sleeplessness
Like many people, I've struggled with insomnia. All my adult life, sleep has been tenuous. The insomnia comes and goes of its own accord, and at its worst has lasted for weeks at a time with only two or three hours of sleep a night.
Many of my short stories have been informed by my fraught relationship with sleep . One character can't sleep because he's almost the same age his father was when he died in his sleep. Another character is struggling with guilt over killing a child with his car, and the mother of this child visits him in his dreams and tries to keep him there with her.
Many writers have suffered from insomnia, and their proccupation with sleep often finds its way into their work. For an interesting discussion of writers and sleeplessness, check out Greg Johnson's "On the Edge of an Abyss': The Writer as Insomniac. Johnson notes that there is something unique about writers -- their self-consciousness and preoccupation with emotional turmoil -- that makes them suffer from sleeplessness and also lets them derive a strange satisfaction in the isolation it provides.
Johnson makes interesting points about writers and the lonely nights they spend struggling to sleep. But, for me, my insomnia started long before I ever wrote any fiction and it gives me no pleasure and no material about which to write. It has less to do with me being a writer than it does with me being a human being in a time and a place when the demands placed on us all are ever more difficult to negotiate.
Difficult as those sleepless nights may be, they have given me the gift of empathy. Sometimes our bodies betray us in ways large and small. We get sick. We can't sleep. Our memory starts to falter. We have less control over these failures than we like to think. My insomnia has taught me to be kinder to myself and to others because we are all frail sometimes. We are frail and strong in turn, and we are struggling in ways that are invisible to other people. It's a reminder to try to live with grace and gratitude even when I'm sure I can't.
Many of my short stories have been informed by my fraught relationship with sleep . One character can't sleep because he's almost the same age his father was when he died in his sleep. Another character is struggling with guilt over killing a child with his car, and the mother of this child visits him in his dreams and tries to keep him there with her.
Many writers have suffered from insomnia, and their proccupation with sleep often finds its way into their work. For an interesting discussion of writers and sleeplessness, check out Greg Johnson's "On the Edge of an Abyss': The Writer as Insomniac. Johnson notes that there is something unique about writers -- their self-consciousness and preoccupation with emotional turmoil -- that makes them suffer from sleeplessness and also lets them derive a strange satisfaction in the isolation it provides.
Johnson makes interesting points about writers and the lonely nights they spend struggling to sleep. But, for me, my insomnia started long before I ever wrote any fiction and it gives me no pleasure and no material about which to write. It has less to do with me being a writer than it does with me being a human being in a time and a place when the demands placed on us all are ever more difficult to negotiate.
Difficult as those sleepless nights may be, they have given me the gift of empathy. Sometimes our bodies betray us in ways large and small. We get sick. We can't sleep. Our memory starts to falter. We have less control over these failures than we like to think. My insomnia has taught me to be kinder to myself and to others because we are all frail sometimes. We are frail and strong in turn, and we are struggling in ways that are invisible to other people. It's a reminder to try to live with grace and gratitude even when I'm sure I can't.
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