The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

She claims that she awaited a breakdown and that this breakdown would be welcome. She believed that if the issue, which eluded her, could come to a head, she might then be left broken, but broken free of it. At the same time she very much doubted she would have a breakdown, surmising that there wasn’t anything decisive enough in her character to bring one about, and that she was more the kind of person who would endure pain and suffering indefinitely while just about managing to cope.

She reports that she did not understand where the wildness came from at night, nor where it went by day. She reports being terrified of it, yet at times wishing for it to take over, and describes powerful, yearning imaginings of being admitted to hospital and drugged, or of having suffered a complete and debilitating breakdown and being surrounded by loved ones. In this scene she reports that she cannot see herself at all, so surrounded she is by those carers, and nor does she have any autonomy, needs or wishes, so subsumed is her being, she says, by the overwhelming force of their care.

Dear Cousin Paul, I write without flippancy. I write to tell you what Google tells me you should expect from your first days, weeks and months of death. I write to try to guard you from disappointments surrounding your fate. I wish only that you could write back.

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.

My life, all life, opens out in accelerated footage of growth. It doesn’t feel like it could ever stop, and that’s the trick of life – it seems so abundant, and even while we’re watching it die all around us it’s whispering in our ears sweet-nothings of plenitude.

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.

‘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.’

When I look back I think this was shortly before my insomnia started. I felt ungrounded in the extreme. I was often frightened. My mind was trying to think its way into stability and was finding only an edgeless expanse. What is real? What can I cling to? What can I rely on? I was always a worrier, but I didn’t used to be anxious in this way. Worry is sensible to an extent, it has a practical dimension. I can’t understand the advice so often given: no point worrying about things that are out of your control. Of course there’s a point in worrying about these things. They are exactly the things to worry about; worrying about the things that are in your control is less practical since, instead of worrying, you could be doing something about them.

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. This thing, this iterative, self-referencing battle with one’s own thoughts, this is the strange being that is anxiety. I didn’t used to have that, and now when I look back to that time in the pub, I can see that I’d reached a point at which anxiety had become so pervasive I couldn’t perceive it was even there.

The mind is a tyrant; telling you what you ought and ought not to have done, which is never what you did or didn’t do. The mind is a ninja.

Writing has saved my life. In the last year, writing has been the next best thing to sleep. Sometimes a better thing than sleep. I am sane when I write, my nerves settle. I am sane, sane. I become happy. Nothing else matters when I write, even if what I write turns out to be bad. I proceed from some open and elusive subconscious formlessness roughly called ‘me’, definable only by being nothing and nowhere, just the silence in which shapes move. Then words. Words harnessing things. There is the comfort of organisation, of shepherding chaos, not trying to abolish it but shepherding it towards borders, taking away the problem of infinity and entropy. Proffering the illusion of completeness. And somehow, I start to see myself out there in the words I’ve made, out in their many worlds, scattered and free.

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.