On pushing limits

There are people who push the limits of their bodies in ways I cannot, or should I say, will not. I am unlikely to participate in a triathlon (I’m a terrible swimmer). I won’t scale sheer rock faces (fear of heights). I’m not one for juice fasts to cleanse my body (I like to eat). There are other, less glamorous ways of pushing one’s body, things you just do, because you have to: Walking up an immense hill even though you are tired, because that’s the way home; carrying a 25-pound toddler for a mile, because he refuses to walk or sit in a stroller; missing a meal because you’ve got a deadline to meet.

Going without sleep, or at least much of it, pushes your body — though perhaps not in the good way, like training for a race or scaling a mountain. Sleep deprivation is sometimes used as a form of torture, and after you’ve lost out on several nights’ sleep it’s easy to see why. I’ve struggled with insomnia for years now. I tend not to get angry about it anymore, although I used to, when my frustration got the better of me. In recent years my insomnia has come in waves; for months at a time I sleep happily and plentifully (at least as plentifully as having a toddler allows). And then. And then, weeks upon weeks upon weeks in which I cannot fall asleep, in which I am slinking about the house after midnight, having snacks, reading, surfing the web.

This is what happened for most of this month. This is the reason for my lack of recent blogging, and for many other things I have let fall away. Without a full night’s sleep, I can focus only on what has to get done. I lose all time management skills and can’t plan very well. When I used to work as a reporter I often dragged myself to work on just a few hours of sleep and did interviews and wrote stories in that state, overcaffeinated and brain-muddled. Sometimes I forgot to ask the right questions. Later I could barely remember conducting the interviews. Now that I am at home, the post-insomnia feeling is the same, but the things I face in my day are different. No matter when I fall asleep, I still must get up when my son does, which is to say, early. On the days I have childcare I am conscious of the fact that I’m paying for someone to watch my son and cannot always make full use of that time, because I am exhausted. On the days I’m home with my son, I worry that I’m not being as energetic and happy with him as I’d like to be. I don’t want what I feel to be what he sees. Lack of sleep can make you confused, forgetful, snippy, depressed, and a poor decision-maker. Lack of sleep, I found out last year, can cause physical pain. When several months of insomnia coincided with a really wakeful period in my son’s development, I saw a doctor for a constant aching in my joints, and her prescription was, simply, sleep.

The past few weeks, I have struggled to fall asleep and as a result most days I walk around like a zombie. I forget things. And so I focus on the important things: My son, and my writing. I am determined to finish my short story this month, sleep or no. Writing while this sleep-deprived is a peculiar feeling. On the plus side, I cannot overthink my words — I’m incapable of it — which results in writing that can be more natural, less potentially overwrought. On the negative side, I can’t think straight. I stare at the screen for minutes at a time. Sometimes the writing is not so much natural as… well, awful.

In any case, the insomnia that was plaguing me for the first half of this month has slipped away again, leaving me wondering where I left off and what happened to May. I’m still plugging away at my short story. This is the short story I began in the spring of 2007, and the one I am determined to have a final draft of by May 31. I’m close. I’ve noticed a lot of blog posts of late on the topic  of “how do you know when a piece of writing is done?” and my answer is, you just know. For me, with this story, it is a matter of getting the ending just right. When I do, I’ll know it, and all that will be left to do will be to make some minor tweaks in wording. Now, instead of pushing myself to get through the day on a few hours of sleep, I’m pushing for that: an ending that works. I’m close.

the day after my birthday

Today is the day after my birthday. It’s a strange day, in which past and present keep overlapping. I woke up at 4am, hungry, and couldn’t go back to sleep. The boy slept until 7, a rarity. Waking up at 4am when my son is not awake is doubly annoying — I did not want to be awake AND I had a brilliant 3-hour opportunity for further sleep. I tried going back to sleep but instead tossed and turned and thought. I got up and ate a bagel and read about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I couldn’t process the information, and that, too, felt strange.

