The stupidest thing I’ve done when tired?
I nearly killed people.
Insomnia has been my constant companion since I was a child. When I was young, I didn’t really see the point of sleep. Why would people do that and miss out on all the marvellous things that could happen whilst they were dozing? I couldn’t understand it. A few years later and I would be the one at house parties who would still be awake at 4 a.m. tidying up the kitchen and flicking through the books in an unfamiliar bookcase to keep myself entertained whilst everyone else slept. Now that I’m much older I watch the way my husband drifts off to sleep within minutes of putting his head on the pillow and, to me, it is a magic trick I will never learn.
I know all about the darkness. In those early hours of the morning I have tried breathing techniques and calming music, crafts and audiobooks, I have cried and railed and paced and lain there convincing myself that, yes, I was just about to fall asleep.
There is no deep-seated trauma fuelling my inability to sleep, by the way. I have no demons on my shoulder, no long repressed memory that keeps me awake. The only anxiety I ever really experience is a direct cause of the fact I’ve usually only had three or four hours sleep and I don’t know how I will get through the day. I am a night owl – if left to my own devices my body clock will naturally let me fall asleep around two or three in the morning and wake up later. Modern society doesn’t really allow for night owls. It is designed around those early birds out catching their worms.
Sleeplessness is cruel in an especially vindictive way. It gives you time: in those hours awake you could write that book, finish that tax return, learn that language, master that skill. But the time it gives you is a broken thing, it is filled with anxiety and fear and rage, it is a sludge of hours, a sticky mess you cannot escape. And worse – it ruins the daytime too.
Days are things to be endured; the shadow of night staining its bright colours. I know all the tips and tricks to help get a person through a day after a sleepless night: the make-up to wear, the timing of caffeine, the things to focus on, and what to let slide. I let a lot slide.
The moment when I knew it all had to change came at the end of my first day back in the new term as a teacher: a job I’d been doing for around 10 years or so, a job I loved and that I was good at, despite my exhaustion. In the car I’d been congratulating myself about how well I’d coped, despite the lack of sleep. This time, my school year would be different: I would wake up early and refreshed, I would not rely on sugar and caffeine to get through the day and then crash from the adrenaline by 6 p.m. ready for my body to wake itself up just in time for bed. I was smug.
That was when I realised the car in front of me on the dual carriageway slip road had stopped. I smashed into it. Another car smashed into me. A pupil who had been in the school bus not far ahead said the whole thing looked “epic” with a new gleam of admiration in his eyes. Miraculously, nobody was badly injured.
My first instinct, once the car had come to a stop, was to put the handbrake on (like that would do any good now) and step out of the driver door, straight into what would have been oncoming traffic if the cars around me had everything not already come to a standstill. My own car was a crumpled thing and smoke wreathed around the twisted metal like a bad Eighties pop video. I remember sitting in the ambulance listening to the radio announcer talk about the major tailbacks caused by me by me but it wasn’t until the other motorists had left that I began to shake.
The realisation that I could have killed someone slithered coldly into the pit of my stomach. I promised myself I would never get in a car again and I would never allow myself to be in the position where I could endanger someone else’s life because of my own exhaustion. However, the responsibilities of life made those promises impossible: I had a job to get to and a mortgage to pay and I couldn’t rely on lifts from colleagues forever. Eventually I had to get back behind the wheel, heart thumping, wincing at every car that drove past me, second-guessing every decision. I still hate driving to this day. I had to find a way of properly living with my insomnia, not despite it.
So that is what I did. I left my teaching job in my fantastic English department and set off on a whole new career as a writer. Was that defeat? I prefer to think of it as impetus. Was it hard to do? Incredibly. But my new routine allowed me to be gentler with myself, to no longer ride a wave of adrenaline each day until I crashed, to get up a bit later but also work much later too. I am writing this at eight in the evening.
I often wonder what kind of person I would have been without those sleepless nights. Would I have achieved more, been kinder, more patient? I don’t know – possibly. I only know what it has taught me. It has taught me determination and a dogged stoicism that doesn’t give up no matter how exhausted I may feel.
I wish I could end by giving you the magic formula of sleep – I wish I could say that I have now completely solved it, this sleep issue of mine, that lavender, or meditation, or yoga or Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has finally worked. None of it has.
But I know this: when I am awake at 4 a.m. I now know that the next day will never be as bad as I imagine. That I will cope. Mentally, I take the pressure away from that tomorrow – it won’t be brilliant, but it will be fine. This is what works for me and, though I still get the odd bad run of nights, my insomnia is now rarer than it used to be. Sometimes I still cancel things the next day if I don’t feel up to it due to tiredness, or feel that I can’t drive but that is not the end of the world – things can be rescheduled, I can adapt. I am kinder on myself.
For years, I battled insomnia, but by doing that I was battling myself, and that isn’t a healthy way to live. Those early birds apparently catch the worm, but, well, who wants a worm, anyway?
‘Sleepless’ by Louise Mumford (£8.99, HQ Digital) is published on Thursday 8 July
No comments:
Post a Comment