No Amount of Sleep
A dispatch from the fog
I’m tired. Two words that mean something so different from what they used to. I used to be tired because I didn’t sleep well. I’ve never really been a good sleeper. Now, it doesn’t matter how many hours I get or how much I fill up my health app’s sleep flower petal.
I’m tired.
All the time.
So deeply tired.
I find that no amount of sleep can fix this kind of tired. It lives beneath the surface, somewhere in the body that sleep doesn’t reach. It is a soul-deep level of tiredness. That’s the only way I know how to describe it.
I kind of imagine myself as that Rockbiter guy from The NeverEnding Story. “They look like big, good, strong hands, don’t they?” They sure don’t feel that way lately.
The world feels like it is going in high speed and slow motion at the same time. Or maybe I am just going in slow motion, and the world is just revolving the same way it always has. My brain feels, well, I don’t really know what it feels. It’s like an overheated computer. The thoughts come at a thousand miles a minute, yet nothing seems to process.
I’ve always been an overthinker, yet these days it feels like I’m drowning in thoughts. To-do lists that seem impossible to manage. The problems of the world are pouring down like a Phoenix monsoon. A 1993 monsoon, not the monsoons of the 2000s, because we don’t really have monsoons anymore. We have dusty haboobs now instead.
I don’t know if it’s perimenopause, ADHD, or an evil combination of the two. At this point, I don’t even think it matters. What I do know is that sometimes, when people talk to me, they sound like the teacher from Charlie Brown. Sometimes, I’ll be watching TV and wonder if I inadvertently switched to a different language. It’s weird.
Sometimes I think my brain itself actually turns off for a minute or two. Seriously, one minute I’m here, the next I’m gone, and I only notice when the power turns back on.
My home's electricity does the same thing. Lately, it goes out a couple of times each week. Just for a few seconds. Every time it happens, I have to go around and manually reset everything. The plant lights. The sprinkler timer. I’ll look out the window late at night, a few days later, see the sprinklers running, and spend four full minutes trying to figure out what I’m looking at before I remember.
That’s what it feels like inside my head. Multiple times a day. I have no idea where I went. I only know I was there one minute, and the next, I find myself coming back and asking myself what the hell just happened. I have to reorient myself.
Where am I?
What day is it?
What was I doing?
The difference is that when the electricity comes back on, the silence of the no-longer-oscillating fans reminds me of something that happened. My brain does not give me the same courtesy.
Then there is the freeze. That’s when I stare at the computer screen, or the TV, or a wall, while my brain yells, Do something and What the hell is wrong with you, Heather? A silent, internal knock-down drag-out fight that I’m just watching from somewhere slightly outside of myself.
I began this essay trying to explain to you that I am tired. I got lost a few times along the way, which, if you’ve been following along, seems about right.
But I think that is the tired. It isn’t one thing. It is the reboots and the freezes and the forgetting and the noise and the weight of it, stacked up. Every single day.
I don’t have a solution. I’m not even sure I have a point.
I’m just tired. And I wanted someone to know.
Love today,
🌸 Heather