The Unrest

There is never a good time to think about insomnia.

Despite this, or because of it, insomnia whispers in your ear, day and night; day when you are savoring your allotted two cups of coffee and night when you sit on the brown leather sofa that you never would have chosen but it is one of the few items of furniture which came from your husband’s life before you and he loves it. You are totally, completely, electrified, noticing each tuft of white hair from your liberally shedding dog and exactly how much dust is on the TV screen. You are a staircase and a short hallway away from bed but miles away from sleep.

This place is unfamiliar. You’ve only lived in Toronto for a year or so and your house has an uncanny quality. This is Freud’s uncanny, familiar yet unfamiliar, which relies on memory and doubt: “The ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows.” What follows is Freud’s tangled attempt to define the uncanny (unheimlich) without just asserting that it’s the opposite of Heimlich, which means “familiar” and “belonging to the home.” Home is where we feel uncanniness, an allegedly safe place that also houses an unsettled feeling of not knowing what home is at all. Freud’s insists that, “something has to be added to what’s novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.” That something is you. You are unsettled in a new city, trying to learn the streetcars, find the best brownies, and make a few friends.

You grew up in bland, suburban houses with spotless white kitchens where little cooking transpired. Then you had some horrible California apartments. The worst, on a pretty block in north Berkeley way too close to Peet’s Coffee, the Cheese Board, and Black Oak Books, had an infestation of giant tree rats (which still give you nightmares) and a stoner landlady who would often forget she left the stove on after lighting a joint. You marveled that she had not blown up the rickety rodent-filled house and called the gas company at the number you’d memorized within a month of living there.

In your New York City apartments, where you’d lived for 20-odd years before coming to Canada, you had never had the luxury of having your bedroom so distant from the living room and kitchen. You had to be careful when you had your sleepless nights, first for your roommate and then for your boyfriends one of whom is now your husband. In this house, in Leslieville in the east end of Toronto, you sense an amalgam of other places you’ve lived but it’s also new. You love the privacy of a house, having your own room to work in, the finished basement perfect for book overflow (which you call the stacks) and your husband’s guitar collection. You love the way your Basset hound’s nails click on the wood floors and delight in watching her navigate the stairs with her dwarf legs. When it’s not winter, you love the front porch and the sunny backyard with its raised garden beds where you slaughtered your new friend’s delicate tomato plants last summer. Maybe this summer you’ll try zucchini.

Quietly weeping in a heap on the brown leather couch, you feel awful. You playback the nights spent on this same sofa in Brooklyn, watching reality TV very quietly or attempting to read. Mainly you drink (too much) coffee which turns your stomach sour and indulge in the irresistible pull of the internet shopping cart. You look for out-of-print books, or high-thread-count bed sheets at a decent price that won’t immediately show the dog’s white hair, or vintage dresses, or fancy notebooks and fetish-y Japanese pens. You fill imaginary shopping carts, abandoning them when the numbers get too high or feel too real. You watch too many YouTube videos on bullet journaling and endless pen, planner, and notebook rundowns with pdf charts as a souvenir. You store comparisons in a folder, knowing you would watch the same video again and again if you didn’t have this evidence that you’d seen it before.

Choosing a planner was a vexing decision you pondered and researched and obsessed about and pondered some more. You relished the road to this analog world coexisting with the digital one. You love your planner and its comrades—the endless pens, many notebooks, tiny paperclips, highlighters, tabs, stickers, etc. The planner is your holy grail, a Rosetta stone, a new New Testament that will make your life cohere into colorful pages on thick, chewy paper. Life resists cohesion, and your devotion to methodical planning is both an illusion and a delusion. You cannot fight chaos, a thug who hangs out with insomnia at after-hours bars talking in zigzags and tangents. Chaos enjoys forcing you to organize yourself in the lonely hours of early morning. Evidence of your nocturnal shopping comes months later via oddly shaped envelopes from Asia—one had two fine-tipped gel pens; another a small plastic box of 20 paperclips shaped like ice cream cones; others have stickers or washi tape. You’re confident the planner is a good plan.

