Wednesday, February 24, 2016 // The Statement
6B
Wakeful: A Year in Sleeping
by Claire Bryan, Editorial Page Editor
Yesterday morning, I drank decaf coffee. Last
night, I crawled into bed a little before midnight,
but did not fall asleep until 3:30 or 4 a.m. And yet,
now, at 6:11 a.m, I am a piercing, alert awake.
I shove my phone back onto my desk and push
my eyes closed. The light from my phone’s screen
creates an imprint on the insides of my eyelids.
Instantaneously I begin to feel nervous (a feel-
ing I now grudgingly call anxious), but, because I
refuse to be a victim, I get up, tuck my hair behind
my ears and reach over to pull heavy blue cur-
tains open. Sitting on my bed, staring at the eerie
morning light flooding across my crumpled blan-
kets, I open my laptop. There’s a word document
titled “insomnia” saved in a folder titled “2015,”
within another folder titled “don’t go there.” This
document was created on February 21 at 7:19 p.m.
It was reopened and added to on March 7, March
23, April 7, 8 and 25. My pointer finger double
clicks the document open and begins scrolling
over the 5,000 plus words that exist inside.
As I type these words I have coursing waves of
nerves brushing up and down through the inside
of me. They originate in my gut, folded up behind
my top abdominal, in the fleshy part of the carti-
lage that connects my top two ribs to my sternum.
Sometimes a wave of nerves comes every time I
take a breath in, sometimes a wave of nerves comes
when I hear a noise, sometimes a wave doesn’t
come and the lack of its not coming surprises me. I
think about the lack of it, why this time the wave is
absent, and, like clockwork, the wave does comes. It
knows I’m thinking about it.
This word document contains the story I want
to tell: about how anxiety leads to insomnia. But
now that I’m upright, no longer attempting to fall
asleep, reading over the words I wrote last year,
I’m not anxious. I’m listening for those waves of
nerves; I’m trying to feel for them. They do come
sometimes these days, but today I can’t find them.
This lapse or lack (I’m not sure which one yet) is
the story I need to tell.
I’ve spent a year asking why my brain won’t
let me sleep. I have found a lot of answers in a
lot of different places. This summer I thought I
fixed my sleeping, but in recent weeks I have been
living too many 6 a.m. mornings. Fixing is com-
plicated and identifying the need to fix it is even
more problematic. As I read tirelessly through my
old writing, I’m asking myself a slightly different
question: Why doesn’t my mind let me fall asleep
even after I have understood why it won’t let me
fall asleep in so many different ways?
***
Last September I moved into a sorority house
with 55 other girls. A sorority house is a lot of
things; loud is a good place to start. Floors creak,
doors slam, voices travel sharply and into every
corner of the house. I wish I could say I had
trouble sleeping because I woke up when I heard
noise. Or I wish I could say I had trouble sleeping
because I laid in bed for a couple hours thinking
about the homework looming over my head, or
how I didn’t want to spend next summer at home
in San Diego like I had in the past, or my recent
and only break up with a boy who’d been my best
friend for years — though all of those things I
did wake up to and did think about. But sound
is sound and thoughts are thoughts, and the two
didn’t add up to me not sleeping.
As the weeks got colder and I remembered
how foreign scarves and boots look on me, I told
my three roommates and myself I had a lot on my
mind. “How’d you sleep?” was the most common,
courteous greeting, but when directed at me,
it became an ache in my chest. It still is. I didn’t
bother saying much more than “OK” because
though some people are light sleepers and might
understand if I said “not great,” saying “I don’t
think I ever fell asleep last night” isn’t a break-
fast table conversation anyone wants to have. In
quiet moments, I did say that last phrase, but the
conversation fell bitterly silent because I didn’t
have anything to say after that initial observa-
tion. Friends would ask why and I’d try to explain
what I was thinking about but ultimately end
in saying to them, “I don’t really get it.” They
wouldn’t either.
