On sleeping

Self-indulgent fiction

I have never had any trouble falling asleep. On the other hand, I have always had a lot of trouble waking up. Since I can remember, I have not wanted to get up in the morning—not to go to elementary school, high school, University lectures or my corporate job. In fact, the only thing that ever made me get up early is a time-sensitive obligation or event—a flight to catch, a meeting to attend, Christmas gifts to unwrap.

Falling asleep is an entirely different endeavor. For most of my life, I could sleep on a cot, in an airplane seat, in a moving car, or on a sticky dorm room floor with only a wool coat for a comforter—with no trouble. There is all this “sleep science” out there now but I believe it is chiefly temperamental.

Some of the therapy bullshit says that it’s all about untied loose ends, that creeping deadlines and obligations and guilt keep the mind restlessly awake. But I have always had loose ends. I remember in school, saving a month of homework til the last possible night; not studying for tests the next day—none of it mattered, I was asleep at the first opportunity.

As a young man, my mind was restless while awake. I remember having a guilty conscience. Any tiny deviation from social acceptability would cause me to agonize over my mistake for days. This made me crippling shy, which in turn made it even harder to fit in. But I was brimming with unfocused energy—I knew I wanted to go accomplish something, but I didn’t know what. I wasn’t naturally someone who liked following rules, so my grades weren’t great, but in my head I was the smartest kid around nevertheless.

As I got a little older and less awkward, I remember writing down a list of goals to accomplish before turning thirty. Looking back on them, many were undeniably as spiritually pockmarked as my then-acne ridden face: buy a Ferrari. Earn a million dollars. Get a girlfriend. Bench 225. Thankfully, it was 2013, so Andrew Tate wasn’t around yet to poison my persuadable male psyche, but I was moving in that direction anyway.

For all the materialism on my list, I also understood that I had to get my conscience under control, if only to achieve the high-flying lifestyle I had dreamt up in my head. So I threw in some ethics too—Stop telling lies.

This stupid list aside, stop telling lies changed my life. When I started, I couldn’t believe the very quantity of lying I mindlessly engaged in on autopilot. I would start to tell some “white lie” and have to stop in my tracks, and think of something literally true to say instead. After a month of this, I committed to never going back to my lying ways. A nice side effect was that I had to always think of nice true beliefs to say about my friends. If I hated someone’s cooking and they asked about it, I would have to find something nice and true to say, like a real-time gratitude journal. It also forced me to take ownership of the words coming out of my mouth—just because I was asked a question, didn’t mean I would unthinkingly spit out an answer like a Vegas slot machine—watching my words carefully made me say only exactly what I wanted to.

But the best thing I got from stop telling lies was the feeling of a clean soul. In the past, I held two ideas in my head at once: on one hand, being ethical was not a relevant concern at all; on the other, that even very small transgressions would make me feel extremely guilty. Now, I felt like I could act with moral clarity. It made my life better, and it made me feel better.

Today, I can’t believe that the rest of the list actually fell into place. I worked very hard for about five years to amass as much material wealth as I could, and it actually worked, way beyond my plebeian high school aspiration. I live in a beautiful house with my girlfriend, who I love. My mind is no longer restless in the daytime.

The downside of material achievement is that you become freed from the reel. With no need to work, it’s harder to find a purpose above the self. If you’re not careful, you can turn into a 42 year-old cry for help. The list has been exhausted, and right on time—I’m going to turn thirty next year.

Understandably, no one has a shred of sympathy for the plight of the young and wealthy. You might say—just make another list! But it’s not the same, I’m too self-aware, I’m too old, I should be a father and a husband and a man who gets up and works out and puts on a suit and kisses his family and goes to work to make sure they can survive. I’m not some kid hatching a plan with nothing to lose. With the calming of my daytime-mind has come lower energy and agency.

And yet, with only one life, we all must live as we see fit. Sometimes I walk by churches and think about going in, but I never do. Sometimes I scroll military job application websites. Sometimes I consider a radical deviation from the plan. But for now, I stay the path. After all, I have one more grace year with which to complete the original list.

I don’t sleep so well, anymore.