Sadly, it is not an effective sedative.

When you can’t sleep night after night after night you get anxious. You should be powering through another draft of your essay or drawing the tiny boxes you love to fill in the tracker of your planner. The planner, too, and the notebooks which you use alongside it are part of your niche self-improvement program. You are a classic hedgehog, burrowing into things, as opposed to a fox, whose attention is sprawling. (You wonder how people who don’t know Isaiah Berlin divide the world—Beatles v Stones? Apple v Android? Chocolate v vanilla?) You’d rather go deep than wide.

You feel powerful: you can live without sleep. You’ve done it before. You pour a little more coffee from the metal carafe which keeps it warm. You top it off with a healthy splash of table cream—a delightful dairy product you’ve become accustomed to in Canada, falling on the fat spectrum between half-and-half and heavy cream—from an ivory Russel Wright creamer bought expressly for this purpose. It is a lovely off-white squat ceramic pitcher which is impossible to clean. Every few days you run a paper towel inside it to scoop up all of the milk solids resting on its internal ledges.

You feel like you could do anything if you could just get some sleep.

You feel like you will never sleep again.

Insomnia is a very capable disorder, efficient and a little mean, like the nurses in the ER. It spies on you during the day, the devil on your shoulder scolding if you contemplate more caffeine. Then it’s a disgruntled angel nagging you about exercise so you take your exhausted carcass for a long walk which makes you draggy in the afternoon but leaves you wide awake at night.

You start gathering materials for this, your insomnia piece—there is always a piece—picking up a book here, an article from a women’s magazine, a study in a medical journal. You have a habit of transforming your interests into work, sucking the fun out of them. You can’t even articulate why something suddenly, urgently matters—gel pens, MOD vases, Paris hotels, houses on Shelter Island, the best ice cream in Toronto—you just feel right crawling the web and making lists. Prioritization is not your gift; curation, maybe, or just assemblage. You are good at finding options, but not good at exercising your option to forsake the world and its complications—aka to sleep.

Insomnia is just one of your diagnoses: you’ve read a lot more about your true scourge, migraine, and you know that migraine and insomnia make ideal playmates and often invite anxiety or depression over for double-dutch. You see your insomnia, your anxiety, and your migraine strolling arm-in-arm, or as witches around a stock cauldron in a cut-rate Shakespeare play. Insomnia is an imp, small and wily; anxiety is a sylph powered by worry so when you are stressed she expands like a zeppelin; and your chronic migraines are Amazonian warriors with their bows at their sides, ever ready to shoot at the target. That arrow initiates the stabbing pain in your head, pain that won’t let you sleep.

Your rule is you get out of bed regardless of what time it is if you are fully awake, with no grogginess blurring the edges of your thinking. Instead, you feel a creeping sense of dread which will get worse if you don’t get up. Occasionally you can fall asleep again on the couch, TV on softly, cocooned in the gray wool blanket which the dog has co-opted. Often, though, you capitulate and make coffee for yourself, refilling the creamer and choosing two mugs to bring to the table where your computer, folders, books, and notebooks are floating around like your aura. You still get creepy feelings here alone in the dark, the uncanny pushing the permeable edges between day and night, awake and asleep, eros and Thanatos, intimations of death and a yearning for life—not your life, but life.

When you were younger and dumber you were an interesting case: articulate, slightly desperate, yet treatment-resistant, as if your body tended towards pain and disorder. The doctors got excited, like new friends who want to hear all of your stories; then they got demoralized, as you failed one treatment after another; finally, they were dismissive, desperate for you to leave so they did not have to be reminded of their failure. A few told you they couldn’t see you anymore with a shrug and a vague promise of a colleague who might be able to help. In your mind, you are a challenge. To the doctors, you are a nemesis: the case they couldn’t solve.

