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