I began “going to sleep” as early as I could,
crawling into the corner of my top bunk bed
around 11 p.m. I’d lie for hours, listening for when
each roommate would come in the heavy door.
One, two hours passing, three, all right everyone
was home I thought. Then I’d lie watching for the
sinking into sleep feeling to overcome me. When
it wasn’t coming, I’d become frustrated that I
wasn’t getting sleep nor was I getting work done.
This intersection of two nonproductive truths
was a driving center point that I fixated on. Some
nights, around five or six in the morning I think
I drifted, behind my thoughts, into a light sleep.
At 7 a.m. my roommate’s alarm would go off and
she’d dress to go on a run and I was wide-awake.
I drank coffee and went to class and went to
meetings and wrote my stories for the student
newspaper, and though I was exhausted each day
that passed I reasoned with myself: I was stressed
and college was noisy. I identified what hap-
pened at night in terms of when my roommates
came home and when I heard noise and nothing
more. I told myself I was OK in the morning, and
throughout the day I could almost forget I even
told myself that. For weeks, it was survivable.
Months later, it was unbearable. But that was the
trickiest part about all of this, and still is: There is
a lot of truth in that simple phrase. I am OK.
***
My sister Robyn is two years older than me,
but most people who meet us when we are stand-
ing side by side mistake us as twins. We are both
five foot six, a hundred and twenty-five pounds,
have the same dirty blonde hair, wave our hands
the same way when we rant, had the same major
at the same school (I get “Hi Robyn” on campus
at least once a day) and have identical dream jobs.
In high school I could spend all week with
Robyn: sit with her at lunch at school, drive home
and do homework in her bed with her, hate walk-
ing the ten steps down the hall to fall asleep in
separate rooms. When Friday night rolled around
and friends would suggest seeing us we could
decide to go to our favorite Japanese restaurant
— where the waitresses knew us by the “twins”
and the menu hadn’t changed in eight years —
and I would still feel like I had a lifetime to catch
her up on.
Senior year of high school I wrote a profile on
Robyn. At the end of nine pages I tried to pin-
point the relationship Robyn and I have — how
marvelously strange it is to have someone on this
earth who mirrors your same goals in life but
is not yourself and can challenge you and make
you grow pretty perfectly. Our thoughts weren’t
the same hair strands, but they weaved together
tightly making us strong.
The two of us want to invent a lot of words.
Like for the feeling you feel when you are per-
fectly full, but not just the word content, it must
apply to eating only. Or the word for daydream-
ing when you are trying to fall asleep but not fully
dreaming yet. Or a word to describe a process we
always thought was possible: getting rid of the
common cold by pretending you don’t have one.
Robyn used to always remind me that life is too
cool to sleep and we always wanted a name for
that quality, the sleep-when-you’re-dead quality
about someone, about us.
When we met my older brother’s girlfriend
for the first time we thought she was too uptight
— she lived alone in a tidy one-room studio, she
had her days planned into a scheduling book, she
checked off the lists that created her days reli-
giously. I never thought I would become someone
who needs to count the hours of sleep I’m getting
or brush my teeth at a certain time or make my
bed perfectly or tell Robyn I couldn’t go to the
Arb at 2 a.m. All of these things I became.
***
In November I took a lot of NyQuil, the blue
gels that were shoved in the bottom of my desk
drawer that my dad bought me freshman year.
Thinking the antihistamines would help me
sleep, I began to take the pills every night before
going to bed. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The pills would make my body heavy and drowsy
and craving sleep, yet my mind would still run
with thoughts and never stop. It was tormenting.
One night when snow wasn’t on the ground
yet, I ran out of NyQuil and walked to Walgreens
to buy a box of ZzzQuil. On the second floor they
had only shelved the extra large box. When I
placed it on the counter along with toothpaste
and a bag of almonds the cashier picked it up to
scan it.
