Category: insomnia

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Mornings

As you probably know, I wake most days around five o’clock, and very rarely go back to sleep again after that, although I usually lie in bed for a couple of hours brooding (or reading, listening to podcasts, looking at stuff on my phone – you know how it goes) before getting up – usually around seven – and doing a half hour routine of yoga/tai chi/meditation. So over the last few months I’ve been able to notice the changes in the timing of sunrise. It always comes as a bit of a shock how much the length of daylight has reduced by the end of August, but it’s hardly surprising when you remember we’re only three weeks away from the Autumn Equinox.

Every morning I have this sense of wishing the day would go away and just leave me alone, even though I haven’t had a regular get-up-and-out-of-the-house job (even a part-time one) for over eight years. Life is still there to be dealt with, whether you have somewhere to be by a certain time or not.

I used to have this idea that one day I would find my ‘place’ in the world and when that happened I would wake every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Although I now feel that I am in the best ‘place’ I’ve ever been (or am likely to be), I’ve had to accept that (along with many other things) starting each day full of enthusiasm and positivity is just not in my power.

Why have I started writing like this today? I don’t know, except that maybe I’m not quite so deep in the usual existential despair (or ‘gloom and doom’ as some would colloquially call it) that I can’t step back a little and consider it analytically for once. Is it down to lack of sleep? Probably to some extent, but that begs the more fundamental question of how I can get my body (or rather brain) to sleep any more than it always has, a question for which I’ve never found an answer. A more interesting thought is that this probably explains why so many of these posts tend to be so dark, and the question begged by that is: why try and write at this time of day, when I’m nearly always in a bad mood?

That goes back to advice I read – probably 40 years ago now – in ‘Becoming a Writer’, by Dorothea Brande, a classic from the days before the world became swamped by books of writing advice. The one thing I still remember from this book was to write first thing in the morning, before your conscious brain has a chance to elbow out the subconscious completely. Over the years, I’ve striven to follow that rule, although it’s sometimes led me down some strange alleyways.

And I think it might lead me somewhere now… but I’m nearly at the end of my quota. So I’m going to leave that for now and let it stew till tomorrow.    

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Dyspraxia and Social Anxiety

Words churning through my head… they are always there, a continuous monologue/narrative – sometimes a dialogue, even a full-blown row. Is that dyspraxia related or something else? It is there when I wake in the early hours, it keeps me awake, I am exhausted but can’t sleep. It is there in the daytime, it churns around and around, I can’t focus, I can’t settle, I can’t concentrate because I am exhausted because I don’t sleep at night.

Is this dyspraxia? I know dyspraxia is responsible for the time I waste looking for the glasses/phone/keys/wallet/cup of coffee or whatever that I put down somewhere 30 seconds ago. That’s exhausting too. Dyspraxia means I have to read everything at least twice, three times, or more before it starts to sink in. It means I often don’t take in what’s been said to me without that being repeated, too, and often I just forget anyway, which means I panic when someone does speak to me and I can’t think what to say in reply, so even if dyspraxia is not directly related to social anxiety, it exacerbates it.

Sometimes I struggle to know what to say, then think of it too late, or I think of something I could say and I want to say it there and then, and I say too much then get angry with myself. When I’m in a group sometimes I’ll think of something to say but can’t get a word in edgeways, or when it comes to my turn I’ve forgotten it or thought better of it and someone says: ‘I think Linda has something to say’ but I just say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t important’ even if it was. Once someone who had been facilitating a group I was in said to me: ‘promise me that the next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’. If I know I’m right about something (factually) and I say it I expect people to accept it, and if they don’t I get frustrated. I hate arguments, I won’t say anything which I think the other people will disagree with.

I apologise constantly, which ironically most people find very irritating. Usually when something goes wrong, even if I’m not completely responsible, I can trace it back to some contributing factor that’s down to me, and so I apologise for that. It’s easy to assume I’m responsible, because I do so many stupid, clumsy or thoughtless things. Apologising is my way of trying to compensate for all those things I do that inconvenience others, but it often doesn’t deflect anger, but rather makes it worse – this used to happen a lot with my parents. If my apologies are not accepted I feel trapped, because I don’t know what else to do, so I get frustrated, ashamed and angry – and I always turn anger onto myself. I can forgive other people but never myself, because I’m not in control of their behaviour, but I feel that I should be able to control my own.

