PROMPT: Write about your bedtime routine and/or your relationship to sleep. Sleep— theoretically the easiest thing a human body can do— got complicated after 50. After 50 was when I fully realized my body was most definitely keeping score— had been from the jump. Turns out that bitch is a documentarian. Never misses a trick. After 50, I discovered there was lithium ion tucked away in the tiny hip pockets of my heart and brain and jugular that roared to life, always at night, reverse charged by a saltwater shift in the lunar cycle of my body. Hormones waged war against the machine of me. I was sleep deprived to the point of delirium. It got so bad, my therapist and I spent weeks creating a nighttime ritual. The ritual: lighting sage, and clearing the room with smoke; 20 mins alone on the floor of my bedroom, doing yoga nidra stretches and listening to a meditation; a candle. I did it religiously for a few months. But even that became a psychological burden. I ran out of places to put my feelings about my neuroses, and my neuroses about my feelings. My body and mind were coming unglued from the inside out, almost nightly from 2 to 6am. The doom scroll of insomnia Instagram was coming up with armchair diagnoses faster than I could integrate. Everyday, I metabolized the dysregulation of my sleepless existence, but was too under resourced to metabolize any actual change. There truly is no rest in exhaustion. Sleep is better now, but still hard when things go sideways — which is life, right? I’ve gotten the hormones somewhat under control (no universe, that is not a challenge), but this business of being a human is a lot. All the things I can’t or don’t have space to psychologize in a day, show up around 3am, back on their bullshit. For fun, they’ve brought bonus fears, in case my existential dread needs a leg up. There’s no one to stitch up the nighttime tear in my self-perception. There’s literally nothing hemming me in. I'm a middle of the night marionette with god knows whose fingers unnerving the strings. I’ve thought a lot about it, and decided we’ve gotten this whole ritual thing wrong. I don’t need a yoga stretch. I need to be emptied out. Shook hollow and bare from the rock bottom core. A candle ain’t gonna cut it. I need a bonfire— a funeral pyre— for this fitful, insomnious effigy tossing and turning in my bed. I’ll clear the room with smoke from the rage that bellows from my throat. I need a hypnotic trance— my spine pulled from the base of my skull into the milky way of something bigger than my head. I need peyote and a collective howl. If I’m going to be this sleepless, this torn asunder every night, at least let me fly away for a while. At least let me soar with a godlike fury into morning.
Comments
No posts