tavie.com

I am not a person for whom sleep, at night, comes easily. This is maybe a strange fact, considering my infamy among friends and family for the number of hours that I am capable of sleeping in a stretch, and for the amount of noise and clamour that I am able to sleep through. I am, indeed, a very good sleeper once it gets to me, and I also admit that I am someone who has a talent for getting sleepy and shutting off a inappropriate moments of stress. (This is self-defense, something I refer to as my anxiety-tryptophan, what I think of as the chemical that my brain releases when confronted with stressful situations.)

But when it comes to sleeping at night, after an appropriate number of hours of wakefulness and activity, even at the moments of most extreme exhaustion, I have always, as many do, had trouble shutting off the brain. I find it almost impossible to go to bed at night and fall asleep without reading or doing one of my beloved New York Times crosswords first, no matter how utterly drained and exhausted and wiped out I may be. I invariably find it stressful, in some degree, to share a room with someone, because I know the light I'd require to read or crossword will bother most people, and so I usually spend nights that I share a room with someone (other than my sister or perhaps Erica or Steph) laying awake for a very long time, with my eyes closed, and usually after an hour or two sleep will creep up on me. I suppose this may surprise people like Kitana, whom I've shared a room with very recently, but it's not the hardship I make it out to be; it simply will take me longer to fall asleep if I don't get my distractions in first.

For the past week sleep has been very, very difficult in coming. I am comforted somewhat by the fact that this is an affliction that is being shared by the majority of the people in the world around me at this time in our lives. But it's hard, isn't it? Even after reading, even when I'm certain I'll start slipping into that pleasant pre-dream hypnogogic state where words run together and strange things happen that I can just barely attend to and be lullingly entertained by on the fringes of my fleeting consciousness, my brain shocks itself awake again and again with images I'd rather not see, and imagined scenarios I have no business imagining. I'm sure anyone reading this (and by now I'm sure it isn't just me) is familiar with the kind of thoughts and scenarious and images I'm speaking of, and I don't guess I'll go into them right now, but suffice it to say that they are terrifying and horrifying and heart-wrenching in the extreme.

Dan Rather is on Letterman now and he is making me cry.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:08 AM | shower me with attention