At 9 years old I stopped being able to sleep. It happened abruptly, literally overnight, because of something I’d seen in my sleep.
Soaking in the bathtub the night after, I recalled in lurid detail a scene that took place involving me and a classmate who lived five houses away. A cat-and-mouse chase through the carport, up the jungle gym, and through the surrounding wooded area brought immediate, icy clarity to our mortality. He kept yelling for me to stop, but I kept ongoing - a ruthlessness that frightened me to no end.
The thoughts spurred by the dream’s conclusion came like a tidal wave. Eyes and forehead cresting the water, I watched as terrible scenarios projected onto the powder blue tile, unfolding like a kaleidoscopic Rorschach of human horrors. I would come to know this as my baseline consciousness, a sort of scary-thought filter or tunnel vision.
It was a deeply uncomfortable baseline that took a lot of time getting used to, and it was always much worse at bedtime when all movement ceased and no one was there to change the subject to Tommy Pickles or the weather. And so I couldn’t bear the solo hours in bed, and so I couldn’t fall asleep.
This persisted for about five years, in which time and in a roundabout manner, I was prescribed drugs that knocked me out cold, and otherwise learned through painstaking socio-emotional development and drilling to live with it - to defang the monster by treating it like a vapor.
I practiced how to talk to myself instead of yelling, graduating to a whisper until I could finally just shut my eyes and ignore the monster like a passing fart.
Even with this evolution, sleep has ALWAYS been somewhat of a pain point for me. I never relapsed to my pubescent lows, but I have struggled the most since that time ever since 2020 ushered in its new order.
Which is why, my tired and wired creatures of the night, this installment of HTFHTS is all all about INSOMNIA!
Listen to EP 5: Insomnia of HTFHTS here on Mixcloud.
The playlist without my radio persona is archived here.
Allow me to go back in time for a moment again. I’m realizing as I write this (with no real idea of what I’m doing) that this is definitely a PEN15-inspired episode of HTFHTS.
From age 9 until about 14, I’d struggle in fear and for hours on end to fall asleep, many nights clocking an hour total I could hold up on a single hand, if any at all. The bedtime situation at home was bleak, and much worse when I tried to spend the night elsewhere.
I generally avoided but sometimes braved sleepovers depending on how many life-altering (read: ending) scenarios I could imagine unfolding on balconies and staircases, and to this day, I can remember the exact layouts of each and every middle-school friends’ home. I also remember what they smell like.
Once, I found half a bagel face-down on my best friend’s living room carpet. That did shake me (because it’s chaotic!), but I still felt safe enough to sleep there.
Things at 13 abruptly changed when I started medication to target the insomnia. It technically worked because I fell asleep, but, SURPRISE!, the heavy-duty benzodiazepines in a tiny, underdeveloped body also came with its costs.
The first time I slept out and took the yellow, immediate-release disk before bedtime, I peed my friend’s cot. I’m not sure I need to explain the humiliation and shame of waking up cold, wet, and smelly in your first teenage year.
I didn’t say anything the next morning, and I don’t know if my friend knew what was going on … but I could tell that her mom knew, and that was enough for me to never return.
It wasn’t a one-time thing, either, and it didn’t matter where I crashed. I was sleeping harder than I’d ever slept and I guess for me at that time it meant urine.
So we went back to the drawing board.
The grizzle-haired man with terminally laced fingers peered into my eyes like he knew something, literally anything, about me (did he clock the nascent lesbian?), and agreed the pills could use a tweaking.
He also, and nearly on the spot, gave me 3 diagnoses I could show for all my troubles and, unlacing his fingers just this once to point to a set of psychoanalyst finger puppets (Jung, the Freuds, a red chaise lounge) on the windowsill (as if to suggest he had a personality and that this would be fun), said he looked forward to seeing me again.
(An acknowledgement that isn’t enough and that I still don’t want to leave unsaid: I am simultaneously extremely grateful and fortunate that my parents believed in, and had the resources, to get me mental health help, while being weary of and disappointed in the field as I first experienced it. In the late 90s/early 2000s, practically every kid I knew who so much as enjoyed laughing was prescribed Ritalin, and when they turned a bit more inward and existential at maybe 12, there was a large-scale bait and switch to SSRIs.
I also believe in and like drugs! Eastern/Western, of earth and synthetic - I partake. But I still think this, what I’m describing here, was a weird, unethical, and wildly lazy practice … not unrelated to a predatory pharmaceutical industry that just kind of fucks people up and over!)
