These days, I lack the spine for anything. I submit to the greater flow of “whatever happens, happens.” Then, I get angry about not having agency in the bigger picture. This cycle repeats itself, and I wake up another day, hoping I have slept enough but not too much.
Sleep is a special condition. It happens naturally but is very easily affected by the winds of waking life. Sleep is a lack of wakefulness1, the resting state in which the body is inactive and the mind is unconscious.2
When I sleep conflicted, I wake up with headaches. When I sleep hungry, I wake feeling almost incomplete. Yet I sleep exhausted and wake up with the calmest repose. It’s a shame; sleep is a mystery I am not aware of enough to figure out.
As the sinking feeling hits and I no longer want to open my eyes, sleep is the balm that glazes over each sinew and tendon and wills it into stillness. I’d like to believe that sleep is the best relaxant. But sometimes, I wake up to a searing pain in my leg and forget the sweet promises of sleep. First, there’s the shock—I am on my back, screaming what the fuck as my leg lights up like a hot poker. Then there’s the desperate wishing for it to all go away. It will if I keep sleeping. And then, sometimes, it does, and sleep fixes all things. Other times, I am up till the morning with handfuls of water, my phone and a few painkillers. Ultimately, it goes away. But the fickleness of sleep makes me dread the night to come.
I probably don’t drink enough water.3 And when I do, I probably drink too much. There is no moderation. Too much of a good thing is never good. Too little of it might be even worse. There is so much I can’t explain away about myself these days. Why am I in pain out of nowhere? Why do sometimes I feel like I can never breathe in fully? Why is my body irrational, and why does it not do what I say?
I am back to square one. Experience. Question. Control.
These cures don’t add up; I don’t even remember what stopped my breathlessness. The faintest lead I hold is a fleeting dream about making friends with a childhood bully. It seems like, as much as I want to believe my days of needing to survive are over, I am still in that awful spiral of feeling hunted by everything. This is the first time I haven’t dreamt about beating her up. Maybe somewhere inside, I have reconciled that angry part of me.
I recently re-organised my childhood bedroom. I thought about how angry my sixteen-year-old self would be at me. Taking down all the pictures she tacked up. I look at my sister, and behind her, I see the shadow of my high school days. We glorify things in hindsight, but that was one of the last times I felt the surge of life. There was a terrific need to push on and make it through. I was on the brink of getting in. And now that I’m in, I sometimes think about what would happen if I didn’t. These days, the clarity I feel makes it all too cold. Sometimes, the mess is the beautiful part. But I hate mess, so what does that make of me?
I’m not sure, to be honest; I write today, tired-eyed with a quiet ache, making something out of the great nothing. Because that’s what writers do, I guess. I am making reams out of a single string, jumping off the most painful memories with my chin tucked to my chest, nose-diving into a pool of unknown unknowns. All this to say, I write with the hope of discovering something. There is a reactivity to writing; at times, I am pitted against the parts of myself I haven’t seen in decades. It is all reflective. I look myself in the eyes, and we both tell each other, “You’re not real anymore.” And whoever gets upset first fades away.
There is no winner; it's just the bad taste of growing up in your mouth.
-swan
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading <3
This is the pondering corner where I leave you something to think about; feel free to let me know your thoughts below. x
Pondering about: Globus pharyngeus/Globus Hystericus
“the persistent but painless sensation of having a pill, food bolus, or some other sort of obstruction in the throat when there is none”4
I would write about this, but I couldn’t form a solid thought around it. It’s considered a psychosomatic condition, meaning that you might’ve overthought it up, but also that something in your past needs to be addressed and sorted out before it exits your body by force.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sleep
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sleep
It's the favourite confession of our whole generation.
Jones D, Prowse S (October 2015). "Globus pharyngeus: an update for general practice". The British Journal of General Practice. 65 (639): 554–55. doi:10.3399/bjgp15X687193. PMC 4582871. PMID 26412835.
Theres so many lines from this that I could quote but it's impossible to choose a favorite! thank you for posting this :)