To Sleep or Not to Sleep

I’m definitely not an insomniac. My favorite writing professor in college wrote a thick book about insomnia called Sleep, and I read it wondering if I’d finish every chapter shaking my head in disbelief at the accuracy with which her words described my own sleep patterns. But they didn’t. I never screamed, “oh my God, that’s me!” after an eerily-accurate description. So, I’m definitely not an insomniac, but I’m also not awesome at sleeping. Sleep doesn’t come naturally for me. Like relationships and like my hormonal seventh grade students, sleep is temperamental and unpredictable. Though I recognize the extreme beauty of sleep done right, it is not an easy or blissful facet of my life.

I once slept walked out of a foreign hotel room and woke up scared in an elevator without a room key. I have rearranged my bedroom furniture, sworn crudely at bedmates and changed my sheets and clothes all without knowing. I am a fast-talking somnambulist.

More than one man has left my bed in the middle of the night because my sleeplessness is contagious and, I'm sure, annoying. At 5am, my company is not worth a sleepless night for a working man. This is slightly embarrassing at the beginning of a relationship.

In high school, I tried not sleeping because I decided it was boring. Think of the things I could get done during those hours typically wasted on rest! I don’t think that’s a super normal mindset.

I’m not one of those people who can sleep anywhere or easily adjust to new bedtime situations. New sheets, new people, new temperatures—it all throws me for a loop.

I keep reading and reading because when I put down my book and turn out the lights, I’m scared about what may or may not happen next. To sleep or not to sleep. When my eyes won’t shut and my brain won’t quit, I start to get anxious—unreasonably so. I start to get sweaty and unhappy. I start to get furious. I worry about things ranging from the absurdly benign to the absurdly overwhelming: Did I remember to make that overhead transparency of the parts of speech? Is the skirt I picked out for tomorrow work-appropriate? Even if I bend down to pick something up? Will I ever have a great boyfriend again? And so it spirals.

Deep breath. I’ve tried everything. Moving my pillow to the other side of the bed, counting down from 100 and slowly relaxing each muscle in my body. I’ve tried Tylenol PM (and feared an addiction) and Buenas Noches—small blue pills left over (and most likely expired) from study abroad in South America. I’ve tried slightly harder substances and found the results to be too unreliable.

Since becoming a teacher, the bulk of my sleep anxiety has fallen on Sunday nights. Sunday night anxiety is typical for any person who works a normal job, but the effects may be magnified for teachers. At the beginning of the year, things were really bad. I would wake up on Sunday morning already fearing Sunday night. Of course, the anticipation is a thousands times worse than anything that happens on Monday, but that wisdom failed to alleviate the stress.

About a month ago I had dinner with my friend Rhett who was visiting from Boston. I like many things about Rhett (handsome, tall, kind—do you read my blog, Rhett?), but I especially appreciate him for being a practical and rational person. Over pints of beer and pizza, we somehow got onto the subject of sleep. Rhett, too, struggles with sleep--maybe most people do at some level. He works a stressful job, and frequently suffers from sleepless nights. Only, unlike me, he wouldn’t use the verb suffer to describe them. Rhett explained that he long ago realized that if he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, he might as well get out of bed, get some work done, make a snack, read a long-form article from The Economist. In short: chill the fuck out. He reasoned that there’s no point getting upset or anxious about something over which you have little control. The following day may be brutal, but you will function just fine. Unless you’re a serious insomniac, there’s no point in freaking out. Sleeplessness is about acceptance not irritation.

Huh.

This seems like a simple realization, but I’d managed never to come to it in 24 years, and I consider myself to be fairly thoughtful. Rather than drugs, new-age moves or midnight panic-attacks, maybe I just need to calm down, chill out, and accept the fact that I may not get a beautiful eight hours each night. I will still teach kids in the morning and keep my dinner plans at night. I will still be mostly nice and mostly normal when 6am rolls around.

So that’s what I’m trying out. Sundays should not involve freak-outs, outpourings of emotion or futile hours spent bemoaning what’s to come. Sunday should be about what I intend to do for the next few hours: cook goat cheese and asparagus pasta with my roommate, have a dance party that alternates between Lady Gaga and The Beatles, watch a mindless movie while calmly grading a few papers, compare weekends with my mom on the phone. Then I will try to sleep. But, in a blasé, I couldn’t care less kind of way. If I can sleep easily, more power to ya. I mean, me. If I can’t, that’s cool, too. I will get up, drink decaf tea and read Sloane Crosley’s new book in my underwear.

I’ve spent too long letting sleep get the best of me, when I should be bossing sleep around. I don’t take no shit from sleep; sleep takes shit from me. And when 10pm rolls around, and I feel a freak-out coming on, you better believe I’m gonna read my own blog entry.