[to the tune of Disturbia] INSOMNIA

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! So, a confession: I’d planned to do another subscription offer back at the end of June, because I did a subscription offer for my birthday on December 29 and I thought it’d be fun to do one for my half birthday, but then the election happened and I honestly couldn’t have confidently told you my own name by the end of June.

Anyway! I have now slept - well, ish, as you’re about to find out - and so I can run that offer this weekend. If you’d wanted to support my work but couldn’t quite afford it or justify it to yourself, then why not do it now? It’s cheaper than usual, and only for a limited amount of time. That’s right, I know how offers work.

If you can’t, that is also fine, of course. I’ve made this week’s essay free to read, because it’s nice to be nice.

Bye!

A column

I am trying to write but I slept poorly last night, and it is not going very well. I know there are thoughts somewhere round the back of my brain, but it is too much of an effort to reach for them. It’s tiring. It makes me think of sitting on the couch and, seconds later, realising that you left the remote on the table.

You know you have to stand up again and go get it and you know it’s very close but somehow it feels too hard. You’re comfortable here and the outside world, the world outside that blanket on your sofa, just feels unreachable.

I’m trying to write something I’ve been meaning to write for months - ever since I launched this newsletter, really. I’ve been an insomniac since I was a child. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ways it’s shaped me. It’s been a tough exercise, as I’ve never known anything else.

My mother likes to tell stories of me as a toddler, still running around at 11pm or 1am, of adults taking turns to entertain me because I refused to go to sleep. In Marrakech, my grandfather would sometimes fall asleep while trying to nurse me, and apparently that was very sweet. I wouldn’t know; I don’t remember it.

What I do know is that I have never, in my 32 years on this earth, fallen asleep within, say, 10 or 15 minutes of turning the lights off. On a really good night, I’ll be out after about half an hour of tossing and turning. That usually means I did a lot of exercise that day, or decided to take a sleeping pill, or had a vicious hangover.

A normal night, for me, involves taking around an hour and a half to fall asleep. A bad night? Christ, there’s no limits. It could be two hours, or three, sometimes four. Sometimes, after all this, I’ll fall asleep then wake up again an hour later, then an hour after that. 

The point is: sleep is not something that’s ever come to me easily, or something I could ever take for granted. I look at good sleepers in the way that very big dogs look at very small dogs, or the other way round. Everyone involved knows that we belong to the same species but really, do we? Have you seen us? 

Insomnia is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, specifically because I don’t really know how to think about it. Working on Escape was a similar exercise, as I’d spent so much of my time online that, as I wrote at the time, I no longer knew where I ended and where the internet began. I’m not sure I ever truly got there, in the end, but it felt like a worthwhile study.

In a way, my relationship with sleep is even more tortuous. I dearly want to find out what those sleepless nights have done to me, how they have influenced the shape and texture of my mind, and the reason I care so much about it is because those sleepless nights just have to be filled with something. What I do end up thinking about, at 1.30am, alone in the dark, is the fact that I am still awake and alone and in the dark at 1.30am.

It may sound self-involved and christ, believe me when I say that it is, but I’ve never had any other choice. The line I have come back to again and again, ironically, is one written by my friend Nicky Woolf back in 2018.

“Every thought I’ve ever had has churned in my mind a billion times, repeating into meaninglessness”, he wrote. “I’ve seen madness in those nights alone.”

I read his essay six years ago and I would assume, conservatively, that I have thought about these two sentences several hundred times since then. That’s the dire truth about insomnia: it makes you realise that you really can and will run out of thoughts. It’s humbling, in a way; an occasionally needed reminder that there are only so many things we can think about.

You sometimes see very busy people, people with children or caring responsibilities, wondering about the work they could achieve if they had more time, the epiphanies they could have if they could just afford to have a quiet space that belongs only to them.

I would hate to be a disappointment but, as someone who has had access to that time since before I began even forming memories, I can say with some certainty that you do end up running out. I spend around ten hours a week with nothing but my own thoughts. That’s over 40 hours a month. Around 500 hours a year. There has been the occasional lightbulb moment, at around 3am, while verging on hysteria, but for the most part it is churn.

Every thought I’ve ever had has churned in my mind a billion times, repeating into meaninglessness. That is the main way in which insomnia has shaped me. As I wish I could tell the world, and those who always fall asleep when they want or need to, the sleep deprivation and tiredness are only a sideshow.

It’s something I wrote about in that novel that never found a publisher, for better or worse. One of my characters was an insomniac, because there had to be one. This is how she lived:

“Being an insomniac means living your life and editing the movie someone is making about your life at the same time. You will live something and then you will think about it, again and again. Sometimes the thinking is good and sometimes the thinking is bad; Ulrike’s life happens again on the back of her eyelids, scene after scene. There is no spontaneity allowed if you can't will your body into going to sleep. 

If there is a drink you have agreed to have with a friend, you will have thought of every way in which this drink can go before you even get to the bar and order your glass of wine. Maybe the drink will go well, maybe it will go badly; maybe that friend will make you laugh, maybe someone will walk into the bar with a knife and kill you both. All those possibilities have been accounted for: there is little space for surprises if you lay awake at night every other night.