You fantasize you’ll run into your Oliver Sacks, the hero of stories of medical woes and can’ts: can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t wear clothes, can’t deal with light. You dream of Sacks, a fellow migraineur, who you only know from books: the doctor who finds you fascinating and feels compelled to cure you, who makes art out of your subpar life since you are too tired to do it. You keep trying, pushing, fantasizing about some sweet flavor of a happy ending, a land of no headaches, and long stretches of peaceful sleep. It’s not a real place, yet you try to feel what it might be like. It’s hard, though, to fantasize about absence: no pain means a chance at adequate sleep, but it’s an effort to dream of sleep while the pain persists. And it is nothing if not persistent. You didn’t become a chronic migraineur by accident.

The closest you ever came to an Oliver Sacks was back in 2003 in New York City, where you saw an excellent psychopharmacologist who had the soundest notions about insomnia you ever encountered in a doctor, maybe in a person. During the three-hour, $700 intake appointment he asked about your sleep.

“I have insomnia,” you said. “I’ve always had it.”

“Which kind?” He fired back at you. It wasn’t personal, he was a rat-tat-tat talker. By this time—hour two—you were comfortable in the two-character Aaron Sorkin medical show unfolding as you answered his questions.

“I’m not sure. How many kinds are there?”

“Can you fall asleep?”

“No.”

“If you do fall asleep, do you stay asleep all night?”

“No.” You laughed at this. Who stays asleep all night? Teenaged boys and puppies?

“Do you ever wake up too early?” he fired his next salvo.

“Yes.” You paused, and added, “All the time.”

He stopped typing and looked at you with concern and an undercurrent of Eureka! “Congratulations,” he said. “You have all three kinds of insomnia.”

“So I’m a triple threat? A hat trick, or a turkey, a trifecta. A three-peat. An unholy trinity.”

He smiled, which surprised you. He didn’t seem like the sports metaphor type. “Look, this likely runs contrary to what other doctors have told you. But I see someone who can’t sleep as analogous to a diabetic. The diabetic needs insulin because her body does not produce it. Your body obviously is not producing the chemicals you need to have decent sleep. So we give you the equivalent of insulin at night, and then you sleep.”

This floored you. Suddenly insomnia was not a mind problem but a body one. This fancy doctor believed your insomnia wasn’t about poor sleep hygiene (something only insomniacs ever think about), or excessive worrying (hamstering, as it felt like hamsters endlessly running on their wheels somewhere deep in your brain), or anything else you had or hadn’t done. It was chemistry, and there were drugs to combat it. You left with an Ambien prescription, and you’re still taking it nearly 20 years later. Does it work? Not always, but it improves your chances of a few consecutive hours of sleep considerably. And it’s been a long time since you just took Ambien: you have a complex, three-drug sleep cocktail that sometimes fails but it’s much better than the alternative. Recently a Canadian doctor suggested you go off of Ambien because studies have connected it to a decline in mental functioning when taken over a long period of time. You understood why she said it, but internally you were seething. You will have to pry it from my cold, shaky, up-for-days hands. Good luck.

Your enthusiasm for life quickly turns into despair when sleep takes its leave. But this junction does not phase you. You’ve been here many times before, so many you know what the paths ahead look like: the one where you sleep, white and quiet like a field with fresh snow; the one where you don’t, full of gnarled trees with giant black squirrels and errant raccoons that unsettle you in the long nights of a Canadian winter.

Insomnia follows a classic arc. Sleep should be a hero’s journey, straight-up Joseph Campbell style: you vanquish a couple of money worries and squash a stray thought about a breast exam so when sleep comes you leap triumphantly into its arms, quest over. The embrace is divine. You can’t get enough, greedy for it. When you open your eyes a mere hour or two later you are far from sated. You could sleep forever if only you could sleep.

