Going to Bed When You Need To
this is late because I didn’t go to bed when I needed to
Three Fridays ago, a frazzled CVS pharmacy tech jabbed my right arm with the Omicron booster. (“That hurts!” I said, and he laughed.) I was fine until later in the afternoon, when my body transformed from functional to drowning: my bones ached, my arms shook with chills, and I had a blinding migraine and accompanying nausea. I called a friend who was supposed to come over that night.
“I can’t be a human with other humans,” I grumbled, then crawled on the couch, somehow cobbled together dinner, and watched game one of the World Series between the Astros and the Phillies. (Toxic vs. toxic—or, as my calendar notification read: astros and phillies just destroy each other.)
Because Fox has the playoff broadcast rights, John Smoltz was one-half of the commentary duo; and because John Smoltz is a Hall of Fame pitcher who is, unfortunately, brilliant, that means he’ll accurately predict much of what happens during at bats.
It turns out that Smoltzie’s voice is actually very soothing when all coherence has fled your body: I almost fell asleep listening to him. I admitted defeat and walked my body to bed. It was the dead of the night; which is to say, it was 9PM.
The American Academy of Sleep recommends that adults aged 18 to 60 year olds average at least seven hours of sleep a night. The younger you are, the more sleep you need; your body is growing, and that requires a lot of energy. Babies need anywhere from 12 to 16 hours (including naps!); toddlers, 10 to 13 (including naps!); and teens, 8 to 10 (no naps!).
The first class of my high school, however, like many in American high schools, started at 8AM. I was usually in bed by 11PM, and I woke up at 6AM to shower, make and eat breakfast, and generally get ready in time for carpool, which my family did with two other families, and which usually took 45 minutes. A 2014 CDC study found that 93% of American high schools and 83% of middle schools started before 8:30AM.
While sleep wasn’t always a hot topic of scientific inquiry (The Lancet called it “a Cinderella branch of medicine,” which I don’t fully understand as an insult; but then, I’m a dumb bitch who wants a fairy godmother), interest has skyrocketed in recent years. Research has tied a lack of sleep to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease including strokes and coronary heart disease.
In 2021, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine released a position statement about sleep—bluntly, that good sleep is necessary, because “insufficient sleep and untreated sleep disorders are detrimental for health, well-being, and public safety.”
If you’re a nerd about esoteric sleep disruption data, segregated out by American county, age, race, and ethnicity, this CDC map is fascinating.
And if you’re Justin Verlander—nine-time MLB All-Star pitcher; two-time World Series champion with the Houston Astros (but 2017 was trash-can cheating, so it’s really only 2022); two-time Cy Young Award winner for best pitcher (and another nominee, at age 39, which is very old for pitcher)—if you’re General Pitching Award Magnet Justin Verlander, that guy, you sleep at least 10 hours a night and tell the New York Times you’re not afraid to get a little dirty. “If I need more, I’m not afraid to just sleep more,” he said. Also? He doesn’t use an alarm clock.
HOT TAKE! The problem with having a chronic disease is that you have it.
I thought about that fact last week, from Wednesday through Sunday, while experiencing one of the worst flare-ups of endometriosis that I’ve had in a while: the sensation of rusted wire digging into my abdomen; chills and uncontrollable; nausea and dizziness; piercing migraine. Where the pain overrides the painkillers, and I believe that it, the quality of this pain, is proof again of my inherent failure.
Of course that is bullshit. Chronic disease isn’t proof of anything about the moral quality of a person; it’s just proof that it exists, that it in fact luxuriates in its inability to leave.
And yet: I resisted doing what I knew I needed to do. I told myself that I could just answer one more work email, do one more thing for work, do work, I would be fine and I wouldn’t feel anything. Last Wednesday morning, when I was feral with pain in the bathroom, I edited a draft of a fundraising email, a behavior that is otherwise known as generally being an idiot.
When I finally admitted what, in my mind, was defeat and called out sick, I still tried to stay on my laptop, as if proximity to it meant I was better than I actually was. At some point, I remembered that I could do something, and that was to roll myself into bed and listen to Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” on repeat and wait for sleep.
“I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger,” Joan Didion writes in “In Bed,” an essay in The White Album. “We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.”
I do not know how to outwit endometriosis, or to regard it as friend, or even when to expect it. But I do find it instructive, when it rears its monstrous eyes, insofar as the clarity of its pain shuts down everything outside it. In that sense, pain is a hideous perversion of sleep: both render us apart from ourselves. Sleep, too, insists on its importance, even when we attempt to deny it (or it denies us, in the case of insomnia).
Some of the best sleep I’ve ever had was after my surgery for endometriosis. To be fair: I was on some very strong painkillers, and I also had to sleep at specific elevation, which made me wonder if my body were Colorado—but I got sleep. I slept during the daytime, often for hours on end, and I slept at night, also for hours on end.
I remember that recovery time, now, with great fondness, and an even greater amount of deluded nostalgia. That time was not golden, but my memory needs it to be.
Or, as Joan Didion writes in another essay in The White Album, an essay that is not about pain but which I find applicable nonetheless: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.”
Songs to Listen to When You Can’t Sleep:
Bill Evans, “Peace Piece”
Prinze George, “Victor”
Loyle Carner, “Mrs C”
Broken Social Scene, “Swimmers”
Lauryn Hill, “Everything Is Everything”
U2, “40”
Angus & Julia Stone, “Bella”
The Strokes, “One Way Trigger” (mellow version)
The Flamingos, “I Only Have Eyes for You”
Harry Styles, “matilda x fine line” (record this Harold)
Ariana Grande, “get well soon”
Whitney, “TWIRL”
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
No, I did not do this. (But you should do this: buy Diaspora Co. spices for yourself, for your friends, your family; or, their tote, for your cat.)
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
Proud of you for doing the hard thing and taking the rest. I had a brief run of COVID and the most significant symptom was fatigue - I haven’t slept so much in ages but I kept trying to fight through it, feeling guilty about it.
There are times when I desperately need to sleep and those always seem to be the times when it is most difficult, sometimes impossible. I may take a page from your book and try sone of these!
Hugs.
Lots of sympathy about the eendometriosis.
I have similar self imposed fights with naps which I need most afternoons and are best if I actually lie down and close my eyes. Do I do this? Not often.