"Life is short."
Don't tell this to an anxious person. Seriously. I've spent my entire life panicking about the passage of time, growing old, dying, and what may or may not come after, and it's likely I'll continue to spend my life panicking about these things. It's likely I'll write more about these because I do think about them, but I don't need to be reminded of these things, especially when the person saying it is usually trying to inspire me or cheer me up.
I don't like calling myself an insomniac. I know several people who have legitimate insomnia, and I know that they hate it, and they suffer for it. I also know a lot of teenagers who stay up until midnight playing video games or watching TV shows and insist they've got such awful insomnia. The reason I dislike referring to myself as an insomniac, is because I'm probably closer to the second, than the first, although I think my intentions may be a little different.
I like thinking. Even when I'm doing nothing at all, I enjoy sitting, and thinking about anything that comes to mind. Admittedly sometimes my tendency to think betrays me (thanks anxiety), but I'd still rather have negative thoughts, than no thoughts at all. I also like being productive or doing something that engages my brain, whether that's playing video games, or having conversations with people.
So what does all the mumbo jumbo up above this point add up to?
I really don't like sleeping.
Sleeping takes away the time in which I could be thinking, doing something. According to a statistic I heard a while ago that may or may not be fully accurate, humans spend around a third of their lives sleeping. As it stands, by the time I'm seventy, I'll only remember a fraction of my conscious life, the rest will have been forgotten, or slept through. That's why I stay up until two in the morning doing practically nothing at all, but to me, a conscious nothing wins over an unconscious nothing any day. If I were to refer to myself as an insomniac, I'd much prefer the term "Insomniac By Choice." I don't sleep, not because of any chemical imbalance in my brain, or because I can't sleep due to racing thoughts, it's simply a matter of choice.
I often hear it argued that the quality of life would be better with more sleep, but I guess the anxious mathematician in me is looking for quantity over quality. I could probably come up with some complex math formula that determines at what point the benefits of being conscious stop outweighing the loss in quality of my time spent conscious.
Although I suppose it is rather ironic that I planned on writing this last night, but rather abruptly fell asleep.
“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them, dude."
ReplyDelete~Edgar Allan Bro
I am loving this glimpse into your brain and I especially love the irony in the last sentence. Thanks for sharing - you are a great writer and I look forward to the next post. I can't say I'm surprised - I feel the same way about your mother and the apple doesn't fall from the tree!
ReplyDeleteHmmm. You just might be like me- Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. It's called that because the sleep clinic, or any clinic, can charge more for a diagnosis with "phase" and "syndrome" in the name. My internal clock says sleep time is three AM, and wake up time is eleven AM. I adjusted OK as long as there was external pressure, like a job, to conform to a different cycle. But when I was seventeen, and now that I've retired, the three to eleven shift is my proper cycle.
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