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Foxes in the Night

Two nights ago I went to bed leaving the side door open – not by accident, but because I didn’t know where my cat was, and I suspected she might still be outside (this was the last night before the heatwave broke). There’s no way for anyone to get to the side door without going through multiple gardens and over connecting fences and walls, so I wasn’t unduly worried about security. I usually try to get her to stay in at night, but I’d been out in the dark garden for a few minutes calling her name, and I just wanted to get to bed, so for once I left the door open.

Not long after I’d dropped off, I woke up to sounds of scuffling and unearthly screeching. I went back down again and this time found her on one of the kitchen chairs, so I closed the door, happy to know she was safe, and went back to bed.

I slept again, and the next time I woke, Miko was sitting on the bed and staring at the window, and the foxy scuffling noises were much louder and closer. I went over to the window and watched a shape or shapes in the shadows under the wall at the end of the garden, running back and forth and calling. Then it came out onto the middle of the lawn, where the light was a bit better and I could see it more clearly, running a few steps, rolling over on the ground, jumping up and running again, and so on. It all looked very weird, and I wondered if there was something wrong with it – could it have been poisoned? Then I remembered my daughter’s dog once fishing some cat poo out of the litter tray and rolling in it all over the front room carpet – the behaviour looked very similar.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I read some more of the book I mentioned, the one where someone is killed 50% in, far enough for them to appear alive again at 60%. This didn’t surprise me – though I had thought they’d stay dead for a bit longer – maybe till 75-80%. That’s an advantage of a first-person narrator – you can show their grief because at that point they genuinely believe the person is dead, and hence make it appear more convincing.

I’m still enjoying it, although there are a few odd time inconsistencies – like the post lady turning up just before dark. The detailed references to various parts of London which I’m not familiar with sound quite convincing, but the casual mentions of frost and snow, as though they’re normal in winter, make me wonder whether the author has actually lived in London during the last thirty years.

I keep thinking about plots which are written to that formula which I’ve heard about a lot of times this year, and I’m reminded of a book I read earlier, just before lockdown.

Maybe I’ll finish reading it today.

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Reading – (to be continued…)

This morning, I did something I haven’t done regularly for years – read in bed. For most of my life I’ve read in bed both at night, before falling asleep, and in the morning, after waking up. Then when I was regularly attending the sleep clinic in 2006-07, I was told that I needed to train my body/mind to associate being in bed with sleep and nothing else – if I was awake in the night for more than twenty minutes I should get up, go to another room and do something quiet and relaxing, and only go back to bed when I was ready to go back to sleep. Unfortunately, this never really worked – I could be awake in another room for two hours and feel myself dozing off, then go back to bed and lie down and my brain would be wide awake again. Over the last few years, I’ve started listening to the radio in the night – or rather, downloaded plays and readings from BBC Sounds – and sometimes I fall back to sleep, and sometimes I don’t, but I’ve never really got back into that habit of always reading in bed.

But it bothers me that the only time I read whole books the way I used to is on holiday, or long journeys – and even then, it’s been replaced by listening and/or crocheting. When you’re reading, you can’t do anything else, but if you’re being ‘read to’ (ie listening to the radio, or audiobooks) your hands and eyes are free to be doing something else – like crochet – or any other kind of handicraft, (or even chores come to that). And because I only read in fits and starts (often, to be honest, when I’m on the loo), I never really get into what I’m reading, not helped by the dyspraxic effect that I don’t take in what I’m reading on the first time through, and am constantly forgetting who’s who and what’s happened.

This morning, around six, when I’d already been listening for an hour or so, I decided to read from my Kindle, a thriller that came up as a recommendation based on my previous reading, and which I won’t identify because I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone else. I’ve been enjoying it, but as I’ve only been reading it for 10-20 minutes or so a day, it’s been slow going, and I’d started to feel that it was becoming a tad repetitive. This morning I’d read three chapters, when, at exactly half way in (according to the Kindle read percentage), there came a catastrophic event, in which one of the protagonists was killed and it seemed all was lost. I couldn’t help but the think that the author must have read/been told the advice about having a major climax/plot reveal at the end of Act Three – and I was rather shattered that s/he’d killed off this character (or has s/he? It sounds pretty conclusive, but who knows?)

Dammit, I’ve run out of words again…

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Every Day is New Again

Today is different. Every day is. Feeling quite good, which is noteworthy because so unusual. Wish I could tell you why, what makes today different from the norm, but I have no idea. I didn’t get any more sleep than usual – fell asleep around 12.20 (according to the app) and awake 4.30, so if anything slightly less. Don’t have to go anywhere today (except possibly yoga this evening if the ground isn’t too wet), so nothing to feel apprehensive about. I had a go at making a birthday card for my granddaughter yesterday, which has been lurking at the back of my mind for a while as something that needed doing – that probably helps.

