The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

Eventually, everything has to be done for the final time. There must be many things that, without our realising it, already fall into that category for all of us.

If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. That’s a thought we spend too cheaply. Live each day as if it’s your last, we think, and then we don’t. Everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.

Then the thought: stop thinking. You are always thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought to stop thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the

thought that it was a thought to stop thinking. Then the reprimand: stop thinking. Then the thought: was that a thought, or an order from my higher mind? The thought: you think you have a higher mind? Thought: I’m awake.

An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala – fear arises in its central nucleus, which is responsible for sending messages to the body to prepare a short-term response – run, freeze, fight – whereas anxiety arises in the area responsible for emotions, a part which affects

longer-term behavioural change. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-tooth tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-tooth tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-tooth tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be eaten – anxiety has no such resolution. You will need to stand guard in case, in case. Forever in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates. As a friend once said to me: there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn’t exist.

Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat. Being afraid of the saber-tooth tiger is what makes the tiger keep coming back – not seem to come back, but in fact come back. It is no use to say ‘don’t be afraid’. There is a tiger in your bedroom, you ought to be afraid. But it’s not a tiger you can ever overcome by freezing, fighting or running from, so all your mechanisms for dealing with a real threat fail, giving rise to more fear, which keeps the tiger coming back. A vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.

‘Imagine you spend your whole life honing your mind so that when trouble comes you can respond without conditioning, respond without a kneejerk reaction. You know? Unthinking reaction. That’s what he did, he spent his whole life trying to respond from a truer place in himself. Then, when trouble came, what did he do? He went straight to his conditioning. Anger, blame. Not truth.’

My friend has God. Whatever vanishes for her is held in the permanence that is Him.

‘There’s a Buddhist image,’ I say, ‘it’s a mural of a snake, huge, lunging out of flames, and on the end of its forked tongue, a monk meditating. It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny – to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.’ ‘But for me, God is there too,’ says my friend. ‘That’s the difference.’

Her once-Buddhist friend realised, she said, that he was fed up with doing it all himself. Buddhism is lonely, a solitary struggle with yourself with the hope of nothing except the eventual aim of no longer being a self at all. Obliteration of one’s self out of being. All your struggle, just for that. All your years of trying to be a better self, only to be rewarded with that self’s extinction.