Insomnia is old, and the mechanism for sleep is often faulty and impossible to fix. Knowing others have a defective sleep switch doesn’t bring you comfort or illuminate the dark corners where insomnia lurks. One of your favorite research holes is reading about famous insomniacs and what they did at night instead of sleeping. Bill Clinton played cards—if you are the president, there is always a fourth for Bridge–and read. Vincent Van Gogh painted and wrote heartbreaking letters to his brother, Theo. Your fantasy insomniac friend is Andy Warhol, a man who did not care much for sleep and had a bottomless capacity for gossip. Warhol loved to be on the phone with a friend, making idle chatter with Candy Darling or another of his superstars in the depths of night.

Warhol’s first film featured his then-lover John Giorno asleep for five hours and twenty minutes. Warhol called it Sleep (1964). Though it feels continuous, the movie was shot over several nights and spliced together. It’s intimate but not sexy, the register where Warhol did his best work. There is something fetish-y about an insomniac filming his lover sleeping night after night, something hypnotic about watching a sleeping figure. Multiple paintings of Marilyn Monroe’s (also a famous insomniac), electric chairs (which put you right to sleep), Elvis Presley (yes, him too), and comforting Campbell’s soup cans: Warhol’s subjects are sly comments on the multiplicity of modern life. He had no truck with high versus low culture; he just liked things. Warhol was a dedicated collector—he’d be called a hoarder if he were alive today or poor. Warhol’s childhood was just deprived enough for him to relish beautiful and/or interesting things: women’s shoes; Polaroids of friends and strangers; contemporary paintings; Art Deco jewelry; antiques. Warhol was promiscuous in his work but uptight in his life, very self-conscious about his physical flaws. On the phone, or on the canvas, or in the middle of the night no one cared about his St. Vitus Dance and thinning hair. He was Andy Warhol, happy to talk until you fell asleep cradling the receiver, still on the other end of the phone when you woke up.

Don’t make your essay about insomnia an examination of you. You will want to explain how there is a difference between not being able to sleep occasionally and having chronic insomnia, that it’s like being sad versus being in a major depression. Everyone knows sadness, but few of us shimmy down to the darkest place, so dark the borders blur again.

The uncanny is your subtext as you cram information into your remarkably nimble mind at 3 AM. Your level of clarity depends on how long and how bad it’s been, as your insomnia likes to visit for days, even weeks. It’s no day-tripper. Until night four or five you roll with it, up at 2 or 3:30 or 4:10 AM. Sometimes you go back to bed around 8, praying to gods you don’t believe in for a decent nap. When it works, and you wake up again at 10 or 11, you are groggy and pissed. The day is escaping you again. You used to write 1000 words every morning. Now you know a lot about dresses and notebooks.

Let the status quo rile you up: in thousands of years of science why has no one found a cure for this? A cure for a disorder that wrecks lives, that decimates productivity, that turns the sufferer into a cranky tyrant or weepy victim. After two or three days of little to no sleep you can’t find your shoes; then your wallet, then your keys. Your phone often goes walkabout, only to turn up in the pocket of the warm coat you bought for the Canadian winter which is still not warm enough. You regret not buying something much uglier.

You find everything, get your coat on, and realize the errand that felt so pressing now can’t be done: the pharmacy is not open at 9 PM; the supermarket creeps you out at night; the other possible destinations in your sleepy neighborhood are the sketchy donut shop and the variety store where you can buy candy and lottery tickets and, right, they dry clean too. With an audible sigh you transition back to pajamas—which sometimes look very much like errand clothes, old jeans and sweatshirts are perfectly acceptable for late-night grocery shopping if you had made it beyond your front door. Instead, you move your books and folders and notebooks to the living room; and if you are really sulking, you turn on the television, hoping that along with your books and your computer you can find something to take your mind off of what happens next, the trial, the point when you go to bed. The gentle push against the fulcrum of consciousness. Will it be so kind as to leave you for a few consecutive hours? Or will you end up facing that same choice at 1 AM, or 3 AM, or 4? When do you give in and put the coffee on? When is it tomorrow?

