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Dec. 22nd, 2012 11:32 pmJulie is about ready to murder me about the sleeping.
I remember in preschool when they declared it was naptime I never napped once. I think I assumed everyone else was awake too, that the custom was just a transparent fiction excusing a sanity break for the grownups. And that like me the other kids stayed up reading each night under the covers with a flashlight for hours, or over by a nightlight that you assumed was for that purpose (I really did!), or by moonlight at the window. Obviously that's what one does at that time, either that or just lies awake thinking. The latter isn't as bad as it sounds - it's not like with other people where the thoughts that keep you awake are by definition bad enough to keep an otherwise sleepy person awake. It's more what would happen if for some reason, though well-rested, you were required to lie down in your bed doing nothing at noon. Maybe my indifference to the concept of meditation is due to being forced to master something similar at a young age? Though maybe other people have this kind of insomnia too sometimes and don't need the example - I wouldn't be surprised if I've toggled from a default assumption that everyone was like me to just as wrongly feeling no one is.
Not that there haven't been moments of intense frustration with the inability to sleep. I did have a lot of those, at some point - I'm not even sure at what age, but I remember the tossing and turning. Maybe before tests? Other nights I didn't really care if I got enough sleep. During long stretches at fifteen to eighteen I'd sleep just an hour or so at night, a few minutes here and there during classes, then another hour after school. I think I stayed alive by crashing on weekends. I didn't have my first experience of going forward around the clock till I moved out for college. I found it much more liberating than drinking or anything else one immediately gets up to after that change.
Actually, come to think of it, I felt an intense euphoria when college started, one that had nothing to do with classes, which I hardly ever wandered into, and which basically lasted for years. I always attributed it to hating high school or needing to escape my parents but I wonder now if most of it happened because I was getting real, consistent rest for the first time in years, maybe ever.
I also remember in childhood being overjoyed at the concept of sleepovers, that promise of night company at last, before it started to become clear they invariably ended with me, alone, watching some terrible later-than-late movie on a couch, with the others asleep in another room.
I remember in preschool when they declared it was naptime I never napped once. I think I assumed everyone else was awake too, that the custom was just a transparent fiction excusing a sanity break for the grownups. And that like me the other kids stayed up reading each night under the covers with a flashlight for hours, or over by a nightlight that you assumed was for that purpose (I really did!), or by moonlight at the window. Obviously that's what one does at that time, either that or just lies awake thinking. The latter isn't as bad as it sounds - it's not like with other people where the thoughts that keep you awake are by definition bad enough to keep an otherwise sleepy person awake. It's more what would happen if for some reason, though well-rested, you were required to lie down in your bed doing nothing at noon. Maybe my indifference to the concept of meditation is due to being forced to master something similar at a young age? Though maybe other people have this kind of insomnia too sometimes and don't need the example - I wouldn't be surprised if I've toggled from a default assumption that everyone was like me to just as wrongly feeling no one is.
Not that there haven't been moments of intense frustration with the inability to sleep. I did have a lot of those, at some point - I'm not even sure at what age, but I remember the tossing and turning. Maybe before tests? Other nights I didn't really care if I got enough sleep. During long stretches at fifteen to eighteen I'd sleep just an hour or so at night, a few minutes here and there during classes, then another hour after school. I think I stayed alive by crashing on weekends. I didn't have my first experience of going forward around the clock till I moved out for college. I found it much more liberating than drinking or anything else one immediately gets up to after that change.
Actually, come to think of it, I felt an intense euphoria when college started, one that had nothing to do with classes, which I hardly ever wandered into, and which basically lasted for years. I always attributed it to hating high school or needing to escape my parents but I wonder now if most of it happened because I was getting real, consistent rest for the first time in years, maybe ever.
I also remember in childhood being overjoyed at the concept of sleepovers, that promise of night company at last, before it started to become clear they invariably ended with me, alone, watching some terrible later-than-late movie on a couch, with the others asleep in another room.