Remembering the REM song, ‘Every Day is Yours to Win’:

‘Every day is new again
every day is yours to win,
that’s how heroes are made…’

I don’t anticipate being a hero today, or any time soon, but inclined to look for the good bits this morning – maybe I can have breakfast in the garden?

Still no idea what I’m going to write about. Yesterday I wrote about dyspraxia, which I’ve tentatively started on a couple of times before. Yesterday I went into more detail. It’s hard to explain because I’m still trying to get my head around it myself – and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem very well understood scientifically as yet, compared to dyslexia and dyscalculia, which have been studied for much longer. And (naturally), I’m not very good at explaining it to other people. When I try to talk about it, mostly they seem to think it’s snowflakey, self-justificatory nonsense and just an excuse for continuing to be lazy, scatty, disorganised and inconsiderate of others – or alternatively, that I’m being unnecessarily ‘hard’ on myself, and I’m really not any of those things, and I should stop ‘worrying’ about it. This is where writing comes in, because it’s so much easier to explain things when I have time to think and compose what I want to say without being face to face with somebody interrupting and asking questions and throwing me off-track (which usually results in me feeling tongue-tied, stupid and frustrated).

Now I’m staring at the screen wondering if I want to go on, and if so how, and looking again at that Paul Nash postcard, the one of the bird looking into a mirror on a cliff top. What you can’t see from my photo (because of the poor light in here) is that in the mirror there is the reflection of another bird, this one flying away in the distance.

I like art which shows the impossible, or what appears to be impossible, or at least unexpected. I’m not a fan of Dali (possibly coloured by what I know of his politics), but I quite like surrealism in general. I like pictures that get you thinking and seeing things in other ways. The literary equivalent is magical realism – I like that too, set in the ‘real world’ but with impossible bits.

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No Answers

What am I doing? If I censor myself to write only what I think people want to read, can I write at all?

Round and round in the same old circles. I sit and stare at the colourful icons across the bottom of the screen.

I feel as though I could go back to sleep. Maybe I could – it’s nine o’clock now, so I’ve been awake for about four hours. But if I went and laid my head down on the pillow – which I can’t anyway, because my hair’s wet – no, I won’t, I’d just spend another frustrating hour or so lying on the bed wanting to sleep and then feel like I’d wasted the morning.

Earlier, when I was doing my yoga/tai chi/sitting practice, I had a line from a song stuck in my head: ‘and I, I have no answers…’ I had no idea where it was from, or who, or how it went on from there (except that I knew there was some awkward phrasing in the next line). So I’ve just googled it – which didn’t help much, because do you know how many songs include the phrase: ‘no answers’? My search threw up a link to a web page listing songs with that phrase in the lyrics – 12,414 of them. But while scrolling through them, I had a flash of memory which told me it was called ‘A Thousand Roads’ and it’s by David Crosby. Then I remembered when I discovered it, which was about ten years ago, because it was when I was living in my flat in Bedford – and I remembered blogging about it then. I still couldn’t remember that awkward next line, so went back to Google, and it’s: ‘I’ve got no patented path to set you free’ – it was the ‘patented path’ bit that didn’t sound right when sung – iffy meter, stress in the wrong place.

Well, that has taken up most of today’s quota, I’ve managed to skate away from the angst again. Who can I share my angst with? No one. No one wants to deal with my angst, ever (unless I pay them). I’m stuck with it, first thing in the morning, every morning – well, most mornings.

I want to play that David Crosby song – on Youtube, because I haven’t got it anywhere. But yesterday I was playing music while I wrote, because all week I’ve been digitising my old cassettes and transferring them to the PC – and while I’m doing that I have the volume turned on so I know when it finishes, and also because I want to hear these songs I haven’t heard for years. But then someone in the equivalent room next door started playing music, and it occurred to me that they could probably hear mine too, and not everybody is up and about at this time in the morning, especially at the weekend, and I don’t want to piss off my neighbours.

Once again, I’ve managed to fill 500 words with non-contentious rubbish.

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#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing. 

