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i’ve lived through so many patches of weakness in my 30 years. through failures in (or total absence of) confidence, through white-knuckled clutching to fear, through blind spots in reasoning, through simple ignorance. i’ve lied and cheated. i’ve cried behind the locked bathroom door at work, and i’ve punched cinder-block walls. i’ve hurt and been hurt.
but i have not one ounce of regret for any of those moments. not for the two times i cheated on the people i loved. at the time, they were brief lapses of judgment, the succumbing to the thrill of someone else hotly pursuing me in a haze of alcohol and other clouds. in retrospect, though, it was my cowardly way of punctuating struggling relationships, my way of pushing through the dirt to the surface. i am so sorry for the pain i threw around so carelessly, but i wouldn’t do it differently if i could.
not for the times i was cheated on. it’s one thing to be devastated by betrayal, and it’s the next thing to realize that, had the relationship been open to honesty and trust going in two directions in the first place, things might have gone differently.
not for the months of insomnia that filled my nights with a blinding pulse and my days with ghosts. i broke it down a thousand ways, stalking its shadow across the pages of health magazines, through friends’ advice, inside slow songs, within meditation and finally to surrender. in that, i learned the difference between wasting time and paying better attention to empty time. which is when i started sleeping again.
i read recently that growth requires tension. it’s why we lift weights to build muscle. it’s why we tend to like the teachers who are toughest on us.
people always say, “if i knew then what i know now, i’d…” the thing is, we know what we know now because of what happened then. would it be worth losing that knowledge to go back and prevent the struggle?
(that’s 11 hours of sleep in two nights)
the soundtrack is Clear Music by my new love. i turn left onto Chapel St. as a viola turns into a cello, its low notes coming from deep below the asphalt and sewage system and other infrastructure, slowing the blue transit buses and the dog walkers to a manageable pace. does everyone hear what i’m hearing? Read the rest of this entry »
i need my dear readers’ input (if i have any dear readers left since i rarely post anymore).
my insomnia has been manageable in the last two months–a bout here and there, but nothing destructive. unfortunately, though, last night was a struggle. i went to sleep somewhere before 2 a.m. with a little chemical help. i got more sleep than the typical bout allows but definitely not a sufficient amount. i’ll make it through the work day, though daydreams of napping will likely come around 3 p.m.
the real trouble? i have a ticket to the biggest UConn women’s basketball game of the regular season. the Huskies play Rutgers, their biggest rivals outside of Tennessee, for the Big East regular season championship. Rutgers beat them once, handing them their only loss of the season so far, so this game is huge. HUGE.
my problem is not the game, which starts at 7 p.m. my problem is the drive home after. it’s about 45 minutes home from Hartford after a very long work day on four hours of sleep.
should i forfeit my ticket, watching the game on ESPN2 instead and not worrying about a potentially sleepy drive home? or will the game leave me wired enough to get home safely?
what do you think:
a) the 45 year-old take: tired eyes make for dangerous conditions. watch the game at home.
b) the mid-20s take: what kind of fan are you? this is your favorite team playing their rivals in a huge game, and you have a great seat at the XL Center. get your ass to Hartford.
Don’t let your mind get weary and confused.
your will be still; don’t try.
Don’t let your heart get heavy, child;
inside you there’s a strength that lies.
i rode into work today with Ray LaMontagne. he seemed like the right companion to get me through the fog of a few hours sleep, through the choas of McDonalds wrappers and Dunkin’ Donuts cups flying in tight circles through Westville.
it was like D-Day set to a violin concerto, the music slowing down the violent winds outside–Ray’s light, gritty voice bringing peace to two lanes of caffeinated traffic where there should be only one. the beat indicating i was going somewhere, the strings telling me i didn’t have to hurry because the current would carry me. Read the rest of this entry »
someone accessed my blog via a web search for “melatonin for insomnia caused by heroin.”
i’m trying to imagine the person on the other end of that search. this is for them.
it’s been a week of joke snow and unintentionally early mornings. it’s been a long one in a way i like weeks to be long–lauren and i looking at each other after work and shrugging our shoulders then deciding to go out to dinner.
finally, a life not dictated by sticky notes and pencil marks in the planner.
i gave up zolpidem (a.k.a. generic Ambien) on Monday. actually, i ran out and never refilled it. but i’m sleeping again. sometimes only on the couch, but natural sleep is natural, and chemical sleep is like a brick sloshing around in my brain all day, therefore the couch is fine.
