One major of my major pandemic problems is sleeplessness. Insomnia, should I say?
Insomnia is a loaded word because it translates into an identity- speaking of insomnia, some people start identifying themselves as insomniacs. Not surprisingly, that becomes a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy and a vicious cycle.
But let me start from the beginning.
I remember some sleepless nights as a child, being awake, staring at the full Moon before a math test. As an undergrad, I slept like a log, probably exhausted with all the partying and studying. When I started working, I was under so much stress that the quality of my sleep suffered. I wasn’t sleepless, but I always dreamed about lengthy spreadsheets, finite element models, pending deadlines, conflict, and a perpetual feeling of falling behind. In grad school, sleepless nights became a bit more regular, always provoked by stress, too much work, inability to get it all done and be the superstar I wanted to be. I limited myself to only one coffee a day. Last year, I had a number of sleepless nights, some due to hot nights in DC, stress related to the immigration process, job, money, in short, all possible stresses and challenges.
And here we come to the magical year of 2020.
Covid-19 lockdowns started in March. Life has changed. It was turbulent, scary, and confusing.
Right after our immigration paperwork was finished and we were sure my husband won’t be furloughed, in early May, we both had a period of insomnia. We had a total of more than 10 sleepless nights that month. We didn’t know what to do. It was beyond frustration. The only thing worse than sleepless nights (and a sluggish day afterward) were the consecutive sleepless nights and we had way too many.
It was so bad that I had to tell my supervisor. To you, it may not seem like such a big deal, but for me, it was momentous. At the time, most of my coworkers were juggling WFH and small children all at once, while I only had to manage myself and apparently couldn’t do it very well.
One more reason for my hesitation was that when I mentioned to my supervisor 6 months earlier that I sometimes have problems sleeping, she asked: “Oh, aren’t you too young for that?”
Her intention was probably good, but her comment was completely inappropriate. It reminded me of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko about the US health insurance when a girl who had cancer was denied any payment deductions with an explanation that she was ‘too young to have cancer.’ Who the fuck decides when you are old enough to have a certain problem? You just get the problem and that’s it!
But in May, for most of us, our carefully composed and manicured public personas that we presented to our coworkers simply went to shit.
My supervisor was kind and understanding regarding my sleeplessness. She was combating her own battles. After all, the whole pandemic was such a shit show that no one in their right mind could tell anyone what’s the appropriate way to feel do and behave. (Except maybe to wear a mask and wash your hands.)
For me, however, there was an element of embarrassment and shame in the fact that I had insomnia. That deserved to be unpacked. It may sound ridiculous but, to me, being sleepless equated being irresponsible. It meant that I have not taken my health and lifestyle seriously enough to be able to get good rest and show up for my work, my most important priority, 100% ready. I thought others would perceive it as a logical result of my own bad decisions or poor choices. It reminded me of a colleague from grad school who did not have his shit together, who was perpetually sick, tired, combating some unique diseases, food intolerances, missing weeks of work at the time. Eventually, we weren’t able to rely on him for the simplest of tasks. I did not want to be THAT GUY. I did not want to be irresponsible.
That was my undesired identity number one: IRRESPONSIBLE.
Action-oriented as I am, I bought a book Effortless Sleeping Method, read it, and tweaked my habits accordingly. It was a small adjustment (my habits were already quite good) and a great help. It’s based on changing habits and believes that around your sleeping. The author wrote about people who were insomniacs for 15–20 years and I couldn’t even fathom that misery. One awful month made me absolutely desperate.
Alas, when the hot weather started, I was spending less time outdoors and working out, so sleepless nights became more regular, despite all the work and changes.
At that point, one component of the Effortless Sleep Method that started bugging me badly was the practice of NOT talking about your insomnia. That’s suggested for a good reason: the whole point of the method is not to dwell in your own misfortune but rather smash your idea of yourself as an insomniac. But the best part of insomnia (if there is the best part) is bitching about it to get some relief. I like to analyze and talk things through and being forbidden to talk about my problem made it unbearable. I understood the reasoning but it felt fake and artificial.
A little insight came from Martha Beck’s book Joy Diet, where she writes that you can’t process your problems without being able to develop a sense of humor around them. I wrote a satiric story about this whole situation. It felt great! It helped me balance this see-saw of making sleeplessness not a big deal and acknowledging that, yes, it’s ruining my life. (And obviously, I am talking about it now.)
Writing the satiric piece helped me break free from my first undesired identity (IRRESPONSIBLE) and tap into the second one.
My undesirable identity #2: HIGH-MAINTENANCE PERSON.
I still felt that because I made all these changes and it still wasn’t enough, I was somehow special but in a bad way. I absolutely hated people’s responses when I mentioned my sleep problems, like: “Oh, did you try melatonin/ journaling/ insert some other simple tweak?” when I have tried all that shit months ago and nothing worked.
(People had good intentions. The thing, though, is that people don’t know quite what to make out of your messed-up, unsolved problems. People want solutions and heroic stories. We don’t have many of these nowadays.)
I would dread telling how many little tweaks I made to my life and how nothing really worked and then have them say: “Oh wow!”, feeling sorry for me or surprised at how fucked up I am. That would lead to my fear of all fears: that there is something terribly wrong with me.
Of course, that’s a common fear, I learned that from Gay Hendricks. If you fear that there is something wrong with you, chances are there is probably nothing wrong with you. You are just as a flawed human being, like everyone else.
I saw being a high-maintenance person as being spoiled, demanding, complicated. Nobody likes people like that. As a woman, I was trained that not complaining and making everything look easy are major virtues. High-maintenance people are a burden for their environment.
But what if, nowadays, we are all high-maintenance people?
What if nowadays, we all need some extra care rest and reassurance? Is that a weakness?
Maybe we all worked really hard pretending that we are low-maintenance people. Maybe we all pushed beyond exhaustion, pretending that our flawed unsustainable systems are functioning just fine. Maybe we’ve all exhausted ourselves by ignoring the red flags and clear signs that there is something deeply wrong with the ways we live and work. Maybe we all feel this inexplicable collective pain that manifests in different ways and we don’t know what the fuck to do with it. And maybe, just maybe, this time we will try to have the courage to embrace our own smallness, powerlessness, imperfection, weakness. Maybe then we will shatter our carefully curated public personas and show up, transparent, broken, scared, and real to our suffering fellow human beings.
The idea of undesired identities came from Andrea Owen. Have you tried thinking about your problems with that perspective? What are your undesired identities?
Before you go…
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