For as long as I can recall, I've had trouble falling asleep.
Don't ask me why. If I knew I might have done something about it long since.
But there's something about falling asleep that is like falling off a cliff: you're going headlong, arms akimbo, into a dark, sometimes weird, out of control place bits of the experience of which you can remember when you wake. Other bits leave you sitting upright in the middle of the night, gasping, wondering what the hell that was all about.
Whether you're a kid or an adult, you can't explain what's going on, because you can't explain it to yourself.
As a kid, you get used to just cringing a bit and saying, "I don't know" whenever being catechized about whatever you just did and why you did it, because most of the time it was just something you did just because you did it. Being a kid is like that. You don't know yet how you're supposed to act at, say 40.
As you get older, the trouble with falling asleep is compounded: getting there is, at least, some time when you aren't worrying about stuff. But then you wake up and bam! boom! you've got another day in front of you. And being awake gets to be as bad as trying to get to sleep. and when you get older and you feel that way, you might as well, just say, "I don't know" again because all people expect you to do is be like them. It's like the scene in Moonstruck when Cher slaps Nicolas Cage and yells, "Snap out of it!"
Except you don't always know what to snap out of, or how to do it. And then you get other people wanting to tell you how they know what you need. Sometimes they start demanding what you do is what they want. Sometimes they rachet it up a few notches, using other leverage to not just tell you, but to get other people to order you, to do what they want you to do, mostly because it makes them, not you, feel any better.
As writers from Kathleen Norris and Andrew Solomon and William Manchester (that's how I get back around to where I started, fooled you, eh?) know, it's all a matter of dealing with depression.
Manchester put it best:
So here I am, awake, figuring I ought to explain things. There's a severe thunderstorm warning, and the TV is cutting and out, and the door to the deck just blew open on its own. Could be interesting, being up this late. Back to trying to fall asleep.
I've lately, whenever awake, been re-reading William Manchester's Churchill biography, The Last Lion
Don't ask me why. If I knew I might have done something about it long since.
But there's something about falling asleep that is like falling off a cliff: you're going headlong, arms akimbo, into a dark, sometimes weird, out of control place bits of the experience of which you can remember when you wake. Other bits leave you sitting upright in the middle of the night, gasping, wondering what the hell that was all about.
Whether you're a kid or an adult, you can't explain what's going on, because you can't explain it to yourself.
As a kid, you get used to just cringing a bit and saying, "I don't know" whenever being catechized about whatever you just did and why you did it, because most of the time it was just something you did just because you did it. Being a kid is like that. You don't know yet how you're supposed to act at, say 40.
As you get older, the trouble with falling asleep is compounded: getting there is, at least, some time when you aren't worrying about stuff. But then you wake up and bam! boom! you've got another day in front of you. And being awake gets to be as bad as trying to get to sleep. and when you get older and you feel that way, you might as well, just say, "I don't know" again because all people expect you to do is be like them. It's like the scene in Moonstruck when Cher slaps Nicolas Cage and yells, "Snap out of it!"
Except you don't always know what to snap out of, or how to do it. And then you get other people wanting to tell you how they know what you need. Sometimes they start demanding what you do is what they want. Sometimes they rachet it up a few notches, using other leverage to not just tell you, but to get other people to order you, to do what they want you to do, mostly because it makes them, not you, feel any better.
As writers from Kathleen Norris and Andrew Solomon and William Manchester (that's how I get back around to where I started, fooled you, eh?) know, it's all a matter of dealing with depression.
Manchester put it best:
"All his life he suffered from depression sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knows what Dante knew: that hell is an endless, hopeless, conversation with oneself. every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief."Writing is a way to get outside your own head for a while. Acting must work the same way for some. But there you've got to get the audience to come to you. In little, out of the way electronic corners like this one, you can just put out what's on your mind and readers who find their way through millions of other blogs can take it or leave it. And tell the author you think it's crap on the way out the door.
So here I am, awake, figuring I ought to explain things. There's a severe thunderstorm warning, and the TV is cutting and out, and the door to the deck just blew open on its own. Could be interesting, being up this late. Back to trying to fall asleep.
I've lately, whenever awake, been re-reading William Manchester's Churchill biography, The Last Lion
I've not read the Churchill bio but I really liked American Caesar and Goodbye Darkness.
ReplyDeleteDo people really go to sleep before 3 or 4 a.m.? If so, how do they achieve and maintain the dark circles under the eyes and fine tremor in the hands that come from chronic sleep deprivation? Personally, I've never required any degree of depression to plant me firmly into the "wide awakes." :)
Wishing you sweet dreams...
N.C. Reader