alternatively titled: how many times can i repeat a single word in an article until the word warps and stretches in your own mind’s eye, becoming grotesque and fascinating and… well, anyways, i say “sleep” way too many times.
You know how some people follow something called intuitive eating? Last fall semester, I followed intuitive sleeping…
Which sounds far easier on the body than its actuality was, because the “intuitive sleeping” that I followed came with a bunch of asterisks, footnotes, “but”s.
Many days and nights were carved out by my responsibilities, my schoolwork, my job, so it was only in the rare, treasured spaces in between that I allowed myself to sleep… intuitively.
I’ve always had some trouble falling asleep, but it was made worse by a schedule that often did not allow me to, and soon it became agony1 to try to continue “fixing” my sleep schedule in those few spaces in between. It felt like a waste of time for me. So instead, I quickly learned to simply sleep when it came to me, even if it meant a 3 hour nap in the evening followed by no sleep until morning. I washed the dishes in the loneliness of 5am, I went on runs on campus in the surreal emptiness of 3am2, and I became familiar with the strange rattle of the garbage collectors’ carts in the haziness of 6am.
The best and worst part of being awake at those hours was the feeling that you were utterly alone in the world. There was nothing to interrupt that silence beyond your own thoughts, your own actions. As a result, that period of time always felt off-the-books, off-record, and unless there was a deadline waiting for me in the morning with open arms and forbidding teeth, the time lacked urgency, realness.
When around 5 to 6am, the campus began stirring again, in the form of sleepy figures walking across the quads and loud garbage trucks crowding the streets, it felt like intrusions in the perfect privacy of early early morning.
The fun thing about college is that you learn all kinds of new things about yourself, and one of my discoveries was that I’m somewhat of a light sleeper.
Last semester, I bought earplugs for the first time, something that I had put off out of the suspicion that they wouldn’t work well. But to my surprise, they worked… almost too well. It’s a strange feeling when it seems like the loudest sounds in the world are your own breathing, the creak of your joints, and your heart beating within your own chest.
The first couple of times I used them, I found it disconcerting – I felt unprepared for how intimate, how isolating, that silence was. I was even more distracted by my own relentless thoughts. But, eventually, partly out of necessity, I grew used to it, and I grew to love that loneliness.