Sleep deprivation attacks like a squirrel

Reader, I am famous for not sleeping. Insomnia has followed me around my entire life, like an angry squirrel that desperately wants to eat my shoe. I cannot always escape, and sometimes the angry squirrel leaps on my chest and stares into my sleepless eyes all night, occasionally chittering right when I’m about to fall asleep, and asking about what happened to that pair of Steve Madden oxblood loafers that I wore all the time in 1996 and had re-heeled twice. After that, obviously, I have to think of the brown plaid pants that I wore all the time, and then the brown turtleneck, and my brain is off to the races, reciting whatever absolute nonsense it can gather until 4 am when it starts to run out of steam and finally chug itself out.

I have, of course, spent many a sleepless night reading. Or, more accurately, reading has caused many of my sleepless nights. But I’ve also laid in bed thinking relentlessly about, for example, John Locke (I wish was I was making this up), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, how to categorize and define emotional states (I was in middle school for that one), and what color spectrums might be visible to aliens.

Sometimes, though, it’s just anxiety, and I play out conversations over and over and over, trying to imagine how I would have said something differently. Or I imagine a conversation that hasn’t happened, and weigh out every possible scenario and response, trying to prepare myself for disasters that haven’t yet (still to this day) happened. I have a restive, inexhaustible, and highly neurotic need to know where I belong, and how to react to people, and I always want to play out how I can do the best possible thing while also protecting myself. It’s like the worst ever mental chess, imagining hypothetical scenarios of various types of harm, and trying to figure out how to escape while not hurting anyone else.

When I was in college, both in undergrad and grad school, I had both types of insomnia, the relentless thinking and the horrid rumination, fairly regularly. If I wasn’t laying awake, chain smoking and thinking about Phineas Gage, then I was laying awake, chain smoking and convinced that I was going to fail because I scored a 98 on my mid-term exam (Reader, I realize this is bananas, but please, let me emphasize, that if I did not score perfectly on any of exams for any of my Intro Psychology courses, I was convinced that it would prove that I had no business majoring in Psychology. Yes, there is a lot to unpack in those sentences.)

And while every undergraduate student masters some level of not sleeping, I did manage to stay up nearly three days, with zero naps, my junior year. It was a particularly fraught year, for reasons I no longer fully remember (perhaps because of my exhaustion), but I was not doing well in statistics, which was my minor (Reader, if that’s shocking, remind me to tell you about when I was pre-med), and I spent so much time trying to figure out applied non-parametric statistics, and laying awake thinking of Phineas Gage, and probably John Locke, and definitely Robertson Davies and Boethius, that I wasn’t doing that great in history, either. So I stayed up, trying to cram for a test, and write a paper, and probably do something else that I overcommitted myself to (I was an R.A., in the Folk Dance/Ballroom Dance Ensemble, involved in a few student organizations in varying degrees, and a Peer Advisor for the Psych Department). And then I stayed up again. And then again.

And then it was test time.

Reader, I drank so much coffee, and smoked so many cigarettes, that as I walked across campus to take my test, the world shimmered like being underwater. I knew that this test was my last hurdle before sleep. I knew that I could pass it. I know that I could score at least a C, and hopefully a B. I lit a cigarette and walked across the quad, puffing the nicotine deep into my lungs. Yes, I was almost there. I flicked the spent cigarette away, the glowing stub landing a few feet ahead, where I would step on it and put it completely out. But Reader, the cigarette did not want to be stepped on, and it jumped up, and attacked my ankle before climbing into the cuff of my pants.

I shrieked, hopped up and down, and frantically batted at my ankles and my jeans, before I realized that a) every single person on the quad was looking at me and b) the cigarette was not in the cuff of my pants, but on the ground, where I had littered it.

I was so exhausted that I had hallucinated.

But strangely enough, that would not be the only time that I shrieked and hopped about on the quad (or near enough) and everyone would stop and stare. I was walking to class, smoking (of course), and a squirrel ran out in front of me. JMU was full of squirrels, because the administration paid them to frolic, especially on Parents’ Weekend, to add to the bucolic atmosphere (this came out of the same budget they used, no doubt, to paint the leaves and have the Alpo factor cease production on the aforementioned Parents’ Weekend). I strode along the stone pathway, and saw the squirrel run out into my path. So I veered. The squirrel, however, also veered, determined to cross, probably to collect his paycheck. Our veers did not, in fact, lead us away from each other, but directly into each other, and the squirrel ran smack into the side of my leg. Reader, I shit you not. I froze, wondering if the squirrel was going to climb up my leg and bite me and give me rabies or horrific squirrel toothed disfigurements, possibly involving my eyes (Reader, I’m sad to tell you that I did indeed think these things. Please remember that I’m very neurotic, anxiously so). The squirrel also froze, no doubt wondering similar things. As we eyed each other trepidatiously, everyone who witnessed this encounter burst into laughter loud enough to stun the squirrel back into motion. As it ran off, likely excited to update its LiveJournal with specious claims about the safety of collecting its paycheck in person, I stood there a moment longer, still feeling the lingering warmth of its little body against my foot.

I have not thought about that squirrel in 30 years, Reader. Or that callous cigarette attack (I’m horrified at how much I littered when I was a smoker, and no doubt I’ll think about that for the next three hours). But that’s insomnia. It’s a labyrinth that we wind ourselves through with no guiding string to pull us back. It’s a squirrel running into your leg when you least expect it. It’s a flagrant mixing of metaphors that will not stop, not matter how much your brain begs and pleads, like a dog barking at the UPS delivery person.

And I’m in it. Frittering away my nights with anxious five act dramas that have never happened, and questions about the duration of culture on a lengthy space voyage, and snippets of Mean Mary songs (go listen to her), and, if I’m very, very lucky, I’ll recollect horrible things people have told me, and then think of all the better ways that I could have responded other than doing nothing.

And for the next however many days, that’s probably just how it will be. My brain will be hijacked by my brain, a most self-defeating robbery, and one that I have learned to wait out until we can all shake hands, agree to bury the hatchet, clean up our metaphors, get the squirrels whatever they need to leave us alone, and finally get some rest.

And if you’re reading this, Reader, at 3 am, then you know exactly what I mean.

I salute you.

And your squirrelly brain.