The Writer and the Formidable Sleeplessness
Insomnia in a writer’s life
I am sleep-deprived.
I think I’ve been sleep-deprived since the day I was born.
Maybe this sounds dramatic. Still, it feels true in a cumulative sort of way.
My mother has always claimed that I didn’t sleep through the night until I was seven years old. I continue to maintain that this is inaccurate. The truth is, I was seven years old when I stopped bothering her about it.
But I never actually learned how to sleep through the night.
I might be the type of person who requires less sleep, but I also genuinely struggle with the undertaking of sleep. My mind is intensely overactive. Many nights I can hear my thoughts even while I’m sleeping.
It is peculiar to be both asleep and partially conscious.
It is also not very rejuvenating.
As a young child, I spent several hours each night rocking on a rocking horse in my bedroom while I waited to feel the leaden drag of heavy eyelids.
As a sleepless teenager, I read the dictionary.
Inside a special three-ring binder, I collected words that were novel to me at the time: benevolent, poignant, liminal. I sat in bed with my binder and pencil and practiced those words. That notebook is filled with contrived poetry that I wrote while the rest of the city was asleep.
In college, I continued filling notebooks at night. Sometimes I sat on the balcony of my apartment and enjoyed the quiet night while I wrote. Other times I laid in bed, scribbling on paper in the dim city light that leaked through my window.
It occurs to me now that I may have originally fallen in love with the written word because of insomnia.
With the arrival of babies and then later the arrival of a chronic illness, I had to learn how to sleep at night, so I tried as many sleeping tricks as I could find. From various techniques to help calm the mind to ingestible products designed to soothe, I tried anything and everything to help me get enough rest overnight so that I could function during the day. To some degree, I was successful. But it hasn’t lasted.
Now in my 40’s, I sleep well about once or twice a week. The incessant chatter in my brain has slowed with time. But I still sleep on the edge of consciousness and I’m still awakened by all the little noises and I still have trouble falling back to sleep.
Last night between the hours of 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. I woke up once every hour. I spent about 40 minutes per hour trying to fall back asleep. That means I only slept about 20 minutes of each hour.
That’s two total hours of sleep in a six-hour period.
Even for a person who requires less sleep, this is not enough. And unfortunately, this is what most nights are like for me.
So now I’m likely to be night-writing because I can’t sleep rather than being kept awake by noisy thoughts, like in the past. But often these days, I am doing all the writing in my head.
This is not ideal.
I forget many of the brilliant and poetic word combinations that my mind spins in the dark. But I can’t seem to stop doing it this way. It is in my head that I’m supposed to be in bed trying to sleep at night not sitting up writing in the darkness. At the same time, I’m aware that some of my best writing has come when the house is quiet and all the light is gone, so I go ahead and indulge in thought-writing instead of sleeping, knowing full well that I am not going to remember and I am going to be sleep-deprived.
Once the sun comes up, my husband gets out of bed to attend to morning tasks while I try to get a little more sleep. For reasons I will probably never understand, I’ve found that it is easier for me to sleep in the morning. Maybe it’s the exhaustion of being awake so often during the night that makes it possible. Maybe it’s simply the way I’m wired.
Regardless, I have grown to dread the arrival of night and the expectation of sleep.
I guess an owl can only pretend to be a falcon for so long.