Again, what really worked for me through this pill-popping shuffle was developing my vocabulary around self-talk. I turned to yelling at my brain and bracing myself as my brain yelled back. It doesn’t work.
You’ve got to stay dignified amongst most undignified company (gross, taboo, horrific thoughts), take the temperature down by lowering your inner voice to a whisper.
I practiced this a million times a day to pierce through the nonporous veil, emerging out the other end with the composure to label and eventually trust the difference between thoughts and actions.
It strikes me that every time I sit down to write an essay, I basically conclude this same thing. Thoughts are thots are thoughts are thots. That’s fucking it! (Please, I don’t want to ever talk about the law of attraction; I had an absolute meltdown when “The Secret” was trending and being passed around my freshman year of college.)
Am I just so chill and copacetic with my thoughts now? No! This is what I will lovingly call life-long ass, a teetering-on-toxic relationship that always sneaks in ghost pepper (1,041,427 Scoville heat units, says PepperHead.com), when I require a bland diet.
And it’s just work that keeps having to be done, taught and re-taught.
It’s batshit hard and imo, not even the least bit intuitive. I also don’t think we’re socialized to humanely understand or deal with it - at least I don’t think I was in the 90s and early 00s.
I’m sorry I haven’t mentioned a thing about music, I swear I’ll get there …
But I’m caught up first, and once again, with body horror, particularly when it comes to demon possession. We love to depict young, innocent girls being possessed, usually raped, and often impregnated, by [male-gendered] demons!
This is super precedented where totally cool and always very equitable [world] histories and mythologies are concerned. In their heyday, these [largely ecclesiastical] altered states of consciousness were almost prescriptive - highly controlled routines for a curious subset of the population.
Being a demon came with terms, pretty babe!
And if you didn’t meet them, well … that was license to be ended. Do not forget that women who just kind of seem like they had ideas were routinely labeled as spiritually possessed and then mass hunted when their possession crossed the line into witchcraft.
Take a peek back to 16th and 17th century Europe, when demonic possession, particularly rife in women and children known as “demoniacs,” was characterized as an epidemic.
Being a demoniac (culturally recognized syndrome characterized by involuntary possession) in the eyes of the people and Church allowed some women the wiggle room to have a critical voice and actually say shit, at least up and until their exorcisms failed and they were declared witches (voluntary pact with the devil, punishable) or silenced as insane.
I read portions of this academic article on the topic, where the author essentially argues that these epidemics, disproportionately affecting younger women who were just starting to have their first periods and/or beginning to have real human intercourse (distinguishable from demon sex), at least in part, gave a platform for them to voice psychosexual, religious, and familial concerns with some impunity, reciprocal attention, and without being immediately cast out as heretics. I like it!
To bring it back to the semi-present, here is just a handful of examples of this kind of thing in film: The Exorcist (1973), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Entity (1981), Sinister (2012), and, a fun one, Night Of The Demons (1988).
The demon-possessed as an archetype and storyline is very cool, don’t get me wrong. I once, with nearly zero pre-show ramp-up or conversation, convinced a first date to go see the film “Goodnight Mommy” (2015) with me. She didn’t want to go out again. Fine!
But as a pre- and then burgeoning teen, when my media literacy was undercooked and sense of self just plain raw, naked, and doused in pee, I couldn’t totally separate myself from characters like Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist.
The thing I’m desperately trying to get at here is the heart of what kept me awake at the onset of my insomnia. It was this extreme tension I felt over thinking sinfully -having what I understood to be the ugliest thoughts, all the time, and all while being perceived, for all intents and purposes, as an innocent girl who is probably peaceful, fairly nice, and would definitely be hanged for being a witch if only they knew.
Through what I now see as a very level-headed perversion of validation, I suffered silently and immensely when I realized that everybody only saw me for ME and not the demon inside. This made the demon seem unique to me, made the demon infinitely louder. It gave me the shameful and unequivocal authority to brandish myself a threat to myself and everyone else, a cute friend to all and a ticking time bomb.
And I didn’t have the language to articulate this. I look at kids I don’t know in the face now and just think, “Hey there … you good?”
If someone had done that to me, I’d likely have answered, “I like turtles.”
