Too Bad You Can’t Save Some For Later: Reflections on a Sleepless Weekend
Karen called me an extremist. She said it with a laugh. There was no malice in it. It was just an observation.
In the conversation leading up to this observation, I recounted my weekend, and it looked something like this.
Friday night 6:30: Arrived at the Bun Shop
The Bun Shop is an insomniac’s dream come true. It is a late night coffee shop with tattered, mix-matched chairs and couches; long industrial style tables with benches; fire-hazard/trip-hazard power strips and extension chords; barely adequate yellowish light; diligent medical students hunched over gruesome visuals; party people meeting up to plan the night; and delicious pastries and fresh coffee. It stays open til 3:00 am
While I was at the Bun Shop, I worked on projects I had been procrastinating on. Made stuff for the sake of my creative practice and my sanity. Some of my best writing over the last few years has happened there. I hadn’t been in months, so I wanted to see if the magic was still alive.
Saturday morning 3:00 am: Walked through Mt. Vernon
Mt. Vernon is in Midtown, Baltimore. The Washington Monument (the original one) is located there along with other beautiful 19th century buildings. The streets were quiet, and the night air was fresh. After hours of sitting and staring at a screen, buzzing from the creative work of the past several hours, I needed to wind down before I tried to get to sleep.
I walked up past Penn Station to the block where there were one or two nightspots still open. A few people were standing outside chatting, dancing. The writer in me tries to imagine what the dialog might be.
I had nothing. The pump was empty. And I have been out of the game too long to know which words these young folks might be using. But I could read the body language.
There was one guy who liked this one girl. And, if she noticed it, she wouldn’t acknowledge it. This was a friend situation. And he was dying inside. (Maybe I am projecting)
Saturday morning at 5:30ish?: Arrived home
Many years ago I dated a girl who was pre-med. Her study schedule was intense and, in retrospect, I was a useless distraction. But she was a peach, and she managed to make time for me. Many nights ended with me falling asleep in her room while she stayed up to study. She had a fantastic hack to maintain her sanity during this time.
She had no visible clocks in the house.
She would set her alarms ahead of time and not keep track of when she went to sleep. So if it turned out that she only got 2 or 3 hours of sleep she didn’t have the added anxiety of knowing she only got 2 or 3 hours of sleep.
(That’s actually how the drug Ambien works, it doesn’t help you sleep better, it makes you forget that you slept poorly. It induces short term amnesia, hence the name Ambien.)
My phone died hours before I arrived home, so I am only guessing what time I got there. I knew I had somewhere to be at 10:00 am so I was afraid to do anything more than nap if I was going to make it.
Sometimes I like to take morning naps. I wake up super early, work for a few hours, and then sleep again until an hour that regular humans get up.
Maybe I could pretend this was happening now.
I didn’t go straight to sleep. I made some food and lounged around until the sun came up. Eventually, I powered up my phone and set the alarm for 90 minutes. That would be my dosage of sleep for the night.
Saturday morning 10:10: Arrived at Noelle’s studio
The thing that I had planned was a 2-hour meditation and painting workshop with an incredibly gifted artist and author Noelle Imparato. I’ll talk more about Noelle and her work soon, but I felt it was important to honor my commitment to the community and process I discovered through my connection with her.
Sleep deprivation is a beast. It ravages your brain.
After my nap, I felt re-energized. The bright sunny day and the noise of the city would not produce any quality sleep, but I soldiered through.
As I am typing, I am looking at the odd painting I created during the workshop and reflecting on the conversations I had with the other people I met at Noelle’s. I am glad I went.
Saturday afternoon 2:00: Video shoot in East Baltimore
I had promised one of the young artists that I work with after school that I would film a music video for his latest song. His is 14 and has been really diligent about writing and creating new stuff over the past six months, so I wanted to support that.
We did the shoot. It was an excellent physical workout getting all the angles and carrier all the gear from location to location around the neighborhood
Saturday afternoon at 5:00ish:
My only goal was to make till the sun went down. That night would be the longest night of the year. The clocks were rolling back and I had nothing on my agenda for the next day.
I slept and slept. It was pretty awesome.
Sunday
I can’t remember much about Sunday.
I took a pretty long walk in the mid-afternoon.
I saw the last few plays of the Baltimore Ravens football game through the window of a bar in Canton. They lost to the Steelers. On my way back, I saw two adult males tossing a football back and forth in the middle of the street. They seemed to be gloating. They were where Pittsburgh Steelers Jerseys. “Grow up.” I thought.
It was shocking how quickly the day evaporated and night fell. I slept again.
Conclusion
Karen called me an extremist, but she wasn’t talking politics. She was talking about the feast and famine nature of my relationship with wellness. The previous week I had mentioned that I had, pretty much slept all weekend.
Too bad you can’t save some for later.
Some elements of wellness are cumulative. If you step out of line a diet or miss a work out here and there, the base of healthy eating and exercise that you have built up over time can minimize the effects. Likewise, if you overspend your budget one month, you can get back on track by tightening up the following month, or by finding other ways to generate income to support your financial wellness.
Sleep is not like that. You can’t save it for a rainy day. You need it every single day.
When I was a bit younger, I routinely deprived myself of sleep by staying out to all hours. I was not always out partying or whatever…I was often in my studio working. But I was also in the Army at the time and my overall level of physical fitness made it much easier for me to bounce back.
Sleep deprivation was like a badge honor. I developed “extreme” tendencies in my twenties. I was up, afraid to miss out on what may be happening next. I played around with the altered-mind state that sleep deprivation sometimes brought about. I romanticized it and falsely attributed my creativity to it.
I know better now, but I can sometimes fall into old habits. I try to rationalize the occasional all-nighter.
I can’t remember the last time it was worth it.
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