Insomnia

Never in my life have I been able to understand how it is that people can not sleep. Staying awake past midnight was always impossible for me. And I never understood people who found comfort in the night, in staying awake with the moon and in sync with the stars.

Only one of these facts have changed now.

After having went through tremendous amount of stress sourced by multiple things at a time, I had collapsed into severe mental breakdown last year. I do not know what triggered this, but it was likely the exams. One night, a few days prior to my paper, I went to bed at ten with the idea to fall asleep by 10.30 pm and wake up by 6.30 am to study for my firat paper. I had a tight schedule set for preparing. Every minute was accounted for and every action was calculated. I had everything pinned down to the minute, no second was to be wasted at all. I could not afford a failure. I had failed enough this year and it could not repeat.

I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to overtake as I mentally went over the schedule for the next day and the syllabus I had to cover. But sleep never came. Ten minutes turned to thirty and thirty minutes became an hour. Soon enough, I was staring at the ceiling wondering why my mind was still so active despite being so exhausted from the extreme scheduling of the day. Everytime I felt as if I was drifting off, my consciousness took note of it and I returned to the world of waking again. This was another thing that I was failing at.

The harder I rued to force myself to sleep, the more awake I got. Eventually, my head started to throb and my mind started spinning like it was collapsing into frenzy. As the clock hit four, I realised it was a lost cause and gog up to study. I calculated (like everything I have so obsessively calculated) that if I stay awake for the entire day, sleep was bound to come early the following night.

At 10 again, after an extra hardwork at the study table, I returned to my bed, ready for a wearied sleep to snatch at my eyes. But before I knew, tossing and turning turned the clock to four again. Now panic over took me. I cried to my roommate who calmed me into going yo sleep and stop worrying about not waking up at 6. I eventually drifted off, but I think it was more die to the tears. My eyes fluttered open at around 7 and I woke up. 3 hours was not bad, what was bad was that this cycle kept up, staying awake for one or two days and sleeping for a mere 2-3 hours.

I thought this would pass as exams finish but it kept on for another month or so.

For the first time in life I understood how precious sleep is and yet, I could never find my poetry or romanticism in it like most do. for me it pure torture, the feeling that your mind was eating itsslf alive.