Wednesday, February 24, 2016 // The Statement
7B
to my health insurance company but never did. It
was given to me nine weeks ago by a therapist… my
therapist. I kept it because it gave me concreteness
every time I opened this notebook that sat on the
desk next to my bed, it told me — or by keeping it
there I was trying to get it to tell me — a piece of
my identity.
“This is the room we have available at this
time, it is typically for our younger patients, I
apologize,” I was told on the first day of therapy
as I entered a room painted blue full of puzzles
and toy blocks. I made a joke about loving puz-
zles, grabbed a piece, and played with it between
my pointer finger and thumb as I thought. I spent
an hour on a couch every week. I practiced cog-
nitive behavioral therapy on white worksheets. I
talked a lot. I didn’t hate it. I learned a lot: how
my brain had created unhealthy synapses
where when I heard one noise, no matter
how small, I jumped to thinking I would
never be able to fall asleep when in truth
it was a pretty small noise. How other
things, like not going to bed on time or it
not being fully dark in my room, linked
another unhealthy jump in my mind tell-
ing me I’ll never be able to sleep. Every
time these synapses fire they create
deeper and deeper grooves in my neuro-
logical paths that release anxious feelings
within me. My brain was making these
well-worn grooves and I had to train it
not to follow down the same problematic
grooves every night.
I learned something really heart-
breaking about the freedom of thought.
I used to believe that every thought
was your own and was healthy and true
and deserved to be thought about and
explored. I learned that this wasn’t true.
***
According to the Anxiety and Depres-
sion Association of America, anxiety is
the most common mental illness in the
United States. I paid a lot of money and
spent a lot of mornings hoping my sis-
ter’s car that wasn’t built for snowy roads
would survive a 10-minute drive to a therapist’s
office to be diagnosed with the most general dis-
order that exists in the world. And now, I, too,
was this basic denominator. I was the statistic
written at the top of news articles addressing
“mental health awareness” that were pitched in
the newsroom.
I have typed the word insomnia into Google
a few hundred times. Insomnia can be classified
into four categories: transient (insomnia lasting a
single night or a few weeks), intermittent (if tran-
sient episodes occur from time to time), chronic
(if insomnia occurs most nights and lasts a month
or more) or secondary (when insomnia is a side
effect of another problem, a symptom of an emo-
tional, neurological, or other medical disorder.)
I believe I have experienced all four of these
types. The most prominent, and also the hard-
est to accept, is the secondary type — my anxi-
ety gives me insomnia. But I don’t know if those
words are true — the word insomnia and the
word anxiety can very much be reversed in that
sentence. My insomnia gave me anxiety. Because
I could’ve sworn to you those first nights not
sleeping there were no waves of nerves, I just sim-
ply couldn’t sleep. Or, were the waves there and I
just didn’t have a word to call them by? Did defin-
ing them “anxiety” make them occur more often?
Did identifying a problem help solve it or simply
and boldly accentuate it?
***
I traveled to New Hampshire in a minivan
with five strangers at the start of May. We had
all signed up for the New England Literature
Program and would be camping and backpack-
ing while studying the work of New England
authors together. As hours of the drive stretched
on and secrets seemed to be exposed like they
were nothing fragile between us, I told them I
was worried about my sleeping. I didn’t know in
that minivan that I was about to spend six weeks
learning how to sleep again. At night, my body
would not feel anxious and buzzing but instead
be calm enough to actually crave sleep now that
it had been reminded how good sleep felt. There
are a lot of things to fall in love with in the care-
fully crafted community of NELP. Sleep was my
largest love affair.
When we spent three days in the pouring rain
on the Pemigewasset trail, a trip we had to cut
short due to the harsh weather, I faced my anxi-
ety with higher physical stakes. Instead of hav-
ing to wake up and walk my body through Ann
Arbor to class, I had to be rested enough to climb
a mountain.
When the last week of the program came and
I still hadn’t taken a solo camping trip where you
hike out and set up camp to spend 24 hours com-
pletely alone, I began to think about and realize
why. I imagined all the waves of nerves finding
me in a small green tent with thick rows of birch
trees and miles of lake water around me. I knew I
would spend 24 hours wide awake, counting the
waves of nerves pulsing up and down the insides
of me. After the dishes were cleaned that night, I
signed myself up anyway.
