Of all the difficult relationships I’ve maintained in my life, the one I poorly keep with sleep has been the most maddening, because I never seem to learn from it.
Sleep and I have real enough affection for one another, to be sure, yet we consistently fail to spend nearly enough quality time together. And you cannot expect an important relationship to flourish if you aren’t willing to put in the time.
Mostly, this is not sleep’s fault; it’s mine. I’m the one driving us apart.
Despite this, sleep is by and large forgiving, embracing me when I finally allow it, and then showing up again the next day at the expected hour, no harm, no foul, offering once more to snuggle up and make it all better. But me, as ever, pushing sleep away, promising we’ll make up the missed time tomorrow, swear to God. And then tomorrow comes, and again, this silly distance between us.
I do sneak naps, when I can, but they’re always too brief, often jarring in their endings and only fleetingly satisfying. They feel somehow like adultery.
Every now and then, sleep will punish me for my routine avoidance and callous thought that I can, when convenient for me, sneak a little extra here and there to make up for my mistakes. At such times, when it becomes obvious how desperate has become my need, sleep instead retreats from me, to where I’m there alone, begging quietly in the dark, come back, I need you, I’ll do better, I swear it, just please, please, please don’t leave me here, so very rigidly awake.
People expert in such flawed sleep intimacy have a word for it: insomnia.
Which is to say that, strained metaphor aside, I do also have some legitimate sleep issues beyond my own persistent willful neglect of slumber. Intermittent mild insomnia, arriving unannounced in the middle of one night, typically before a day that would be taxing enough even fully rested, and dissipating just as suddenly, sometimes as much as several days later, into a blackout unconsciousness of absolute exhaustion. Which still, cruel fate, can be annihilated in a second by, say, my darling little devil kitty, bat-, bat-, batting a pen off my desk. Bam! it hits the floor. And bam! I’m back awake.
But mostly, yes, my lack of sleep is just pure pigheadedness on my part. I simply will not willingly give up the day. In fact, I’m actively doing the same right now, in writing this.
Because the end of the day is my own personal time, removed from work and home responsibilities, with family safe and accounted for, house and pet chores done, clothes laid out for tomorrow, door locks locked. This when-I-should-be-sleeping time is a too-brief daily respite that I covet, but am often, ironically, too unawake to enjoy. By week’s end, I’m often falling asleep trying to stay awake.
As songsmith Paul Simon never quite said: “The nearer your destination, the more you’re sleep-sliding away …”
Most often, as Lisa is sleeping beside me and I’m holding poorly still to the day, it’s the TV I turn to. On rarer occasions since momicking my neck so badly a couple of years ago, it’s a book, or my own writing. Sometimes, it’s bonding with pets, of which we have many, including that darling little devil kitty. Sometimes, it’s just sitting still, telling myself not to think, and then invariably thinking hard about that.
As a side note, TiVo was supposed to help with some of my sleep failings: recording my favorite shows, which air too late for an early riser to stay up and watch, meant there was no longer any need to sit up, etc. Of course, when I ultimately go to watch the recordings, it’s at times my sleep-sensible spouse would argue are too late for me to be up. As in often as not, I’m laughing my way through last night’s TiVo-ed Daily Show even as this night’s show is airing. Fail.
And I can’t claim these stupidly self-destructive behaviors arise from any kind of ignorance, other than the willful variety.
Because I’ve read the repeated news stories about the studies: Modern folks do not get nearly enough sleep. Poor bedtime habits R us. Short-circuiting of our natural circadian rhythms. Inevitable lack of mental focus the next day. Inevitable bad health effects to follow. Listen to science: You need to go to bed, bub. Yada-yada, zzzz …
Or not zzzz, as the case may be.
When I was much younger, and often worked the equivalent of a second-shift job, this stay-up-late routine was no big deal. I slept then until noonish the next day; problem solved. But in recent years, especially, this tendency to push one day into the next has served me about as well as falling out of a moving rollercoaster. Because even on those nights when I do sleep all the way through, I’m still up by 5:20 a.m. on weekdays, though more often actually waking up minutes before 5 o’clock, and trying, trying, failing to go back to sleep again.
Sleep deficit, here I come again! The inevitable result, by most workweeks’ end, is a creeping mental fog that I swat at like some damnable fly, using escalating assaults of stimulants, from coffee, and more coffee, to nasty energy drinks. By Friday, that caffeine monkey is riding me like a cheap mule.
I crash on weekends, starting the whole cycle all over again as early as Sunday night. If I’m going to get hit with a bout of insomnia, it typically arrives on a Sunday as well; Monday morning, 3 a.m., and I’m too often again angrily re-counting all the small electronic-equipment lights visible in my darkened bedroom.
This whole dumb lack-of-sleep pattern dates back to when I was a kid, and the need to get some quiet time in a family that, with the notable exception of my sister Michele, is exceptionally loud. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t love that about them, or that I am any different. I can talk a blue streak, even when I’m alone. Which is part of why I so crave moments of external quite, or at least less noise. Because with the bevy of background hiss and rattle and hum finally removed or reduced, my brain starts to notice it’s the only one still rattling on, and can often then be convinced to finally shut the hell up.
So, growing up, it became for me a kind of contest, to stay up past the rest of my family, who have never been an early to bed bunch. And in outlasting them, I began a pattern that, way too many years ago, settled into a lifestyle. And now, it seems, I simply know no other way; going to bed at normal-people hours feels uncomfortably foreign, just wrong. And so Lisa inevitably says, upon waking briefly to use the bathroom, or whatever, and finding me still up: You need to turn the light off, the TV off, put the book down, shut off the computer, take out the headphones, whatever, and go to sleep. Because we’re both going to regret it tomorrow when you don’t.
Not if, notice. When.
And indeed, we do regret it.
So in a minute here I should really turn in for the night, absolutely. Which isn’t in any way to say that I will …
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