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Sleeping (or not)

Today I think I will plan on doing nothing – which is not the same as not planning to do anything, which is what I usually do. If it’s warm enough, I will sit in the garden – not sure about that at present, earlier it seemed nice and sunny, but has clouded over again. Yesterday I was cold most of the day – my therapist even commented on it, as she sat in her house on the Isle of Wight in a sleeveless summer top, and I huddled inside my cardigan in my living room. By the bay window, which is west facing, it can get warm in the afternoons, but the light is too bright for a good Skype picture, so I do it sitting on the sofa by the fireplace, at the opposite end of the room.

It’s not freezing cold, obviously, just a subtle discomfort – for example, since I sat down to write this, I’ve taken my cardi off once and just put it back on again. Also when talking (or thinking) about deep emotional stuff, it’s comforting to pull those two sides over at the front, like wrapping myself in a blanket. Maybe that’s why I prefer cardis to pullovers, or maybe it’s just for the convenience of taking them off and on.

Normally I’d say I’m quite insensitive to changes in temperature (or noise, light and other external conditions, but that’s a topic for another day), but this week I’ve been noticing it more than usual, and I’ve started wondering if it’s related to tiredness. I’ve noticed myself a couple of times almost dozing off in the day time, and always in the evening. I also got restless legs syndrome yesterday for the first time in ages.

I try not to get obsessed about sleep (or lack of it) but this morning I thought I’d check my sleep app, which confirmed that I’ve been waking up at half past four every morning (except Wednesday, when I slept in till quarter past five), and not properly getting to sleep till gone midnight. Long term, I know it’s not good for my energy levels, or my moods. I’ve stopped actively ‘watching’ telly after ten in the evening, but I listen to music through it, and wonder if that’s just as bad. In theory, my bedtime is eleven, but I get engrossed in crocheting and keep staying up to hear the next song.

My relationship with sleep has been messed up for most of my life, as you may already know if you’ve known me a long time. It is what it is, and worrying about it doesn’t help.

This morning I listened to the last three episodes of a serial that’s been downloaded on my phone for a long while. Sometimes listening to the radio sends me back to sleep, but not this time.

I need to call the garage today as they haven’t got back to me about the van. Otherwise, I think I’ll have a quiet day.

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New Morning

Wasn’t really expecting a poem today, but here it is:

New Morning

Coming out of the darkness, temptation whispers
how good it would be to return to oblivion
and slide back down into happy dreams.

‘That’s not how it works’
cries Morpheus, slamming
the door on your pleading.
He won’t take you back
any more than the womb
will take back the newborn.
This is the new day.
You’re on your own.

Though the smiley sun
may peep round the curtains,
the darkness still hovers
at the back of your mind.
Thoughts cluster like midges,
buzzing and nipping
with spiteful glee
as you pull round the blankets,.

There is no escape from
the heartache that lingers,
the memories that creep near
and poke bony fingers
at the half-healed bruises
you thought you’d forgotten.

You must make the choice
(though you know there’s no option,
and choice an illusion),
or regret it forever.

Every day, every morning,
the same demons taunt you
till you gather your strength,
and all of your will power
and get out of bed.

Linda Rushby 14 May 2020

And here’s one I opened at random yesterday and found left on the computer when I started it up this morning:

Look Inside

What do you see when you look inside?
Fear, frustration, disappointment?
All of those.
Loneliness, anger, regret?
Not so much as once there was.

After all this time and striving,
don’t you think it should be clearer?
After all this time and striving,
this is as clear as it is.

Do you long for the striving to end?
Do you think of what that means?

Linda Rushby 17 January 2016

From the tone (and especially the last two lines) I thought it was a ‘chemo’ poem (I’ve got at least one of those, and probably others lurking around), but was surprised to realise it was a year earlier, from January 2016. I don’t really remember it, but it definitely feels like another first-thing-in-the-morning poem.

This is pretty much how every day starts for me – any time between about 4 and 7, that limbo of ‘should I get up now?’ or ‘I’m sure if I stay here I’ll doze off again’, and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t and realise after a couple of hours that there’s no putting it off any longer. Today was perhaps a bit worse than usual because of quite a heavy therapy session yesterday, in which at one point the therapist said: ‘you’ve had quite a lot of heartache’ which is why that word popped up, and in retrospect, I think: she doesn’t know even the half of it, and do I want to go back through my emotional life and dig it all up and show it to her, including the most painful, shameful and embarrassing bits? But maybe that’s what I need to do.

Aside from that, I’ve said in the past that sometimes I think getting up in the morning is the most difficult and stressful thing I do all day, and this is what I mean.