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