Because even if I could have gotten some basic ideas of it across, I had the thought that articulating any real piece of it, the words themselves, would personally end me. I think a lot of people think like this, too. And, like, are we all awake right now at this very mature hour I will not disclose?
***
The past two years of pandemic life (fake-out post, interim, Lite) have been hard on the ol’ circadian rhythms. Recall - I no longer commute to work. This recent New Yorker cartoon captures the gist of it, that chihuahua prancing on a collapsed body … shockingly accurate:
And so I have to make a LOT of conscious efforts to do energy-consuming things in the daylight, practice rituals and mind tricks that, no shock to anyone, actually feel good and prevent me from otherwise operating like a foraging possum.
But it’s in my nature to operate like a foraging possum, seeeeeee? And when I allow myself to do so, I really let my tail down (I never thought I’d invoke the image of a possum tail, no less for a cheap play-on-words, I’m so sad and grossed out right now … it stays!), really GO for it.
This is where a type of emotionally induced narcolepsy comes into play.
Leaving any subtlety out of this, the visual that jumps to mind is Jessi Glaser and her hormone monstress Connie sparring with Depression Kitty in the second season of “Big Mouth.”
“Jessi, have you ever laid on your side, facing away from the television, listening to a Friends marathon, when it's raining outside, and you're wearing double socks?”
— Depression Kitty
This is also kind of what pretty much happened for me when I hit 14, a real dense and comfortable double sock over just about everything.
The places I spontaneously fell asleep in my teens are just remarkable.
-On the floor of the Sears Tower while on a JCC teen tour hitting mostly very random places (for example, midwestern JCCs) in the midwest. I don’t know what else you’d expect I’d do when placed in an enclosed “skydeck” for more than ten minutes.
-Face-palmed into a desk while shadowing students at the high school I would transfer into in 10th grade. (I will cut myself some slack here and say these classes were each an hour and a half long, and an exam was scheduled that day. They must have found it charming, because I was granted admission shortly thereafter.)
-On a Valentine’s date to see a NON art-house Adam Sandler film, and what I mean by this is that he’s screaming the entire hour and half. (How else do I tell you that my time is precious and there will be no second date?)
Well, twenty years have passed and I’m back on my shit!
When I’m not tough on myself and these natural instincts, when I fail to leave my apartment for a significant amount of time within hours of waking up, I really have to fight to keep my eyes open by the time I feel it could be (is it?) lunch. This works sometimes, sometimes. And it’s a repeating pattern throughout the workday.
Getting myself on a healthy night-centric sleep schedule suffers with this dual-pronged predicament of low movement and spontaneous blackouts.
And, as promised, because I have a radio show wherein I play music, not movies, and wherein this episode I curated music around the theme of Insomnia …
How does it feeeeeeel, how does it souuuuuund to be laying on your bed sheets with eyes peeled and bloodshot, bulging out of your skull?
Perhaps you find yourself overcome by pants-splitting desire (Little Annie), riddled with anxiety and nit-picking self talk (Sabrina Song), or even caught up in an imagined rolling boil as you confront others (Zelma Stone, M.I.C [The Master of Inane Conversation], Tres Leches).
Maybe it’s a happier, kinetic insomnia where sleeping is for chumps and all you want to do, and all you’ve got to do, is dance (Young Lychee, Ash Lauryn).
Mayyyyyyyyyyyybe you wake up repeatedly throughout the night when a repeat dream visitor strikes every hour on the hour, in your head and not your bed, making the break of day feel like a blast of acid in your corneas (HTRK)!
Or even better, the unbridled creative madness that strikes in the witching hour as you fossilize into your mattress (Lea Bertucci, Patrick Belaga)!
There’s lots to be said about, so much to think, feel, and potentially do to pass through this underbelly of time masquerading like some river Styx to separate the living from the dead.
I read in a listicle somewhere that Groucho Marx couldn’t get to sleep after the stock market crashed in 1929, and so he decided to just call strangers in the middle of the night and insult them. It’s a fun idea!
Actress Tallulah Bankhead, on the other hand, hired gay caddies to sit with her and hold her hand until she finally settled into sleep.
I also really like this, both for me and for you.
I want to offer myself as a gay caddie to always hold your hand, if not in the physical, then at least always in my mind. To know you are not alone in your freakish fucked up thoughts and that actually, they help bring out the most special parts of you.
Would you do that for me, too? I think then maybe even a wired hour will feel restful.
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