Close your eyes and I’ll tell you a story
Confessions of a sleepy head
Every morning, for I don’t know how long, but would guesstimate between two or three years, I have pulled a tarot card. I hold my crystals and usually make a little affirmation for the day, noting how I feel or what I’d like to accomplish. Then I shuffle and wait until one card pings out from the rest and turns itself face up.
Yesterday, I pulled Strength in reverse. Cards in reverse tend to get a bad rap. They’re not always negative, mostly they focus on blocks, delays, or things holding you back. Shit, I thought. What’s my fate, then?
To my surprise, rest, it said!
It warned of depleting energy and a withdrawal. A reluctance to complete tasks and feelings of overwhelm. That in order to rely on my inner strength to help me prevail, I must look at my energy levels and recuperate if necessary.
I resist against rest. Things not deemed as “productive” are hard for me to accept. I multitask and habit stack and draw up to-lists like my life depends on it. Typically, I’ve berated myself for feeling too tired. Unable to give myself the compassion or kindness I needed, instead I would wield the assumptions of others that it meant I’m lazy and ignore what my mind and body were asking for.
More recently I’ve been letting myself nap when I feel like it. Since reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and understanding the extent of the benefits from biphasic sleep (two distinct sleep periods over a 24-hour period), I’ve revelled in the validation from an external party and taken the thumbs up for afternoon shut eye in my stride.
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I started listening to the audiobook of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. The novel follows an unnamed narrator who attempts to derail her life and sleep for an entire year. She’s in her mid-twenties, she’s orphaned, she quits her job, and she survives off her inheritance. She has a situationship with a man in finance, an incompetent psychiatrist, and throughout the book she increases her intake of pills and medications to the point of regularly blacking out for extended periods throughout the day. Oh, and it’s set in early 2000s New York. All the ingredients for a perfect messy-young-woman-finding-herself piece of fiction.
My ears pricked up at a small ode to sleep the narrator makes. As I was listening to the audiobook, getting this down word for word took more attempts at rewinding and playing than I care to admit but it still felt worth it.
Oh, sleep, nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom. The power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.
I don’t feel misery in my waking consciousness, but when I’m particularly tired especially for more than a day or two at a time, the pleasure, freedom, and power of sleep are just as alluring to me.
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On Tuesday, I found a purple poppy. It enticed me so that I changed track and diverted towards it. Against the miserable gloom of the grey skies above and my inner desire to sleep for the foreseeable, it appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Something magical, maybe even something I imagined. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen a purple poppy out in the wild before. Perhaps among groups of wildflowers, its charm diluted by the vibrancy and saturation of the other plants in concentration.
There were no other purple poppies around that I could see, just the single plant with eight or nine flowers standing defiantly and claiming their space. I was grateful to be awake and that I was someone able to bear witness to the existence and beauty of this flower. Perhaps if it were someone else and not me who laid eyes on it, the poppy would have been discarded as a weed. As a nuisance. I took a picture to make sure my eyes didn’t deceive me.
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Today, the potential for taking a nap whispers quietly beside me. The safe comfort of cocooning myself in the foetal position, wrapped tightly in a blanket, makes my eyelids feel heavy. My eyes glaze over at the thought of slipping away into soft, half-formed dreams. My legs get pins and needles on purpose, willing me to be horizontal.