natural sleep’s first few steps in its new life only come in six-hour segments, though, so i’m feeling a bit like the fog has set in, but it’s a light fog and i don’t need to go anywhere, so it’s fine like the fog of one good glass of wine on a snowed-in night at home.
not that those of us in southern Connecticut know much about snow. like i said, we only get joke snow–flurries and the kind that turns to rain on impact. thanks, carbon emissions and irregular weather patterns.
tonight, i have very important plans to go to the bookstore, tomorrow i must attend a Love Fest (…i’ll give you a moment to pull your mind out of the gutter…), and Sunday my morning is booked solid with brunch in Guilford. don’t worry, i have Monday off to recover.
my old-friend-turned-new sent me a song that seems to sum up my mid-January mind quite well. so i’ll leave you with Bon Iver – Re: Stacks.
i didn’t want to mention it for fear of jinxing it, but i had been falling asleep in my own bed without medication, and sleeping for a reasonable amount of time, for many days in a row.
but now i’m awake. so i wait and wonder what i’m doing wrong.
*sigh*
i really want to be writing right now, so i write what’s hanging around.
1. i discovered that there are three different centers for sleep disorders within five miles of my home. some states don’t have even one. i can’t decide whether i’m privileged or exploited.
2. UConn’s Maya Moore is r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s. she almost outscored Holy Cross by herself. she doesn’t look like a freshman, she doesn’t play like a freshman. 31 points in 19 minutes?! that’s hot.
3. lauren and i have been having some pretty serious discussions regarding the heavy weight of home. the thing is, home is where she is and where we can exist together. everything else is just fine print.
4. i made sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows for my company’s Thanksgiving lunch. me! i cooked! two sticks of butter. brown sugar. 1,000 calories per bite, and not a bite was leftover.
5. due to the mild fall (global warming or just another weather cycle?) the leaves are just now starting to fall. i always forget about the yellow ones. we were driving down Hartford Turnpike tonight, and the orange street lights that leapfrog the rows of yellow trees on either side of the street bath the leaves in permanent sunset. all that bright on an ink black background. the perfect modern photograph. the street glows. the leaves fall one at a time. leave the shudder open for awhile and ghosts pass through the frame.
famous insomniacs include Amy Lowell, Judy Garland, Franz Kafka, Groucho Marx, and Mark Twain. Albert Einstein used to sleep through meetings because he wasn’t able to sleep at night. Teddy Roosevelt’s cure was a shot of cognac in a glass of milk.
Kafka kept a diary of his sleeplessness. on october 2, 1911, he wrote, “Sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep soundly, but after an hour I wake up, as though I had laid my head in the wrong hole.”
when Marx couldn’t sleep, he’d call people in the middle of the night and insult them.
Garland died of a drug overdose after years of dependence on amphetamines and sleeping pills.
The picture’s far too big to look at kid, your eyes won’t open wide enough
And you’re constantly surrounded by the swirling stream of what is and what was
Well, we’ve all made our predictions but the truth still isn’t out
But if you wanna see the future, go and stare into a cloud
i haven’t slept on my own in about three months. i tried last night to fall asleep to the sound of Sunday Night Football on low. it worked a few times, but part of my head did not want the rest of me to sleep and jolted me awake. when i finally checked the clock, it was nearly 2 a.m. that’s when i went to the orange rx bottle. again. Read the rest of this entry »
my dreams apparently do not miss me. abe and the beav will have to wait it out until tomorrow night. rozerem may not have any impact on the parts of the brain that control memory or balance, but it also has little effect on the part that keeps me awake all night.
i’ve never gone through heroin withdrawal, but i imagine it feels something like being on rozerem. shakiness, paranoia, pins and needles in my extremities. i didn’t hallucinate, but that may have provided me with some much needed entertainment.
on a plus side, i didn’t spiral downward into an endless pit of desperation and despair. once i realized i wasn’t going to sleep around 1:30, i calmly pulled myself out of bed. i stumbled down the stairs, clinging to the rail (the pill had robbed me of most of my muscle control), and plopped down onto the couch. after half an hour of staring at the sky lights and listening to the rain that was beating down on them, i added half a tylenol p.m. to the mix and suddenly it was 7:30 a.m.
in some circles, that’s called success. tonight, success will be called Ambien.