I tried to write, in those hours before my son awakened, and in doing so remembered a post from a while back on red Ravine in which a single mom said she got up before dawn, before her kids disturbed the silence, to write. I wrote that I didn’t think I could do that. But then I couldn’t, before my son was born, imagine waking up before dawn for months and months on end. Dawn is no longer an important marker of whether I should be awake or not. And so, before dawn, I re-wrote a C is for … piece for Alphabet: A History. There is something I don’t like about the piece I’ve written, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. And so I tweaked and edited until the sun began to light the sky and the boy woke up.

As I wrote I stopped to look at a bouquet of flowers my husband brought home for me yesterday. I could smell them — a couple of the blooms smell, improbably, just like chocolate — and I thought of another birthday and other flowers.

I suppose it’s the nature of birthdays that cause me to think about the past, but I got to thinking that things seem to happen on or around my birthday. Some of these things are significant: For example, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with my birthday, but here I am writing about it anyway. I have a habit (tradition?) of writing journal-ish sorts of things on or around my birthday that encompass current events. For example, eight years ago, I wrote:

“The day before my 29th birthday, they began a war.”

I’m sure I could write something about these anniversaries of war and peace falling so close to each other. But I don’t want to link them. I wish they were not linked. I watched Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech* on TV and felt the weight he now carries. I have a lot of respect for him, a young president on whom the whole world hangs its hopes and for whom the past has leaked into the present and threatens to stain our futures.

*full text of Obama’s speech here

waking dreams

I worked myself into a frenzy this week. I have that tendency: work and stresses and stupid worries of various kinds just build and build and build, and then I sleep less and less and less.

And then I crash, from too much sleep lost, or from whatever was stressing me out being solved. I feel like that now, like I’ve come out of something dark. When I did sleep the past few nights I dreamt strange and convoluted dreams, populated by people from work. I woke in the mornings late, dazed, tired already.

I’m still tired, but I’m calmer. These days I’ve been trying to get my bearings in a working life, taking refuge in small things. I listen to music a lot, on my commutes, and I feel fiercely protective of that time alone with my headphones. I laugh with my dog, at his nightly antics, his facial expressions, his need to lick my face, my hands, my feet. He sometimes winks — both Billy and I have seen it, so I no longer think I’m imagining it — and every time he does my heart catches and I feel the need to look behind me, as if he might be winking at someone else.

I’ve been trying to hide in books, too, a refuge I haven’t taken advantage of enough. One side benefit of insomnia is uninterrupted quiet time to read, and so I’ve spent hours blissfully lost in novels recently.
…. And last night it rained. I heard the gurgling of water in the gutters and the patter on the roof early this morning. It was no summer thunderstorm, the kind of wild summer rain that I sometimes dream about and wish for, the kind of rain that I grew up with, but it was rain all the same, the first in several months. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the rain in July in San Francisco. I took the dog out around 6 am, and the rain had softened to a heavy, silent mist. I didn’t feel it as I walked, but by the time I returned my face was slick and my jeans were soaked. The dog’s fur was spiked with wet.
By the time I walked down the hill to the train just before 8, the rain had stopped altogether.

The loss of sleep makes normal situations seem like strange dreamy other realities. This morning on the train our driver made an announcement over the loudspeaker, but those of us in the second car couldn’t hear it. All we could make out was the word “sorry.” But then our train pulled out, and the driver changed the sign to read “sorry, no passengers” and we in the second car realized we were supposed to have gotten off. I stood by the door, full of irrational thought, scared that we’d never be let out. We sped through station after station until I tugged on the cord to signal that we were stil back there in the second car, and we wanted to stop. It felt unreal: I saw myself riding a half-empty train labeled “sorry, no passengers” through stations where the train would have normally stopped. The faces of the people on the platforms we sped by were blank, unseeing. I don’t think it would have seemed odd if it had all transpired — the other passengers faces growing animated with the realization that we were stuck in the car — in black and white.