This particular bout of insomnia is your own damned fault. When you moved to Toronto you couldn’t sleep—you often can’t sleep in unfamiliar places, to the tune of reading at 4 AM in a hotel bathroom while your husband sleeps loudly. Soon after arriving in Toronto, you bought a king-sized bed. Your husband has always wanted one but most bedrooms in New York City apartments are too small. The primary cause for your current square dance with sleep is a change in your meds, the result of taking your initial insomnia after moving into your own hands and doubling your dose of an unusual drug. The decent doctor you finally found put you on a taper back to your original dose, and tapers mean insomnia and usually migraines too. You doubled the dose because you were tired of waking up disoriented in this house, fumbling to put clothes on, to get stuff from the room designated the library for obvious reasons, and carry everything down to the living room while hitting every squeaky spot on the hallway and the stairs. Eventually, you memorize the not intuitive positions of the light switches. The house has lots of quirks you’ve grown to love, and having a house makes you feel grown-up. In Canada, you have a husband, a house, and a hound, a rudimentary recipe for a good life.

But not at 4 AM. At 4 AM you have regrets, anxiety, and old-fashioned worry for company.

There is never a good time to read about insomnia. This realization is dire since you try to read your way out of most things. The books—there weren’t even that many of them, you have a few and borrowed a couple from the library—looked at you accusingly every night. Why not pick up one of those? You’d think. You open the book and are completely bored by the snippets about Shakespeare and too impatient to find something promising, like the section on film noir or Edith Wharton. Then you look at a meditation on insomnia—creatively called Insomnia— which is way too precious for this time of night, and morning does nothing to dispel this opinion. Her elliptical proclamations grate: “You don’t need a bed in order to sleep with someone.” “Like travel, insomnia is an uprooting experience.” She calls her husband or lover “Zzz” which is, again, too twee for this time of night. So much for Insomnia.

You move on to Bright Eyed by RM Vaughan, a gift from a good friend who sympathized with your suffering. Bright purports to describe “Insomnia and Its Cultures,” which sounds interesting. Vaughan is Canadian, which interests you, as you are often befuddled by Canadian mores. Bright Eyed is readable, but you still can’t focus on much beyond the creepy owls on the cover and the idea of insomnia culture—sorry, cultures. It’s not just a disorder, it’s a culture. Maybe long-lost relatives or new friends lurk within it, people you could text in the middle of the night when you get panicky and don’t want to wake your pleasantly snoring husband? Maybe it’s like Polar Bear swimming or urban foraging: people don’t necessarily share that they are part of insomnia culture unless you can recognize the signs–Dark circles? Uncontrolled yawning? Or maybe there’s a secret handshake: one hand slipping past another in a downward motion to signify the fall into sleep.

The books quickly change from lofty studies about sleep and its absence to the dullest of memoirs. The only subject more boring than sleeping is not sleeping. The not sleeping trope forms the pattern of several memoirs. You are not having it. There is nothing inherently interesting about a person trying and failing to sleep; if there were, then we’d have symphonies and opera cycles and concept albums about it, not just quasi-self-help books and the plaints of the sleepless.

Some go the science route. Others discuss all of the artists afflicted with insomnia as if being in their company would make those hours in the night more bearable. Yet all of them end up at that most mundane of subjects: the self. Samantha Hunt’s memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping seemed promising until you reread the subtitle—one year of insomnia? That’s nothing. She blames the world for her affliction, too. Poor you, Brexit is keeping you up at night. The state of things weighs too heavily on your shoulders. The one aspect of Hunt’s insomnia that did garner your sympathy was her resistance to sleeping pills. That was legitimately dreadful.

Why are insomniacs so timid, so suggestible, so superstitious? In part, it’s because we are lonely and looking for both comfort and company through the long, blank nights. This essay is a challenge, an attempt to meet the enemy on your terms–on paper, rather than in your nocturnal ramblings from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to couch. Paper is where you feel safe, like you can dissect the carapace of insomnia and try to locate its shriveled heart.