On my solo, when the sun went down and
I crawled into my sleeping bag, I couldn’t find
the waves of nerves. And where in the past the
searching for waves typically brought them
running to me, none came. I fell asleep effort-
lessly, on a slanted hill because I couldn’t find
flatter ground, on twigs and branches and rough
dirt because I didn’t do a good job of clearing
the ground, listening to strange animals thud
through the brush. Despite all of the unhealthy
synapse-inducing factors, I slept.
***
This year, as I folded sheets under my mattress
and pushed pins into a tapestry to hang on my
wall, I told myself I was constructing a purpose-
ful place to sleep. I told myself it was going to be
different this year.
It is different, of course it is, but sleep doesn’t
come like it did in New Hampshire or in San
Diego or in Washington D.C., where I spent the
rest of the summer. It seems to remember it is
unwelcome here in Ann Arbor.
Sometimes I go to class with the old exhaus-
tion. But sometimes there are days when some-
one answers my question of "how are you?" with
“good, but tired” and I feel like I can actually
relate because I feel a normal amount of tired.
There is never a night I fall asleep — that luxuri-
ous sinking feeling that I miss — effortlessly.
The second week of the semester I sat on a
black couch and a boy asked me to explain why
I said I didn’t want to see him anymore after a
very sudden and short amount of time. I scram-
bled with too many words, trying to explain how
I have problems sleeping and don’t understand
it fully and his presence in my life added more
waves of nerves and less sleep. I didn’t say to
him what I have written here. I fumbled a lot. He
looked at me and said, “Claire, that’s the point.
You have general anxiety disorder; you don’t have
to explain it. It is a clinical disorder.”
Maybe he’s right; maybe I need to get better
at understanding the clinical part of my disorder.
Maybe I need to pull out that white piece of paper
that has my diagnosis on it and study it, learn to
cope with the tangible symptoms of anxiety. To
accept that my insufficiencies are excused by
my diagnosis. Maybe my exhaustion will finally
evaporate if I can stop trying to solve my anxi-
ety, to cure it. But here is the difference: It is not
as simple as what all the thought catalogs and
WordPress blogs from every anxiety-suffering
teen who preaches to accept yourself and become
not a statistic but a normality, because I have tast-
ed cured-ness. In New Hampshire I was strong. I
know I do not have to live sleepless.
There is something sickening attached to
what I learned in therapy, attached to this clini-
cal part. I learned that my brain, my self, cre-
ated unhealthy neurological pathways. I made
so many unhealthy choices that I gave myself a
disorder. Though I am trying to pull myself out of
those deep problematic neurological pathways, I
am haunted by this idea that I gave myself a dis-
order.
***
It is a strange sensation to watch your-
self in very real, tangible ways change
into a person you don’t recognize. Last
year I noticed I’d creep away from loud
conversations and into the confines of my
bedroom. Outside of my house, I noticed
when conversations got loud more often
and would remove myself from them,
not commenting or speaking up. In these
awake times, there were never waves of
anxiety. So why was I creating distance
between myself and the people around
me? Why, when I genuinely liked and
wanted to share my life with the people
around me, was I reverting more inward-
ly than ever?
So this week I sat on each of my room-
mates’ beds and challenged myself to
explain my insomnia, something I always
struggled to make public. As I opened
my mouth an elevator speech of what my
insomnia is like flowed from my mouth,
and, strangely, I didn’t hate it. I said it
seven times, to each of them, and for the
first time in a long time I recognized and
liked the sound of my own voice. I wasn’t
explaining a diagnosis, I wasn’t explain-
ing a definition of insomnia that I had
Googled, I was explaining, quite simply,
me.
Just like those deep grooves that are the
neurological pathways in my brain, I’m typing
these words to create new grooves that lead to
a healthy explanation of my anxiety. I’m pull-
ing myself out of the problematic grooves. I’m
remapping my brain.
I’ll now always think of my anxiety as not
general, not the same, most common mental
disorder in the country, not everyone else’s. I’ll
think of it as this peculiar, hybrid disorder that
surfaces only in this unique arena right before
and right after sleep. Sleep is a romantic time
between self-awareness and self-lost-ness, and I
feel lucky my anxiety allows me to exist so alert
in these times: They might be the most impor-
tant. I’ll share what I can about this precious
part of me and I’ll know sharing feels reassuring
and rewarding. But I won’t forget that there is
beauty in the nuances of my secret: There will
always be a little bit of all of this that is still
unsolved, and I’m not afraid, worried or anxious
to keep that part to myself.
I am going to create a new word for my type of
anxiety — a precious type that only comes alive
in the secret moments in between the conscious
and the unconscious. That word will be all mine.
ILLUSTRATION BY
EMILIE FARRUGIA