Here we are, again.

I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep because there are things bouncing around in my brain (bits of work ephemera mostly); because my legs are twitchy because I haven’t been to the gym in two days and apparently walking a couple of miles after work with the dog and elsewhere isn’t enough to keep my pesky calf muscles entertained; because I know that my weekend might not be my own — chores and other things will pull me in various directions — and therefore I might not get to write as much as I would like. Or maybe even at all.

The calves, well, I could stretch some and they would probably stop being twitchy. And the work bits, they will go away if I read a good book. It’s that last one, really, that’s keeping me awake.

I have thought recently of just giving up on writing. I mean giving up on the writing that I have to cram into the slivers of time before or after work or on the weekends. That would be the writing I see as my writing, as opposed to work-related writing. Seriously, I’ve thought of giving up on it because I’m tired. It is truly enticing… My life would be calmer, more relaxing, simpler, less insomnia-provoking… if I just didn’t keep pushing myself to write write write when I could be lying on the couch reading a book, or sleeping in, or, well, any number of things. It’s just difficult, and something that provokes anxiety: will I get to write, or not? There is a part of me that’s tired of my own expectations. At this point the expectations are not high: Just write something, anything. There’s another part of me that’s tired, too, of feeling guilty when I’m not writing, even though I know for my own sanity and for the good of household relationships, I need to not shut myself in my office with a laptop all the time.

Tonight Billy and I were discussing this. Or, well, I was thinking out loud about how I could possibly make this work, and I was telling him about all the other people I know, or know of, who cram writing into the time outside of the 9 to 5, because they have to. Writing comes in addition to work and anything else they have to or want to do. We discussed the options: whether it was feasible for me to get up early a couple of times a week to write, or if I should take one night a week as my Writing Night. Neither of these feels right, but these are the options, it seems.

Billy said something about how after work, he just wants to relax and not worry about rushing around to try and accomplish something else. And I said, “That’s because your work is your passion, and for many people, their passion is outside of their work.” (This is true, about him. He has other passions, but he likes his job and it seems to drive him.)

In any case it doesn’t matter what you call it, passion, work, hobby, whatever. If you are driven to do something, you’re driven to do it, whether it’s work or writing (or whatever kind of art) or taking care of your kids or maintaining a pet dog who — ahem — insists upon eating your catalogs.

The point is, I suspect it’s not optional, making room for those things you’re driven to do, or passionate about. If it were, I wouldn’t be up at 1 am trying to write myself to sleep. Giving up, while it may seem alluring for a moment, is impossible.

lost day

Today was a lost day. I slept very poorly last night, one of those nights in which sleep was late to come, and when it did, it was fitful and fraught with strange dreams and whirring thoughts. I awoke often, confused by the seeming slowness of time. It’s only 2:37 am? It’s only 4:19? And finally, my busy mind decided it had had enough, forget it, take the dog out, at 6.

When I stumbled back into the house with the dog (who was cheerful as ever) I was so bleary-eyed I couldn’t read the news and I sat listening to music at the dining room table, headphones in my ears, clutching a mug of coffee. After an hour or two I rested my head on my forearms…sitting up just felt too hard.

The rest of the morning I squinted at too-bright sun, tried to be coherent, and even gamely accompanied Billy to the gym. The day, in contrast to my fatigue, was shining and summerlike, the kind of day that normally would have been full of promise. But by afternoon I was stretched on the couch letting the narrator’s voice on some nature documentary lull me to sleep. I gave in; I napped.

I’m not a napper, usually. It’s not that I dislike sleeping so much; it’s just that there are so many things I want to do when awake that napping seems a waste. When I do give in to sleep during the day I tend to awaken confused by the time, my brain strangely blank.

Music, a nap, dinner. The day passed, but it feels as though i wasn’t included.

