Notes on Forcing Myself to Fall Asleep

Five nigh-illegible sticky notes hang from the monitor but the one to which I keep returning tells me to stop forcing myself to fall asleep.

When I first went to a therapist, our conversation inevitably turned towards matters creative, and, when I described the frustration of it all, of the words that just weren’t coming and the shit quality of the words that did, he looked up and said, “That sounds like you’re forcing yourself to fall asleep.”

Deny your mind its clenched eyes and shoulds and musts and pressures, its tossings and turnings, its cursings hurled at the ceiling of yourself– just stop. Show up, do your thing, let it come. It will, eventually – if you get out of your own way.

(A second sticky tells me to trust the process – whatever it is today. I think this is an adaptation of a line of Josh Lyman’s in THE WEST WING, “This is how it works today.”)