“Someone’s really trying to sleep,” he said
while laughing a bit, low and loud. I tried to place
his accent. He sounded Southern, but maybe that
was still Midwestern. I laughed, just slightly,
more to myself than to him.
“You know, in college I had the worst insom-
nia,” he continued. I looked at him, wide-eyed,
wanting to hear more but not knowing if he’d
continue and not willing to push him to.
“My girlfriend broke up with me and all I
could think about was how I had screwed it up. I
let it keep me up all night. I was a fool. I should’ve
just gone to bed!” He smiled at me, as if it was that
simple, paused and then after another low laugh
said, “I’m just saying you can get really addicted
to these things. I know.”
I tried to explain to him that they only shelved
the extra large box and I didn’t really need that
much. I don’t know if I would have taken ZzzQuil
every night if I had bought that box. Before I
paid, I asked him to take it off my bill. I walked
home thinking that it had been weeks since I had
thought about the nights in September when I did
think about that summer’s breakup.
As I pull sticky contact lenses from my eyes,
brush my teeth and crawl into an oversized t-shirt
I often feel physically sick. I dread getting into bed
because I know that it will begin my war with sleep.
Where I fight to keep my eyes closed as wave after
wave of once invigorating butterflies of nerves pulse
up and down my body relentlessly. I often lay in bed
for four or five or six hours not being able to silence
my mind that runs around violently and carelessly
with my thoughts. My eyelids tremor unknowing
to the confusion beyond my skull and my muscle.
When I wake up I don’t feel as if I am waking up.
I feel woken, frightened, moved and rearranged
forcefully in the middle of the night, but sun is shin-
ing through my window.
By January my sleeping got worse and my
tiredness evolved into an unfamiliar tiredness.
I no longer craved for heavy blankets and my
eyes to close. My body buzzed with these anx-
ious feelings, and I began to hate lying around
and listening to them. What I hated more was
how physically and mentally weak I felt. What I
hated most was how I didn’t want to admit these
weaknesses. And so I didn’t. The sockets of my
eyes began to grow darker and darker shadows. I
stood in front of the mirror and stared at the two
semicircles of pulsing skin right under my eyes.
The skin was colored a grey-purple; if I stared
really close there were the tiniest light pink spots
mixed in between. My eyes would sting — this
sour, painful sting — every time my eyelids closed
and reopened. I didn’t recognize both the feel and
the look of my own eyes anymore. I don’t know
how much of it was in my head and how much of
it was reality, but I began to not look like myself. I
stopped feeling like myself months ago.
***
The first week of February, I sat in a small
waiting room with six black chairs and a coffee
table piled high with newspapers and two differ-
ent succulent plants. I was shaking just slightly,
as I scrambled to fill in the mountain of papers
on my lap that I was supposed to complete before
my first appointment at Ann Arbor Consultation
Services.
“Please list who you live with, your relation-
ship to them, a description of who they are, are
you satisfied with this relationship — yes or no?”
I began laughing, a shallow laugh, out loud, at
myself. A girl or lady — she looked around 25—
sitting two seats away looked over. Harsh, black-
framed glasses dominated her face. Her hair was
red and pixie cut. I wondered why she was here.
And then hated myself for asking that question,
hated myself for living every cliché movie scene
of a therapist waiting room where the main char-
acter dreams up what everyone’s problem is.
I wrote down “55,” then the word “girls,” then
paused for a moment and eventually wrote the
word “friends.” The ballpoint pen I was using left
a black blob of excess ink at the start of the “f” of
friends; my handwriting looked ugly. I couldn’t
muster much else more to begin to justify what
my life was in a sorority. Justifying how I couldn’t
imagine my life without it brought its own anxi-
eties.
Folded up in a notebook of mine, I have a piece
of paper that states in large, spidery handwriting
“General Anxiety Disorder” with a string of num-
bers after it that I was supposed to call and repeat