The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.

If somebody willed your destruction they could do it this way, by taking away your sleep. Of course, it’s tried and tested.

There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn’t another soul to be found on the journey through to morning.

When I don’t sleep I spend the night searching the intricacies of my past, trying to find out where I went wrong, trawling through childhood to see if the genesis of the insomnia is there, trying to find the exact thought, thing or happening that turned me from a sleeper to a non-sleeper. I try to find a key to release me from it. I try to solve the logic problem that is now my life.

There’s terror when a basic animal need isn’t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens – you fear life. You no longer want your life, not on these terms. When I don’t sleep and don’t sleep and don’t sleep, I don’t want my life; neither do I have in me the propulsion (courage? know-how?) to take it. So I have to endure my life when it’s unendurable, and this is an impasse.

The doctor seems pleased in a muted way. I want to tell her that the counselling, meditation and relaxation techniques that I already do, every day, aren’t improving my sleep and are increasing my sense of failure, since now I not only fail at sleeping but also at meditating, relaxing and being counselled.

Time kicks, kicks, kicks its way in with the tip of a toe. Time is the thing that breaks apart life from death, eases apart their embrace. Time, not life, is what we live. Time, not life, is what runs out. Time pushes death over there, where we can see it, and then offers itself as finite protection. Time is the breeding ground of fear and despair.

it’s easier to live reconciled to your life than to be counting the losses. We’ll look out of the window at

Can I escape this? The sword hangs. There is nothing to put my mind at rest – every day presents a new threat: the night. Every night is a battle, most often lost, and any victory is one day long, until its challenger comes along: the next night. I’m frightened. I understand why people kill themselves, or break down. I understand the bleakness of a life. The desire is to be a child again, to trust, to be comforted into peace and wellness.

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.

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.

What use is there in coming up with a metaphor of something I’ve never experienced to describe something I often experience? How can I describe the sense that underscores my life – all life as I see it – that nothing is known? Nothing is inherently certain. Everything is bottomless. How can I get to the heart of that?

I can’t make myself believe in God, not because of cynicism or some haughty deference to science, but because God is sturdy, a form of certainty to a believer, and I’m constitutionally incapable of accepting certainty. My mind can only see the provisional, never the incontrovertible. I can’t help it. I’d like to help it but I can’t.

Worry and anxiety are not the same. Worry tends to be more temporary, more object-focused, more concrete, less diffuse than anxiety. Anxiety often has no object and transmutes itself into worry by finding objects to attach to, in order to justify its existence.

I am a type. I annoy her and waste her time, because all I need to do is sleep and I’m cured, whereas she has patients with real illnesses that can’t be cured, certainly not with sleep.

In the dream the subconscious finds ways to articulate, dramatise, embody things that have happened in waking life, things that are weighing on us, feelings, fears and desires. The dream is startlingly creative and expressive in doing this; it never fumbles for a metaphor, it never struggles for detail, it never labours over the unnecessary. It realises the ineffable.

My mind is a cacophony. It thinks useful thoughts, and for every useful thought it thinks another four hundred useless, repetitive ones, and of those useless, repetitive ones a significant number are toxic. Shoulds and shoudn’ts. Eviscerations of self. Eviscerations of others. Terrors. Regrets. Reprimands. Old arguments. All of it arrives to me as an unedited babble, a firework continually exploding and dissipating, exploding and dissipating.

The mind is a prison. And when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out, which I think is what love is – the escape of the self from the self.

I’m angry that the week we gained Donald Trump as a world leader we lost Leonard Cohen, in some deal that even the Devil must have flinched at.

Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.

This is the cure for insomnia: no things are fixed. Everything passes, this too. One day, when you’re done with it, it will lose its footing and fall away, and you’ll drop each night into sleep without knowing how you once found it impossible.