Sleepless

Last night, I was laying awake for a brief moment before I ultimately fell asleep. I was trying not to think about work. I have only three days left, tomorrow not being one of them. There is nothing left for me to think about except for the email I plan to send 10 minutes before I leave on my last day. It’s my default setting to think about work as soon as I go to bed for some reason. I’ve been actively trying to reprogram my mind. I think the work residue in my mind is from my year as a principal when there was just an incredible amount of things that happened in a single day that I almost needed that time at night to process everything before going to sleep. That was definitely not a good habit because my anxiety was at its zenith then and the processing of the day not only made it so that I couldn’t fall asleep easily but also I would wake up the next day with crushing anxiety. Fast heart rate and the familiar “butterflies” in my mid-section. Not just my stomach but my whole abdomen, chest included. Even when my current job was good, I still went to bed at night and replayed the day’s events in my mind and thought about what the next day would bring. I don’t like that.

So last night, realizing that there is absolutely no reason for me to think about work, I switched my mind to thinking about this really neat crochet project I’m working on. I actually woke up thinking about it and my plan for the next steps of the project. But I also thought about writing and my journals and other things not related to work. For some reason, laying awake made me think about the times when I was a teenager and what I would think about when I couldn’t fall asleep right away.

Back then, not being able to sleep was concerning to me. I knew I was supposed to be sleeping, and it stressed me out a little bit if I couldn’t fall asleep right away. So what I did was think about the other people near me who were still awake. It made me feel better about my own temporary insomnia if I knew I wasn’t the only one still awake. Where we live now, our street is a short distance from a main road. At night when it’s quiet, and particularly when we have the windows open, we can easily hear the traffic on that road. There’s not much of it, but we’ve learned that young people, could be older ones too, like to wait until the middle of the night to rev up their motorcycles and blast down the road. They do that more on Friday and Saturday nights so I particularly don’t like sleeping with our windows open on those nights. Even with our windows closed, the noise still seeps in. They are obviously still awake.

However, when I was a teenager, we lived in a gated community that was set far back from the main road. In fact, there was an entire lake between us and the main road. Our neighborhood was at least a mile or two on various winding roads away from what we called the “guard shack”. So there was never any car noise that I could hear to assure me that there were others still awake. What I did have was the knowledge that there was a person working in the guard shack 24 hours a day. They were there to raise the gate if you had a community sticker on your windshield or they were there to take your name and information and call the person you were trying to visit if they hadn’t called ahead to say you were coming. Made it pretty difficult to sneak friends over as a teenager. Not that I really ever tried to do that. So there was always somebody there and they were always awake.

The other thing that I listened for was the booming coming from the military base down the road. The city I live in now is also just down the road, so we definitely hear the artillery practice and other scheduled explosions and demolitions and whatever it is they do there to get ready for whatever they are called to do. Our old apartment was actually right in the flight path of the base so on a daily basis we had huge millitary helicopters flying low over our apartment multiple times. However, the base is large enough so that even though where I lived as a teenager was about a 30 minute drive from the base, we could still hear the blasts and other training sounds very clearly. I’m pretty sure the area of the base extended pretty far down towards where I used to live. Sometimes the base will post online about expected trainings so that we can be prepared for extra noise. Twice a year the Marines come to down from the base on the coast to practice artillery with the army. That’s always a particularly loud week. People who live close enough have to worry about their walls rattling. We never mind though. I agree with the people online who say it’s the “sounds of freedom”.

The knowledge of an ever watchful guard in the tiny building at the entrance to our community and the ever watchful soldiers down the road training in the middle of the night gave me comfort enough to know that I was not the only one still awake. As a 40+ year old adult, I am less concerned about other people also being awake than I am about just being awake in general. It makes me mad. And irritated. Which makes it harder to fall asleep. I don’t care who is also still up in the world, I just want to be sleeping!

So, in honor of sleepless nights, here is a link to one of the first things I posted on this blog more than 10 years ago, on a night when I couldn’t sleep. Enjoy. The Beginning

It’s a little after 8 pm where I am in the world right now. However close you are to bedtime where you are, sleep well my friends.

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