a study in the art of sleep (the remix)

It's been a hell of a week, emotionally, for me and by the power of association for certain people close to me. You all got a dose of that last week, readers, in my last post about feeling far away from my mainstays. This homesickness hits hard every so often and throws me WAY out of whack. Like, "breaking the chains of this life" out of whack. But it gives me an opportunity to fix things that are out of balance. I need reminders.

Thank you, by the way, for all of your "reminders" over the past week. It's good to hear from all of you.

There are other things, of course, that go into the soup. I share a lot of them: Money is a big one. I'm sure you are familiar with the usual contributors too, work stress and relationships and all that.

I just read a couple of posts about sleep by one of my favorite fellow bloggers, Andy of Flight Test Dummies. The first post details a highly coveted recipe "for it to all work out." The second is about being tired.

Talking of emotional chaos, tired is a feeling I am all too familiar with.

First, you should know that I picked up a lot of sleeping habits from the Greco Boys (of whom Andy is the oldest). Back in 2007, when I was still scared to death of Andy, I spent most of my time in their living room. Possibly I spent more time there than they did, and I almost definitely spent more waking hours in their living room than they did. Those couches are comfortable, but I used to have insomniac tendencies. It was a stressful summer because my parents had just left the country and I was feeling a bit orphaned and homeless. (My mom often referred to me as her "poor little huerfanita/orphan child." Still on the fence on whether that was helpful or not.) I was on my way to college, which is a big deal in itself, both exciting and terrifying. And I was facing the breakup of my best (and only successful) relationship in life to that point.

With all this stuff on my plate, I lost sleep. I stayed out as late as I could, snuck out of my girlfriends' houses at 4 in the morning and went to the grocery store to buy coloring books and trash mags and act out scenes from Monty Python. (Price Chopper was one of two places in Amsterdam open past 10pm; The other place was Fastrak, infamous for its rumored parking lot drug deals.) When I was trying to fall asleep alone, I would journal frantically for hours, pouring out my tormented teenage soul. I listened to soothing (or arguably, depressing) music, staring up at the ceiling for hours in the dark.

Mike, one of the Greco Boys and my boyfriend at the time, slept. I felt like I hardly ever saw him because he spent his time doing one of three things: working incessantly, playing Smash Brothers while drinking Mountains of Dew (there are photos), and sleeping.

I would corner him to have an important conversation about something, usually trying to figure out what we were going to do when I set off for Minnesota, and he would fall asleep. And the closer it got to my departure, the more he slept.

"You know, honey, he's stressed out," his mom would tell me. "That's how he deals with stress. He sleeps. Andrew is the same way."

Which brings us back to now, when I'm reading Andy's blog posts about being tired and figuring out how to balance all the demands life throws our way. He recalls college, when "sleep was just another thing on my list like dinner and homework." Yup. Got a big project due? You reallocate your time, take some away from sleeping and dinner and add it to schoolwork. You feel yourself getting sick, you power through until a weekend when nothing is going on, and then you just get slammed by that head cold and don't leave your bed for two days. And then you're behind.

You know the drill, I don't need to go into detail here.

A lot of the "introduction to being a grown-up" articles I read throughout my average week note fatigue as something that will be a part of our lives as adults. "You will be tired," they say, as if staring into a crystal ball. "You will be more tired than you ever thought possible."

At the time I first read this, I thought, you are crazy. It is not possible that I would be more tired in my well-balanced adult life of going to work, going to the Y, going to sleep at a reasonable hour that will give me (theoretically) 8 hours of sleep. Also, remember how little sleep I got in college, how many nights I got home at 5:00 in the morning or stayed up until 2:00 eating chips and salsa with my podmates (on a Wednesday)?! I functioned just fine back then.

But I was young. I remember my mom, all through my childhood, falling asleep pretty reliably at 10:00. She used to say, "OK, brush your teeth, I'm turning into a pumpkin!" We just knew that after a certain time of night, she would not be involved in family activities. Even if she tried to be there, she would nod off and start talking nonsense. We laughed, but we weren't surprised. She just got worn out by the end of the day.

Now, I don't know why, because I spend my days sitting in front of a computer or behind the windshield of my car, but I get tired. I can hardly watch movies anymore because I fall asleep 10 minutes in. Jason comes over and we try to have conversations, and I fall asleep mid-sentence and start talking nonsense. I often try to carry deep, metaphysical conversations with him about things like spiders. It doesn't make sense.

After battling my overactive brain for most of my life, I changed my strategy for living. It was a good day if the sun goes down and I am physically and mentally exhausted. There will be no lying in bed for hours, wishing I could just fall asleep. I want to have maximized my awake-time so that when night comes, I can maximize that too.

But to be honest, it's getting in the way. There are not enough hours in the day for me to be exhausted at bedtime, because there are still 10,000 things to do. Not sure what it's working on, exactly, but I'm certain my mind is working while I sleep (yes, I know it's scientifically proven). Lately I have been dreaming, vividly, every night. The dreams all have a similar theme: I am on a task force, tracking down a killer or taking down a mafia, and it becomes clear that I am the next target. So I give the task force a get-out-of-jail-free card and finish the job myself.

In my dream, the job never gets done. I always wake up right as I look my enemy in the eye.

I probably average 6 hours of sleep a night, which isn't bad; but I'm doing a lot on those 6 hours of sleep. (See the section of Andy's recipe for it all to work out titled, "5 Parts Fuel.") I do work out almost every day. I eat. I problem solve, in my own life and at my job. I have meaningful conversations with people, spend time with my friends, with my family, and with my man. I want it all to be quality time, but right now I'm running at max capacity and I can't cut corners anywhere. I have no time to reallocate, no hours to move from one category to another.

And last week I maxed out. Something's gotta give, right? With me it does. Every now and then I need to really recharge. I do get a lot of energy from being with other people, but I'm the type of person who needs to schedule time to think. There's something not quite right about that, but I don't quite know what to do about it.

On Saturday I spent the day at the beach with my girl Kristy. We both set aside the whole day to just lie outside and do whatever we want. And talk about whatever we want. Topics that are important, that we don't even have time to breach in a normal week. We swam a lot, tired out our bodies, and talked ourselves into silence. (If you know Kristy OR me, you know this is nearly impossible; if you know both of us, well, you probably don't believe me when I say that we actually had patches of silence on the drive home.)

And I'm starting to feel like a normal person again. Not all problems get solved by constant worry and attention; some just need to be left alone for awhile.

And now, it's time for bed.