It's strange how the act of sleeping has changed meaning throughout my lifetime. Sleep used to feel like a time of the day, like a season, like something that would always happen at some point soon after the dropping of the sun. The stars meant sleep. That was the way of the world. There was no choice about the matter, either, with our parents enforcing the policy for most of our upbringing. Waking up in the middle of the night was the most terrifying thing to ever happen to you. All that dark. All those monsters. Who would want to stay up in the night-time, anyway?
Then you discovered television. Or a computer. Or reading by flashlight, if you were into that. You met friends. You learned to tie your own shoes. Maybe you took the school bus. Suddenly you were finding out that most of your waking life was spent in desks, on enclosed playgrounds, with adults telling you what to do all the time. Where was your free time? The night-time granted you a brief escape from all of that. You began to view sleep as an enemy, and the night as your friend.
Then high school happened. You got your license. You viewed the night as prime real estate to build memories upon. The nights turned into parties and bong rips. The nights turned into sex and alcohol. The nights were when you felt like you could be the teenager that Hollywood showed you how to be. It wasn't all the media's fault. This shit was just fun, and since you had school every day and lived with your family on the weekend, you always looked forward to the nights--plans or not. Even if you weren't out with friends, you practiced mutual insomnia instant-messaging each other until two in the morning. For what? For no reason. Just because we could, and our parents gradually stopped telling us what to do. Sleep was hardly a concern. We were young. We could live off poptarts and starbucks.
Whereas high-school sleep was something you eventually had to bow to, college-sleep was an entirely nonexistent entity. Sleep fell out of our vocabulary in college. Sure, we still did it. It wasn't as though we walked around like zombies. I slept a lot during college, actually, because it was a lot of fucking work and having a steady job at the same time made sleep a welcome escape. But if we ever had to pull an all-nighter, we would--no sweat. Sleep took last place to every priority, provided the circumstance called for it. A party, a road-trip, a late-night walk to taco bell? The excuse could be as small as playing a Mario Party drinking game, or as big as a midnight drive to Bodega Bay. It was an accessory. It was a common alternative for reading all those textbooks we paid a billion dollars for, but it never got in the way of our College Experience.
Now the real world arrives.
Now sleep means something entirely new. The night-time. My whole concept of time has evolved. My priorities, shifted. Sleep gets me through the working-week faster. It also takes time off the clock, however, and The Clock is a brand new thing. The Clock is every moment of the rest of my life, ticking away. Not to be depressing. It's simple truth. I didn't think about The Clock when I was in college, or high-school, or ever, really. Death, yes, but not its gradual approach. I never anticipated this love-hate struggle with the harsher realities of Life After College. The challenge and excitement of it. The ups and downs. The hurdles to jump over in the spreading shadow of passing time. At once a race and at other times a wading pool. Suffice to say, The Clock changes the value of sleep.
Sleep is not an enemy. Sleep is healthy, and therefore important, and because of this I do not ignore sleep as easily as I did during college. It is more like an additional challenge. Another thing to balance on shoulders totally unprepared to carry a real life. Here I am, an adult, living on my own dime, in my own story, trying to find peace in complete chaos. I have a full-time job and an internship starting Monday. I have the waves of a recently-ended relationship still splashing in the back of my mind. I have a new home I'm about to move into. New friends. New views of the world. I have all of this, and while all of it feels completely personal and intimate, none of it feels like mine. I constantly feel like I'm existing to accomplish some task, to save up X-amount of money, to work, to pay taxes, to pay bills, to be a part of society. So recently I've made it a goal to use every free moment of my day doing something productive for myself and my sanity and My Experience. This could be reading in the park, taking a walk, writing, or watching a movie. If I'm not tired, don't sleep. If I am, then sleep. Otherwise, the challenge of sleep is knowing how much I can go without it. How little sleep can I get away with? With so much on my mind, it's a shock that I get any sleep at all. The challenge is knowing how much of my real life is worth trading for shut-eye. How much time I can afford. Do I want the week to fly by, or do I want to enjoy it a little? Life changes so drastically, my answer to that question will change each week.
Part of me just thinks it's a shame to sleep if you're not tired. You shouldn't eat if you're not hungry, right? So if it takes me until two a.m. to get tired, then so be it. Sleep happens.
- Left to Fry
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