The scufflings of night creatures

At some point I began calling myself an insomniac. I mentioned my problem to others casually, in passing, and matter-of-factly, as in, there’s no dispute about this. I said it like I might say, “I have long hair,” or “I’ve got this one tooth that’s crooked.”

Insomnia, to most people, means “can’t sleep.” That’s the simplest way to define it, I suppose, but it’s more nuanced than that. There are insomniacs who can fall asleep in minutes, but they wake up in the middle of the night and blink at the dark until daybreak offers relief. Some insomniacs go to sleep and make it until just before they are supposed to wake up, a maddening pattern that gyps them out of that last hour of peace before the alarm. And then there’s me: Mostly I’m the kind of insomniac who just can’t fall asleep. I could lay in bed tossing and turning for hours before sleep decides to prevail.

The dictionary defines an insomniac as someone who “suffers” from the chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time. I no longer see insomnia that way, as suffering. I used to, and no wonder; I was locked in a battle against my body, my brain’s activity, even my creative impulses. I had a particularly long bout of intense insomnia not long after I moved to San Francisco, about seven years ago, and that was the first time I realized that being awake when others might be sleeping was going to be a pattern for me. I fought it. Hard. I sought help for it, and was given all kinds of scary medications that brought on the bliss of sleep in minutes and took any feelings of grogginess away as they retreated in the morning. They were helpful, if a little disconcerting, but meant to bring aid only on the worst of nights. I was uncomfortable taking them and doctors were reluctant to prescribe them. They are, after all, narcotics. So I fought being awake however I could. I recently reread a journal entry I wrote late one of those anxious nights and was surprised how frantic and desperate my wishes for sleep were:

Lack of sleep – no, not merely lack of sleep…hunger for sleep…craving of sweet, sweet unconsciousness…
Thoughts flap about as if birds encased in glass. Bang! Bang! They crash, with a sudden surprising flutter, and unanswered questions, half-baked schemes and fleeting whispers drift like stray feathers to blackness.
What will I do at work tomorrow? What books can I read? Will I ever be a good writer? Bang! Bang! Bang!. The mind, given a choice, would never rest, seizing every opportunity to jolt me into some tangle of what-ifs and then-whats.

In time, I realized that fighting my insomnia was counterproductive. Now I (mostly) enjoy the nights when I cannot sleep. There are a lot fewer of them, too. I don’t lay in bed worrying about how the next day will be awful because I’ll be so tired. I don’t toss and turn. I get up. It’s one of my favorite times of the day, because I do what I want, and there’s something thrilling about being awake when everyone else seems to be asleep. I laze about in our spare bedroom reading (sometimes for hours). I write, though at night I struggle more for words and am less productive than I am in the morning. I scratch out ideas and sketch the things that tumble about in my head. More often, I think about what I will write, later, when my head is clear and I’ve managed to sleep. There’s research out there that links creativity and insomnia, and I don’t doubt that connection. Sometimes those hours of peace when I can let my mind go where it wishes are the only time I can think about writing ideas without interruption — not just from other people, or the dog, but from TV and the Internet (I rarely watch or surf when I can’t sleep, and most advice on dealing with insomnia will suggest the same.)

But there’s also something about being awake in those hours: Insomniacs hear the scufflings of night creatures, the creaks of houses shifting their weight, the yowls of cats fighting in the yard. We see gardens blue with moonlight and sip tea against lonely chills. There are lots of famous writers known to have insomnia: Mark Twain was an insomniac, as were Franz Kafka and Alexandre Dumas and the poet Amy Lowell. You have to wonder about Van Gogh (Take a look at “Starry Night”), and Munch (ditto) and Miro (“Constellations”).

The “suffering” of insomnia has little to do with not sleeping at night. It’s the next zombie-like day that causes the suffering. No matter how much I look forward to late-night hours of thought and creation, I still have to get up in the morning and make it through the next 14 or 16 hours. And I do get through, whether insomnia has robbed me of sleep or not. Thankfully, there’s coffee.