Now you avoid reading about other people’s sleep disorders. They are the opposite of love affairs or madness, drug addiction or divorce, gaslighting and torture, all of which you can parse endlessly. Other people’s insomnia is more private than sex or self-harm. What happens when you confront “the dark night of the soul,” as Scott Fitzgerald memorably dubbed 3:30 AM, is between you and your sandman. Talking about sleep is like announcing one’s restricted diet or exercise routine—all verge on too personal yet people feel perfectly justified bringing them up at a dinner party. Don’t.

Fellow insomniacs, maybe it’s time to stop living a lie. If you are getting three or four hours, tops, cut back on daytime activities. If you can, make time to nap early in the day. Limit caffeine, of course, and limit alcohol too, which can make you drowsy but also dehydrates you and can interfere with long stretches of sleep. If you have more than one drink your sleep is wrecked: you can fall asleep but can’t stay there. Inevitably you get up to drink some water, have a throbbing headache, and rue the day you fell in love with bourbon. You fear any occasion where there is champagne, as you love the bubbles but the effects are disastrous. After your wedding lunch, where you had both champagne and two generous martinis, you had a whopper of a migraine and didn’t sleep for a few days. True love plus copious gin will keep you up at night. Next to you, your newlywed husband sleeps soundly. You resist cursing him for his sleeping abilities or waking him up to hold you for a little while. You probably won’t fall back asleep, and you might get that panicky feeling that comes when you wake up too early and have too much alone time between when you get out of bed and he does. Inevitably you resent him for his grogginess after six, seven, eight hours, impossible numbers for you. Sleeping is a contest you will never win.

When is it a good time to think about insomnia?

When you slink out of bed at 3:30 AM—yes, the dark hour of the soul—after the dog woke you at 3. She’s now posed in a perfect circle which juts into your back like a bowling ball. She’s unconsciously leeching your body heat. You are idly scrolling through your phone, its screen the only light in the room, putting off the minute when you have to leave the comfort and company of bed and venture downstairs to coffee and computer.

Veteran insomniacs don’t toss and turn; we admit defeat. We accept that it’s 3:30 AM—and, frankly, you aren’t sure Fitzgerald’s proclamation holds up. You don’t disagree with him, but your soul has gone dark at all sorts of times. There’s nothing special about 3:30 that differentiates it from 2:45, or 4:10, or 1:25, or whatever odd hour you wake up and try to coax yourself back to oblivion. When you give up—which is way more often than you fall back to sleep—you already feel the exhaustion that will overwhelm you in the early afternoon if you can’t rest at all. The feeling that you have already lived a day at 3 PM is as dark as any you had at 3 AM. At least at 3 PM, you can find some human connection—send an email or a text and get an instant reply. Someone is paying attention. At night, communication is less clear. You ache for company in the cold, dark Canadian nights.

The blues in the middle of the night are indistinguishable from the shadows that barely happen in the Toronto winter. To be up all night in this still unfamiliar place is to be up for hours and hours, dead time when you are too tired to read or write anything serious and you don’t want to make noise and wake the husband and the dog. It’s more than four hours from 3:30 AM until the dull sun rises, and the only brightness in the mornings now is an occasional headlight bouncing off the thin layer of snow that lasts from January through May.

Sometimes you put your coat on over your pajamas and sit on your front porch with the motion light on, hypervigilant, watching for the sneaky skunks and enormous raccoons that haunt Toronto. You worry about your dog as there are coyotes here too, creatures you have only encountered in Joni Mitchell songs or Roadrunner cartoons.

“There’s too much nature here,” you shouted in frustration one day last summer when you were hanging out in the backyard and swarms of bees showed up at your barbecue. Your Canadian husband laughed, as did your Torontonian guests. They have a possum that visits at night. A photo of it unleashed nightmares—brief horror movies that startled me awake for nights after seeing it, as if I weren’t already there.