Insomnia is a message
Listen to it.
It’s late in the morning in my here-and-now. A new week ahead, a freshly minted Monday, the usual barrage of meetings just around the corner.
I’ve just fired up Zoom, taken a deep breath (let’s be honest, a sigh), checked the clock, glanced at the calendar.
My eyes burn.
Let’s see. Five calls this morning, three overlaps.
Another miserable day ahead, dotted with strategically scheduled human interaction and self-doubt.
Cue a friendly reminder from my laptop, an upbeat chord in what I guess is F sharp major. I stop and wonder for a moment how many meetings that friendly chime took to create. Fifty? More?
Di-di-ding! Five minutes to your first call.
Insomnia is a bitch
I managed just over 5 hours of sleep this past night, with 5 more spent tossing and turning, reading and half-meditating, dozing off in uncomfortable positions and, jolted awake by stray thoughts again and again, cursing and giving in to the comforting synthetic aftertaste of sleeping pills.
Some call 5 hours of sleep enough. Some don’t. I wholeheartedly side with the latter.
Also, I wish the pills worked more often. This past night they didn’t, and if you were to interact with me now, you could tell.
People can tell. I can tell they can tell. I mean, they just point it out, no need to ask. “Another shit night, Nick, huh.”
Insomnia is a bitch you have to get to know well to truly appreciate, and it sure does its best to get intimate. It strikes at the oddest of times, prompted by whatever unexpected mishap, demanding period, or string of destructive thoughts happen to cross your life path.
And then it lingers.
Some are lucky and see it through in some days, but many of us must endure weeks of this ordeal. Months. Years. Oh, boy. If this is you, I feel you.
I’m among the luckier portions of the cohort, I guess. It’s weeks at a time for me, but — the intensity. And the distance it creates from those who don’t know and dismiss our pains.
Blessed be ye fools who know not.
There are many variants of this purgatory. Mine is of the early-riser kind. I wake up at around four AM; I have to pee. And mere moments after regaining consciousness, I just know.
Here it comes.
The body longing for some more respite, blissful oblivion; the mind wide awake, anxious, cursing, at odds with the needs of its host, already anticipating the hours of missed sleep, the tossing and turning, a full day of misery ahead.
Welcome, yet another sleepless night. Welcome, suicidal thoughts. I’d almost forgotten you existed.
Insomnia is a message
Every insomniac can tell a unique, often gripping story, and every kind of insomnia has its origins.
It would be unwise to appoint myself anything other than yet another sufferer. It would be disrespectful to start spreading unprompted and unprofessional advice.
Still, I hope this article may reach fellow insomniacs, that these words may resonate, and that they may help turn the desperation and confusion of some into the calm resolve that has been sorely missing in their lives.
I have discovered that insomnia, at least for me, is a message. I can choose to ignore it or listen to it.
And when I listen to the message, the insomnia disappears.
There’s just a catch; my message isn’t easy to act upon. It seldom is. I did it three times, and it changed my life.
It changed my life because it obliterated my insomnia. To cite Fight Club, “Babies don’t sleep this well.” It was like flipping a switch from the “5 shitty, choppy hours” setting to a sorely needed “8 full hours of warm oblivion.”
Also, it changed my life because I had to quit my job three times.
Those were my reasons. That was the message. Three times, I’d gotten an office job, and three times, insomnia reared its ugly head.
“Not your place, Nick. This is not your place.”
That was my message. It still is.
I’m now well over a year into my fourth office job, and my insomnia has been hitting on and off. It’s uncanny how it subsides during weekends and vacations and intensifies when the calendar is packed.
I’m fully aware that the solution is one brief resignation letter away. Tough as it is, I’m choosing to endure this; it’s not the right time to change things up yet again.
But at least I know.
So let me ask you: What’s your message? Are you able and willing to act on it?
Well. If you can…maybe you should.