Insomnia and I have established a wary partnership. As Joan Didion wrote in the essay “In Bed,” about her migraines:

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding….

Opposite day.

Yesterday sucked. It was one of those days:

1. I slept very little the night before (insomnia!) and woke up cranky.

2. It was pouring rain and hail. All. Day. Long.

3. No one called me back for the six stories I’m trying to write by the end of the week. In fact, one guy even emailed me to tell me that he would never call me back. (Um, gee, thanks for your cooperation.)

4. I decided, despite the hail and rain and plunging temperatures, to cheer myself up by going to this cool shoe store I really like and buying this pair of shoes I have wanted for a long time. Our car is in the shop (Thank you DHL truck and cab driver for side-swiping our parked car) and so I walked (in the pouring rain and hail and violently blowing winds) about a half a mile to get to said shoe store. When I got there, the one salesperson ignored me. Just flat out acted like I wasn’t there. So I finally left without said beloved shoes. By the time I got home, I was soaked, cold and maybe, just a little bitter.

4. Did I mention no one returned my calls?

5. Even Stalker Cat was in a bad mood, because he was stuck outside in the pouring rain and hail and he kept coming to my window (his fur slicked and wet) and yowling incessantly. I’m a sucker and let him in, which was fine until later in the afternoon when he hopped up on my kitchen counter and proceeded to carry off a bag of bagels. A small cat! A bag of bagels in his mouth! He carried them up the stairs, where when I reached him, laughing, he was trying to gnaw through the plastic bag. There were teeth marks in the bagels. I wish I had a picture, because watching a cat lug a bunch of bagels up the stairs was pretty funny.

The one bright spot in the day was getting emails from a couple of people I generally find to be awesome.

The point of this post is not, actually, to rant about my bad day. The point is this: Sometime in the hopefully not-too-distant future, I’m going to avoid tumbling headfirst into the seemingly bottomless pit of despair that accompanies a Bad Day. I always forget that there’s a Next Day, which is usually — not to get all empowerment and positive thinking-y on you — a better one.

For example: Today is the exact opposite of yesterday.

1. It’s sunny and beautiful outside. Blue sky, puffy white clouds.

2. I’ve actually left the house and gone to the gym. On the way home, I stopped in the bookstore and bought two books. Even if nothing else had gone my way today, that would have been enough to make things better. I don’t know why I didnt’ do it yesterday.

3. Everyone called me back! Even the place where I’ve left six messages in the past 5 days and which seems to be more of a fortress than an office.

4. More emails from people I generally find to be awesome.

5. I ordered the aforementioned cool shoes online. Ha! Take that shoe salesperson! I hope you work on commission.

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming, maybe

I’ve been oversleeping, something that is both luxurious and frustrating. Luxurious, because I know I am lucky to be able to do it, and frustrating because I don’t necessarily want to do it.

I have had trouble falling asleep recently, and find myself staying up reading until 2 am. This in itself I don’t mind so much; the quiet, uninterrupted reading time is delicious.

It’s the morning after that’s the problem, because inevitably, when I fall asleep at 2 am, I am unprepared to wake up at 7:30, or even 8:30. I find myself half-asleep, turning off my alarm when it offers its maddening electronic beep, and then returning to the deepest of dream-filled slumbers and waking up confused, groggy and still lost in the dreams at 10 am.

This morning I dreamt I had breakfast with someone I haven’t seen for several years and the mood of the dream left me disconcerted when I woke up.

I tend to think that my natural sleeping pattern is midnight to 8 or 9 am, but frankly, I would prefer
being up before that. I hate waking up late and then an hour later wondering where my day has gone. If I could write well at night, I wouldn’t mind staying up so late, because I would spend the time writing and not have to feel guilty when I woke up late in the morning. Instead, I stumble into my morning, feeling rushed to get started writing, harried because the morning is half over, confused by the visits in my dreams.

