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I'm self conscious
I. Can't. Sleep.
But what's more interesting, to me at least, is that — I'm beginning to think that what for the longest time I've always called insomnia, might really be more akin to a childlike refusal to just go brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, and get into bed.
Let's go back...
When I was a child, my mom — out of a heartfelt, well-meaning, and deep feeling desire to ensure she was showing me a certain kind of conscientious care that she herself did not fully receive — would often devote herself to the aspirational task of earnestly engaging with a resolutely oppositional little Me about why it was time to go to sleep, why it was that sleep was so very important, and other such perfectly reasonable and seemingly inarguable justifications, which I somehow, nevertheless, apparently found a way of refuting and parrying with such pint-sized aptitude that these post-gloaming-time debates would sometimes stretch on for hours.
This! — Rather than simply putting me to bed. Despite my brilliant treatises on the Tyranny of Unexplained Nighttime Consciousness Boundaries Being Imposed Upon My Helpless Little Form.
Because it was what was happening. Because it was the thing that happens at this time, the thing we do now.
Thereby forcing me to, you know, deal with that.
That dysregulation in one's body when one has a strong impulsive desire to do one thing, but is being told they must in fact do something else.
You know that feeling... the one that becomes internalized as you grow, thus allowing you as an adult to do the things you might not want to do, but need to?
Or just as importantly, not do the things you might really want to do, but know you need to not do?
But let's go back even further for a moment.
My mom says, when I was a baby she and dad would have to put me in the car and drive me around for hours before I'd finally fall asleep...
I can always rest when I'm traveling.
It's something about stillness — everything stopping — that an anxious and excitable little child within me seems unable to abide.
I think that's why I love trains so very much — or the backseats of cars I've mentioned before. It's like a very low to the ground experience of flying: effortlessly soaring through the world, feeling the regulating vibrations of the carriage trundling along beneath me... I don't have to do a thing, but a thing is still happening to me.
I can rest, then.
It seems, for me... it really all does come down to this idea of movement.
There's a scenario in a favorite book of mine* wherein time has stopped completely and those who are still around must move constantly lest the oxygen surrounding their bodies be used up.
I think that's how I feel.
As though stillness and rest before the point of utter exhaustion is the equivalent of standing still in a growing miasma of carbon dioxide as the oxygen quickly diminishes.
So, most nights... Static and stationary and chasing after my own unruly inner child — I sit, wanting to watch just one more video, research just one more topic, play just one more little game with the World before ending this day's journey. Read, in essence, one more bedtime story before turning out the lights.
There's this concept I came across...
With the provocative title of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination*
It describes what appears to be a relatively common experience of sacrificing sleep for the sake of mindless, pleasurable dithering, which there wasn't time for during the day.The idea being that the "revenge" is against — well, oneself ultimately — but feels as though it's against the circumstances of one's day, which did not lead one to have enough time for said dithering earlier on.
"Take that, Overcrowded Day!"
One seems to say in a cutting-off-one's-nose-to-spite-one's-face sort of tone,
"I'll contribute to my own ever-growing sleep debt! That'll show you."
But, regardless of this intriguing insight into my seemingly communally reflected experience here, I nevertheless seem as good now at convincing myself of the right timedness of these demonstrably ill placed nocturnal activities as I was at convincing my loving mother all those years ago.
Almost as good, that is...
Because the difference is that I am, after all, in here with me, as it were — in my own head — and can therefore clearly see after all these years that the "one more whatever-it-is" will always, inevitably lead to a one more and a one more, and a one more... until...
The dawn creeps up tenuously, not sure if winter's gray will allow for it and my eyes begin to droop, tempting me into another world with its soft, persistent grasp.
Far more convincing than any parent, inner or outer could ever hope to be.
Far more satisfying than any revenge against myself or my circumstances.
And I begin to drift.
Sleep now feeling like the single greatest gift I could be given in spite of myself, rather than the frustratingly necessary action-ceasing event, interrupting all the fun there is to be had in the warm and twinklingly dark blank canvas of the night.
I'm not sure how I feel right now about being a fully grown adult grappling with himself over his own bedtime...
I don't know...
What do you think?
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