think about William Styron. I try to focus on his triumph, that he survived and made it out of the big black hole but I can’t.

All I can think of is being institutionalized, the hallucinations I’ve had, and the misdiagnosis, loss of my cognitive skills, how my hands shake and I go all day with tears in my eyes that I refuse to let fall. I think of all of that and it doesn’t scare me as much as the idea of madness waiting for me at the end of my life.

I don’t want to be so afraid. I don’t want to assume that I will go mad this way. I don’t want to further impact my ability to sleep with my circus of looming insanity running circles in my head. I want to sleep. I want to be marginally sane.

I’m 35 years old.

I hope that as I survive year by year, I learn to not be so afraid and take the drugs when I can get them.

I hope I learn how to sleep.

I pray, I don’t go mad.