Sleep Desperation
Sleep shame, Need for Deep Rest, Syncing with the Sun
Dear sleep, my childhood friend. The beautiful black dupatta worn by my life. The cheapest way to rejuvenate. To curl into my own corner of calm. You come with a dabba full of dreams. Curate a film festival of memories and impossibilities. You beckon me into your arms in good times and bad. I remember our reading-napping remix on the summer floor. Then the days when my body ached mad. And being 'ghosted' even before the term was coined. You were my only companion in that nerve-wracking time.
It wasn't always easy to have you. Families like mine haven’t been fond of people who fall in love with you. Late risers, especially girls are greeted with taunts. Anger, even. So many times I've woken up to my aunt banging the utensils. My grandmothers have worried about my future. This Brahmanical machinery of womanhood equates late-rising to a questionable character. The ideal woman here wakes up at dawn. She earns a license to shun anyone who wakes up later. So what if I slept late? If I needed time to calm my overactive mind? If I sought solitude - a rare artefact in Indian households? I receive scorn the morning after. Puffy face, frizzy hair, crusty eyes. Looking at me, nobody can imagine the beautiful things I must have read or created the night before.
It’s not only families who have a problem with you, dear sleep. Corporate spaces (and corporate-funded campuses) think you are optional. A luxury that one has to earn by proving themselves. They say ‘burn the midnight oil’ when it’s established that you aid in learning. Those who go to bed early get a different flavour of judgment in this coffee culture. Despite so many celebs endorsing you, you remain a symbol of laziness, not a secret to success.
Rightfully, you refuse to show your depths to people who still seek validation from family, friends, and colleagues. I’ve been one of them, dear sleep.
I have also let you down in other ways. Whenever you were about to kiss me, I held up a device between us. You seem to be tired of my habit of putting you second to everything else. I haven’t tried to understand you. Your circadian rhythms go unnoticed. I’ve downloaded apps to track you and induce you. Those binaural beats and that gorgeous voice of Michael Sealey. And it has worked sometimes. Yet, I realize that technology is best kept away from this pursuit of you.
But not science. Science loves you, even when it doesn’t get you completely. Sleep scientists call you ‘mother nature’s best effort yet at immortality’. When you take the throne of my internal kingdom, a staff of self-cleaning and self-healing agents step out with purpose. I love your free daily servicing of my inner machinery. You soothe my chronic pain. Regulate disturbing emotions, archive my experiences, and sort my memories. You MarieKondo-fy my observations and realizations. You are the work that happens when I stop thinking about work. Far from the poster boy of laziness, you are the most productive way of doing nothing, dear sleep. An investment that begets beautiful returns in my waking life.
I wish to embrace you in a whole new way. Without shame, I want to take delight in your sacred everydayness. Explore you in a lover’s embrace or next to a warm, sisterly body after a sleepover. I want to wake up and discuss you with people. I want to replace sleep morality with sleep hygiene. Make my bed a phone-free zone. Sync with celestial bodies, not devices. Whatever time I wake up, I want to go say hello to the sun. Walk into birdsong and vitamin D. Open the window to let another morning breeze in. I plan to learn the art of waking up. And also the art of breathing myself into your nightly abyss.
I hope I find the courage to be the boring person who goes to bed early. Come find me dear sleep. I need you.