A lifelong relationship with insomnia has taught me two things about sleep: that sleep is not to be taken for granted, and that eventually, sleep will return - maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but someday…
It is not an entirely comforting thought while in the throes of a sleepless night. The knowledge that sleep will return does very little to alleviate the tossing and turning, the physical discomfort, the emotional distress. It is rare while inside the experience of sleeplessness to see the other side, to remember the string of nights when sleep came with ease, to believe that falling asleep is something I know how to do, to imagine that I will ever fall asleep again.
Sleeplessness is an experience of extreme body dysregulation. I know that I am tired. I know that sleep will not come. And yet, I continue to try to fall asleep. I have strategies that I’ve developed throughout the years: I listen to music, I listen to an audio book, I read, I massage my temples, I breathe deeply, wrap myself around a slew of pillows. When those don’t work I take a shower in an attempt to reset myself, to bring myself back into balance, to find some kind of equilibrium in my body.
The water usually helps with the reset. Water is healing. Water allows me to release some of the tension that’s built up in my body from whatever it is that is at the heart of this particular bout of sleeplessness. After a shower my body can relax which is usually enough to get my mind to relax, to allow sleep to come over me.
But on those rare nights when even the healing water of a shower cannot help me, I eventually come to realize - or is it accept? - that the distress in my body will not succumb to overtures of appeasement. On those nights the only thing left to do is confront the cause of my sleeplessness. And so I sit up in my bed, muster up all the courage I possess, gather up a nice big pillow, and scream, as loud as I can, from the deepest parts of my soul, directly into it. I scream and wail as long and as loud as I can, past the point where the tears come, past the point where the pitch of my voice changes, past the point where my breath can even keep up with the screaming. I scream and scream until eventually, my body beyond the point of complete exhaustion, I pass out in my pile of pillows.
And here is the rub: it is on those nights that I have had some of the best sleeps of my life. There is something about the emotional clearing that the screaming and crying bring. It is a complete release of the emotional tension that had been building up, that had sent my body into the experience of sleeplessness in the first place.
In late August of 2011 hurricane Irene traveled from the Caribbean all the way up the east coast and brought storms as far north and west as the Catskill mountains, where I was running a summer camp. The storms knocked out our electricity and kept our whole camp community held up in the strongest building we had at camp. By nightfall the storm had cleared and I went outside to make sure the campers could all be sent back to their cabins. When I walked outside I looked up and saw a night sky covered with more stars than I had ever seen in my life. A combination of no light pollution and the strong winds of the hurricane blowing away every wisp of cloud and dust left the clearest and most beautiful sky I would ever encounter.
This is what it feels like in my body after a good scream and cry. The force of my emotional release knocks out the noise pollution of my incessant self-critical thought patterns, clears out the clouds of unprocessed emotional distress, and lifts the high pressure tension that winds me up, that tightens the muscles across my body. It is a return to an equilibrium that I rarely experience.
When reflecting on these nights I think about Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The intensity of my insomnia has to be met by an equally intense practice of emotional release. It is an experience of coming to equilibrium through touching the edges, through allowing myself to be in the extremes.