ONE: “You don’t sleep more than a couple hours every night, if you’re lucky? That must leave you with plenty of extra time to get things done, right?”
Um, no.
Insomnia does not like to be lonely.
You know that saying, “Misery loves company”?
Insomnia is there to make the night as miserable as possible
because being truly lonely is only fun in a crowded room
drowning yourself in alcohol.
Meanwhile, Anxiety, so terrified at the concept of functioning,
cloaks herself in sweaters like tents to hide from curious kittens
and she trembles
and shakes
like her body is an earthquake
and she’s preparing to fall apart the moment Depression,
drawn to the stench of existential despair
radiating from Anxiety’s sweat glands,
comes knocking on their door to join the party.
It was a party that neither of them wanted to be at
but, as fate would have it,
they find each other in the middle of the dance floor
and fall in love with each other’s insatiable need for validation.
They spend the night swapping horror stories
about how everything will go wrong
and that there is no hope for me,
no light at the end of the tunnel,
no kindred spirit waiting to be merged with mine across time.
They mock me and my naïve little belief that my life must be worth living
simply because I am breathing
because, little do I know...
they are planning to kill me.
So no,
I don’t get things done at night,
because as much as I want to escape consciousness
and responsibility
and reality
the mere thought that I’m only going to wake up to
the very things I am most afraid of
convinces Insomnia that there is no point in leaving that bed
unless absolutely necessary.
TWO: “You do it to yourself, you know.”
No, I don’t know.
No, I think you’re the one who doesn’t know.
Insomnia occurs when the chemistry in the brain isn’t quite right.
This results in hours upon hours of tossing
and turning
and thinking
and worrying
about every aspect of my life
as if I don’t obsess enough over them during the day light hours
when the sun illuminates and magnifies every fault and insecurity I have
like an organism under a microscope
no, I don’t do it to myself.
Binge-watching entire seasons of my latest Netflix obsession
throughout the course of the night
is not the cause of my sleeplessness
it is a symptom.
Getting up and leaving the house at three in the morning
to take a walk around the block
is not the reason why I can’t sleep
it is one of the million things I do to try and exhaust my body
in hopes that if it tires before my mind does
maybe – just maybe – it will fall asleep for me.
A walk around the block becomes laps around the town
until alarms start ringing and the sun starts rising
and I’ve burned all the calories I need to be an attractive woman in society.
Insomnia is not a trendy Tumblr aesthetic,
it is a curse I do not deserve
so, fuck you for saying that I do.
THREE: “Have you tried this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? What about this?"
No, of course not.
Why would I try absolutely everything medically available to me
to lower the volume in my head long enough to get a peaceful sleep?
It has never crossed my mind
in my entire twenty some odd years of living
that I should do something to remedy my restless nights.
You think I don't realize that these bags
are permanently glued underneath my eyes?
Or that I don't toss and turn at night
and wrack my brain for all the clever things
I ought to do to induce sleep?
I've tried millions of things.
Some work better than others
and some don't work at all.
Some things I won't go anywhere near anymore
because one night, Insomnia forgot to invite Depression to the party
and she felt so rejected that she tried to force the forever-sleep
on the rest of us
with sleeping pills and Benadryl
and to Our dismay,
she failed.
FOUR: "You just haven't tried hard enough."
Who the hell are you to tell me how hard
I have or haven't tried?
Newsflash:
Most days it is just as hard for me to lie down in bed
as it is to pull my ass out of it every morning
because Depression only unchains the wrecking balls from her feet
just long enough so she can wrap them around my neck
and take a lunch break.
So, I am bound to that mattress
because, all of the sudden,
I'm carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders
and I am not strong enough to carry it without Her.
FIVE: "Try counting sheep."
Okay sure let's give it a whirl:
I see one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven thousand things
that are wrong with me,
eighteen hundred germs crawling into my skin
designed to make me sick
and, if I’m lucky, maybe kill me,
nineteen million reasons why I should cancel on my friends tomorrow
even though I’ve done it twenty-thousand times in a row,
twenty-one excuses to call into work on Sunday,
or twenty-two reasons drive full speed into oncoming traffic
so I don’t have to show up at all
but I can still say that I tried.
Or twenty-three muscle relaxers I should take all at once
so I don’t have to worry about any of the above
No, I don’t like to count.
SIX: “You don’t sleep? How do you function?”
I
don’t
know.
But I do know this:
I don’t want to.
xXxXx
Check out more poems like this in my book, Flames Speak, coming to you soon!
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