The Ramblings of an Insomniac

I'm yawning as I write this or attempting to complete a yawn as I can't even seem to accomplish the basic reflex necessary for channeling more oxygen into my body. So this may be a half-fueled ramble. Half-lacking oxygen, sleep, and a linear train of thought.

I am an insomniac. Have been since puberty struck me at 14 forgetting to give me my moms big boobs but over-compensating with acne, menstrual cramps, and an overwhelming sense of worry and an over-active mind. When I was younger and stupider, I used to think saying I had insomnia made me sound cool. Like I was a dark and brooding writer like Jack Kerouac and couldn't sleep for all the deep, angsty thoughts running with scissors in my head.

Nowadays, as a parent to two hyper boys, insomnia is just a pain in the butt. A thief. It robs me of energy and even the will to play. Plus, it runs even more rampant albeit with safety scissors as I've added a layer of mommy guilt on top of all my other anxieties like a rich layer cake. There are dark chocolate layers baked with my desire to write more or even better or even just something stuck between my vanilla concerns for my kids to have friends, healthy diets, good grades, and some semblance of a well-balanced life that doesn't resemble mine.

During summer, the insomnia I've managed to tame into a benign monster that allows me some precious sleep so I can wake up early and nag other people out of sleep returns to its fierce and fiendish self. It lays awake until past midnight with the excuse that it is claiming "me time". But more often than not the monster and I lay in bed flipping through Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu for a half hour with the inability to find anything to watch or settling on some random comedy series or lesser known BBC adaptation of an obscure Dicken's novel and pretending to watch it while scanning Facebook for something to wake up the brain cells or give meaning to existence. Eyes heavy, brain slack-jawed, the monster cons me into thinking I am ready for sleep. But the instant I turn off the television and my side lamp and adjust my pillow, it gnaws on my thoughts. Not even deep thoughts. Sometimes just thoughts repetitively saying over and over, "why can't I sleep".

So I sleep in the next morning when I can but wake up with a drunken grogginess at 9 a.m. having achieved periods of unconsciousness in small bursts from 3 a.m. onwards when the room wasn't too stuffy or the pillow too lumpy or my neck too crooked. Sometimes I nap the next day stealing the time I had set aside for creativity or connecting with my kids which consequently forces me to stay up late again in a gambit to play a board game past bedtime or attempt to write something more than incoherent phrases that play out in a stream of consciousness so tumbled down and varied they are more ragging rapids than stream.

Sometimes with the help of my go-getter, energizer bunny friends, I can fake a vivacious personality. Even without their help I have moments of hyper focus and energy like a pinball thrust forward with the goal of hitting every light only to fall back into a place of waiting.

Pills do not help. I am immune to Melatonine and every prescription sleep aid. Nothing short of hitting myself over the head results in complete unconsciousness. And it's not all anxiety related. A lot of the time it is that the room is too hot, too cold, too stuffy, the sheet to scratchy, the wind too loud, my body too stiff, too sore, too soft, or too full. I once stayed up for over a day because I couldn't sleep sitting up on my flight from Phoenix to London and then was too overtired to sleep so took a tour of the city from the front window of a double decker bus that I can only remember as one long, jumble of postcard images.

And do not tell me to exercise myself into sleep. Any good insomniac knows that the body can be completely and physically exhausted but the mind still warbles on like that chatty girl on a long bus trip who can't read body language or the veiled hints that you'd like to close your eyes now and go to sleep.

Then adding more insult to injury, I find my best writing ideas come to be as I waver into REM sleep leaving me with the option to drag my tired body out of bed and hope the muse hasn't scampered away into the dark night with a cute vampire or lay there hoping I will remember the idea in the morning. Except with the latter, I only wake with the evaporating image of something wonderful but too far gone to know exactly what it resembled.

Even now I forced myself from a nap because the words were marching across my mind and demanding an audience. I just hope they reformed here in neat, orderly rows that make sense. A call of collective commiseration with my fellow insomniacs.