Trouble Sleeping?
join the enormous club
Pssst…. are you awake?
Who among us hasn’t been up at 4am at some point in the grips of something a writer-friend calls “night logic” - where your rational mind pretty much shuts down and your emotional mind takes over, letting your feelings and anxieties and fears surface. For me, that includes a lot of other emotions that are not necessarily useful to me in my waking life: rage, frustration, sorrow… I do not love it when I wake from a dream in the wee hours.
Sleep is where your mind feels safest - so that is when all the hard stuff comes out.
Your awake-time is when all that emotional stuff lives peacefully in the back of the closet in a shoebox no one is allowed to touch. Depending on the volatility of the emotions/fears/memories that are stores away in the shoebox, we tend to scream if even the closet door is jostled, much less if someone accidentally opens the box.
In any event, as for midnight waking up and being overwhelmed by feeling sad / afraid / lost / bereft — you HAVE to go through the feelings. All of them.
They are real. They live in a figurative box in a closet in your head. If you don’t go through them and feel them and “see” them and recognize them for what they are, they will come tumbling out on the head of someone who wasn’t expecting them to be there and clobber that person and that is not at all what you want to be doing with your secret feelings, right?
So, since you have to eventually go through them all, it might as well not be at work with your boss or at dinner with your kids or at the gym or at the grocery store or the bank. It might as well be when you are the most alone.
Feelings are yours to work through. They belong only to you. You can’t control them, nor should you, but you do own them.
So go ahead: wake up in the middle of the night feeling awful and recognize and acknowledge the awfulness.
Here’s what that might sound like: Wow. I lost a job that meant a lot to me. I lost a parent that meant the world to me. I lost a spouse who was intrinsic to my sense of self. I am in a situation that is beyond my capabilities as they are right now. I am scared. This is real. This changes who I am. I am sad / afraid / angry / terrified / lost / frustrated / confused / overwhelmed. I am human and I am mortal.
But also? I am literally in my bed, the safest place in the whole world. And I was just a second ago asleep, the safest possible physical position for my body to be in. I am literally physically safe. So okay, the truth is, I feel emotionally unsafe. But this is the very best time, in the very best physical place, to take an hour or so and unpack these horrible horrible horrible feelings and “see” them.
Here. In my bed. With my aching, frantic head on a pillow. With my empty arms clutching at a blanket. I’m breathing shallowly as though I were on a rollercoaster, but I am not on a rollercoaster. I am snugly in my own bed. I can not be safer than here.
(Note: if you are not safe in your own bed you need to go elsewhere to sleep. If you are not safe to leave then there are organizations created to help you. Please look for one.)
If you woke up and you were covered in cold sweat and are now staring at the ceiling it might be hard to recognize your own safety, despite the pillow cradling your head. Maybe pick up a stuffed animal (if you have one and this is a possibility for you, you could also choose a nearby cat or dog or friend or something.) Point is, these arms need not be so empty at this moment. Any inanimate soft object will do. The pillow cradling your head for example….
Then feel it. Feel it in the middle of the night. Feel how much these feelings hurt.
When you’ve cried, punched the pillow, screamed into that pillow (hopefully you didn’t wake the neighbors, your lover, or your kids) - and felt the horrible feeling until you are panting with exhaustion, you may recognize that you are empty. Drained.
You are left with just whatever is left when you’ve drained dry. Strength? Determination? Hope? (There’s Pandora’s box of evils again)
Maybe you’re just left with the fact that you’re alive. Life. You’re left with time. However much time you have left—it’s yours.
Go back to sleep out of—yes—exhaustion. Fix it later. You don’t have to fix it now. You felt it and that was work enough for one night.
Just be sure to keep a dream journal.
WRITERLY NEWS
I am thrilled to report that a theater review/essay I wrote about two plays I saw this week was accepted into Counter Arts on Medium. I don’t know if this link will work, but hopefully yes! (I wax poetic about shows that confiscate your phone - I also went to Radio City Music Hall to see the 100th Anniversary of the Rockettes’ Xmas show. Some guy tried to video a dance and I told him to stop it. He argued with me. I won.
More news: I was recently interviewed by Michael Clogs of Depictions Media for their eponymous podcast. We went right off the rails from the very beginning - into big ideas, controversies, and all kinds of things that Canadians like to discuss that are all but off the table with strangers in the USA. Have you noticed this? We talk a lot more about the weather these days unless we know each other.
Anyway - the fun thing about this podcast is that for no reason whatsoever, it is big in Lithuania — as listed in the Top 50 Podcasts of the World. (He told me so when he found out my M’s stand for Milda Motekaitis - as Lithuanian a name as you can get without letters that don’t appear in the American alphabet….and yet the last name is misgendered. Having misgendered names is an irony that Lithuanian-Americans have been living with long long long before anyone who speaks this mostly genderfree language ever coined the term trans.
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHT
The idea of establishing a “safe space” makes me wonder if that means the default is that no space is inherently safe. I can see a case for that claim — but if that is true, then doesn’t it follow that we are intended (by the fact that we exist at all — in an inherently unsafe world) to learn to be capable of successfully navigating unsafe spaces?
I love this. Thank you. I can relate to your experience. The mind can race in the middle of the night and it reminds me of the opening lines of Mary Gaitskill's novel Veronica:
"I open my eyes. I can't sleep. When I try, I wake after two hours and then spend the rest of the night pulled around by feelings and thoughts. I usually sleep again at dawn, then wake 7:30. When I wake, I'm mad at not sleeping, and that makes me mad at everything. My mind yells insults as my body walks itself around."
All the best to you! I really enjoy your posts!!
Wishing you sweet dreams in the New Year - if not before!