Why We don't Sleep?

The Most Boring Article you'll Read.

Nothing sets us off to sleep faster than a droning account of a bad night’s sleep.

If I taped my chloroformic morning bulletins, maybe I could play them back before bed. Only that bootleg hypnosis wouldn’t have the desired effect, as I find the topic - and the sound of my own voice - so electrifyingly stimulating.

My friend Emma once told me, “You could write about anything and make it interesting.” Occasionally, the brain clings onto a compliment with a grip usually reserved for ego-flattening insults. Soon afterwards, my aborted experimental thinkpiece on ‘curtains’ proved her kind but wrong*. Today, we put that lingering praise through its second-greatest-ever test.

The early reviews are strong. Finally, some long-overdue recognition from the underslept literati:

“Absolutely soporific!”

“A prosaic lullaby for the restless mind.”

“His me-first style veers toward the self-… awareness… though rarely… bloated and overripe… or… absolute nonsense… ”

For the last seven years, I’ve slept like a baby - I wake up on the hour, yelping for breast milk. I sleep like a log - stiff with the existential dread of stoking the slow-burning fate of my unnamed brothers. By now, I’ve exhausted every last murmur of forced concern from my loved ones.

All jokes aside - which, funnily enough, is actually what I’m rebranding my dulling substack to - or maybe I’ll go with ‘Funnily Enough’ - I warned you upfront about the joke asides - there’s no other health issue that takes so much from a person and receives so little sympathy. Be you an insomniac vigilante, a jilted octomum or a really quite-shattered blogger, any mention of chronic poor sleep is heard as moaning. You’re tired, got it.

If you heavy-lidded, dream-having, pillow-sucking slumber-chumps can’t empathise, honestly, I don’t know how you sleep at night. I’ve tried everything:

Trained my farmyard dyscalculia. I preached on the half-life of caffeine - as if a post-perandial macchiato were as harmful as lapping up spilt uranium. The white noise: the off-beat acapella; the satisfying thwack of a pavilion-bound cricket ball; the lulls with the quiet expectation of privilege.

In my restless pursuit of a good night’s kip, I tracked my snoozes every night. I let the plastic ring I wore decide my bedtime. Anxious, I would wake up earlier and earlier to analyse if I’d slept long enough. There is a level of chronic tiredness where a person will consider subscribing to their own mattress cover. I came close. After all that, I was still fumbling more z’s than I caught.

In a rare, troubling victory for the hypochondriac community, I successfully diagnosed myself with sleep apnea. The first clue was waking up panting like a bulldog disfigured for our viewing pleasure.

Now a CPAP mask siphons oxygen down my throat each night. I’d cast myself as a pudgy, adolescent Bane** in a coming-of-age Batman prequel, where the antics of a young masked prankster are getting increasingly out of hand. In the final scene, I accidentally detonate the booby-trapped-prom crown worn by Batman’s date, the love of my life, and my voice finally breaks.

Until I turned thirty, sleeping was as easy as breathing, which, I guess, is still the case. Remember, sleep, eh? Those were the nights. The more demanding life is, the less we recover from it. That soft, regenerative lull between all the things we must do in order to sleep.

*This is true. What was the angle on the curtains? Half-drawn at most. Jesus, I think it was from the perspective of the drapes themselves. Here I hang, open to the world, quietly judging the morning.

**A guy said I look like Tom Hardy (unmasked) about 9 years ago, that’s the other compliment I’ve never forgot.