Every day I vow to fall asleep earlier, get up earlier. Every night I find myself blinking at the dark, then getting up and grabbing a book.

April showers

With just one class left to attend and much of the contents of my apartment packed or sold, I feel as though I am biding time until May. I’ve been socializing a lot, attending parties, saying goodbye to various classmates. None of it has been very emotional so far. Frankly, I just want to get going. I definitely feel as though I am waiting to begin my normal life. Plus, with the apartment in such a state of chaos, I am starting to feel as though I am away from home and in a state of limbo. We have little food left in the cabinets, and some of our furniture has been sold. I gave away my kitchen knives so anything we cook can’t involve chopping. Things like that make me ready to get on with all this moving.

I have not been writing, since, as I previously declared, April is No Writing Month. I am finding that I am missing it, which is a good thing. Hopefully that means I will just pour out the words and pages when I get back to San Francisco and I am seriously sitting down to work on my thesis on a regular basis.

Without writing, I’ve found myself coming up with other random creative projects. Perhaps with all of the writing I’ve trained myself to need some time being creative every day, or to express myself everyday. As a result, recently I’ve been drawing, something I haven’t done in forever, and I’ve been dreaming up other art projects. The Internet is a fabulous resource for the visual arts. I knew this already, but it continues to impress me. I’ve been surfing photos on Flickr and browsing collages there and elsewhere. It’s very inspiring to see what people are creating, and it makes me want to spend hours with markers, paper, my camera, and Photoshop.

After a week or so of perfect spring weather, it has gotten cold and rainy, which is perhaps another reason I am ready to get going. I of course had packed up my coat and sweaters and cold weather shoes and I had to go and dig them all out again. It’s been in the 40s and gray, which makes me want to go back to bed not long after I get up. This might also be due to the fact that I am still not sleeping well despite lots of exercise and less coffee. Well, change always leads to sleeplessness for me, so it’s nothing new and I’ve learned not to get frustrated about it anymore. I just try to use the middle-of-the-night wakefulness to be creative or read something interesting — make the best of it.

Trashy post

There is definitely, definitely not enough sleep occurring in my world. Between staying up too late to watch “Winter Sonata” and drinking too much coffee, sleep has been frustratingly elusive. And, in a way, stupidly elusive. I mean, I’m done with my classwork and I should be relaxed and sleeping til noon every day. Ha! Last night I was awake til 3 am, and then my buddies the Cambridge garbage men, who love to slam trash bins around and use the “beep, beep, beep” truck backup noise as much as possible, decided to visit the area just outside my window for an extended stay early this morning. I am starting to believe that they aren’t actually emptying the trash, they just like to sit below my window and drink their coffee while pressing the button that produces the “beep, beep, beep” sound just for kicks, kind of like the bored cows in the “Happy Cows are from California” commercial who keep ringing the farmer’s doorbell. Except in this case, I’m the farmer. And we’re not in California. And I’m by no means happy.

To continue with trash-related news (because I can!), the management company that runs my building for some reason last week did not have the complex’s trash removed. This means that two weeks worth of about 35 apartments’ accumulated garbage has been building up in the fenced in area that contains the trash bins behind the building. This despite signs in the lobby and on doors that say “Please don’t add more trash if you don’t have to” and other cautionary statements that ultimately have no effect. Let’s face it, if you’ve got smelly trash in your apartment, you’re not exactly going to hold on to it just to appease the management company that wasn’t doing its job.

Theoretically this refuse snafu should be cleared up today. This is a good thing. Moving produces a lot of trash. As in two giant bags of paper that have been sitting under my desk for nearly a week because of the prohibition on taking our trash to the bins. (Hey, I was trying to do my part.) But my apartment is starting to give the appearance that I’m one of those old women who stashes newspapers and trash for years to the point that she can’t even see her furniture and eventually they find her buried face down under 50-year-old yellowed clippings from Ladies Home Journal.