This includes surprises about yourself. Ulrike never set out to become this self-involved, but she wasn’t given a choice. You can only think about the outside world and other people for so long. When midnight came and went and you are yet to yawn, your attention will invariably turn inwards. 

Ulrike knows herself better than she ever wanted to. She knows every corner, every crevasse of herself; she is a museum curator and every night she takes an invisible audience through the various rooms of her mind. She is her own biographer and her own fortune teller. There is no distant past or mysterious future; she has thought about it all.”

I am Ulrike and I know myself better than I ever wanted to. Sometimes people have found me insincere and found my anecdotes too well-rehearsed to be believable, and they have questioned my unusually good memory and mocked my tendency to have wargamed every possible outcome to a situation. They have found me fake and obsessive, overly pessimistic and overly optimistic, too keen to speak and too eager to meet new people. An astute former partner once described me as “self-aware to the point of neurosis”.

All those traits have one thing in common, and it is that they flow from the same source. I am acutely aware, at all times, of the fact that I am never more than about 12 hours away from lying in bed in silence and in the dark. My seemingly insatiable hunger for life comes from the knowledge I cannot escape, namely that time passes whether you want it to or not, whether you want to spend it alone and ruminating or not.

Things must happen during the daytime and they must be joyous and stupid and outrageous, because they will keep me warm when nothing else is. I used the word “hunger” and I meant it, because that’s what it is. Every night I will lie there and chew over my recent past and my distant one, over what happened that day and what may consequently happen the day after that. I need more sustenance than people who sleep because I need something to fill those hours.

Like Ulrike, I worry that my life isn’t entirely authentic because I’m not sure when my life is really happening. I behave in the way that I do as an act of servitude towards the version of me that needs to be entertained, otherwise she will lose her mind. I am the main character and the director and the audience, and who is the film for? Must there always be a film? There must always be a film. I wouldn’t have anything to watch otherwise. I would go mad. I would go mad!

I can feel myself unravelling as I’m typing this, because it feels like pressing a finger into a wound that is yet to heal, and will never really heal. There is a version of life I will never quite experience, that will forever remain just out of reach, because I cannot help but endlessly watch myself, scrutinise my every move and my every thought.

It also means that I lie to myself every day, that I construct a version of my life and my past which never truly existed. Remembering something, studies discovered some years ago, isn’t akin to grabbing for the moment that thing happened. Instead, our brain reaches for the last time we remembered it, like a computer finding the last time you saved a document. 

The memory changes slightly, imperceptibly, every time you remember it. The space between the person you are and the person you were when it happened gets larger every time you try to access that version of yourself. There is a yawning gap between the life I lead today and the life I was leading even last month, because I have thought about last month hundreds of times already, maybe thousands.

By being so self-obsessed, not through choice but precisely because I’ve had no other choice, I worry I have lost the ability to know who I am. I write and rewrite my life, endlessly, night after night, and the end result is like a painting of a photograph. It’s something I became conscious of a long time ago.

As teenagers, I spent a lot of time with my friend Eileen, and we would interview bands and go out drinking with them. We’d tell friends about our adventures afterwards and, on one occasion, she pointed out that we always sounded like we’d had entirely different evenings. I’d create some smooth and funny and perfect narrative, and she’d feel the need to interject and remind me of the many setbacks we’d also encountered along the way.

It wasn’t that I was lying or consciously sweeping those bad memories under the carpet; instead, I’d already spent so much time telling myself those stories that I’d remoulded them into a shape I found more agreeable, and more compelling. Stefan Zweig’s prose is incredibly vivid because he would write everything then shamelessly remove whole paragraphs if he thought that readers may not find them interesting enough, and I did the same to my own life.

It wasn’t borne out of a desire to seem cooler, or try to keep the attention of famously fickle teenagers. It was just that I was - am - my first and main audience, and I get bored easily. If I’m going to tell myself stories, I’m going to need them to be as tight and well-written as possible. I’ll get bored otherwise, and bored is the worst thing you can be at 2am.

Again, I worry about what these impulses do to my sense of self, but those concerns are wholly academic. There’s nothing I can do about any of it. As ever, I remain so absorbed by my own brain, trapped so deeply inside my own mind, that I have no choice but to submit.

That’s what insomnia does to you. 

We call it “lack of sleep” or “inability to fall asleep” but that’s focusing on the wrong thing. What matters here is what happens when sleep doesn’t; what we fill that empty glass with. I’ve no idea if my experience is in any way universal, and will resonate with other insomniacs.

In a way, that’s sort of the point. What sleepers do is sleep. That’s straightforward and unifying. They’re all up there, in bed, pleasantly unconscious, doing what they’re meant to be doing. What the rest of us does in the meantime is, by definition, unique to us. We were all given this heavy rucksack and it’s up to us to figure out a way to live with it without being too weighed down by it.

I think I’ve managed it, mostly, but I do wish it weren’t so invisible to the naked eye. That’s why I spent so long wanting to write about insomnia; I wanted this maddening, life-defining burden to be acknowledged in some way. I think and hope I got there, or at least some of the way there today. I feel slightly lighter already.