Sleep: Confessions of a Former End-Duck

Maybe it is Daylight Savings Time. Maybe it is the case of strep throat I’m getting over. But I’ve been sleeping so much lately. Last night I slept ten hours. It is embarrassing, indulgent even. My coworker, a new father, often gets two hours of sleep a night. My husband, a hard worker, gets six. My friend, a cross-fit addict, never gets more than seven. I feel guilty for the many hours a night I do absolutely nothing.

But this is a new guilt. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a terrible sleeper. I’ve been like a prey animal, always on the lookout, unable to fully rest. I heard that there is a type of duck that sleeps in rows. The interior ducks get to sleep soundly. The ducks on each of the far ends keep one eye open all night: staying half-awake to allow them to look out for predators. I’ve always been an end-duck, looking out for danger.

At sleepovers growing up I would always be the last one standing. The sounds of snores, creaks, even the wind would keep me up. At 3 AM, I would roam the kitchen looking for something to comfort myself: stale pretzels smeared with the remains of birthday cake or sugar cookies with fluorescent frosting. As the sun rose I would feel joyful anticipation: yes! Everyone is about to wake up! I don’t have to be alone anymore. But normal children liked to sleep in, and I would have more hours of waiting.

In high school I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and saw a psychiatrist who was overly liberal with medications. One of these was Ambien, a sleeping pill. I took a bottle to a youth group retreat. Even among my fellow evangelicals I was an awkward outcast. I took two Ambien before I settled down into my bottom-of-the-pecking-order sleep space on the floor of the hotel room. This was a mistake.

“Lauren, Lauren!” Popular, athletic, Nicole shook me awake. “We are going to have Bible study now!”

In a drugged daze, I staggered down the hall and joined the group. I perked up a bit when I saw they were reading Corinthians and were at one of my favorite passages. Ever the nerd, I contributed to the discussion, eager to offer my own interpretation. I fell asleep in the middle of it, while I was still talking. The words out of my mouth turned to gibberish, made no sense. My eyes were wide open. It looked demonic. The girls started screaming.

The Youth Leader tried to calm the others down and called my mom. Mom explained the Ambien. This comforted the Youth Leader but the girls were still freaked out by me, the gibberish-spewing zombie. Lisa, another popular/athletic girl, picked me up (I was anorexic, a light burden back then) and carried me back to my room, hoping I would settle down and at least close my eyes. I turned my head back and forth as though I were looking at things, but I felt like a sleeping deadweight in her arms. Unfortunately, freaking a bunch of girls out at a Bible Study was no way to win friends and I stayed the outcast.

This experience scared me off Ambien, but I continued to self-medicate to get to sleep. After college, I taught in the South Bronx. Teaching there was traumatizing. I had to confront my own failure every day: I was working as hard as I could, but due to my inexperience and naivety, I had no idea how to manage a class and my students learned little. My days were filled with their aggressive shouts and threats to each other and me. I would cry every subway ride home.

In my tiny basement apartment that I shared with a Craigslist megalomaniac, I would numb myself microwaving sweet potato after sweet potato that I would then drown in brown sugar and margarine. Then I would crawl onto my lofted bed (lofted to save space and avoid the hamster-sized cockroaches that would scuttle out when everything was quiet). I would take two Benadryl, and dreamlessly sleep for a couple of hours. Then I would wake up with the memories of being assaulted at school, being attacked in a park, or even more upsetting, my countless failures and inability to help anyone. I would take a couple more Benadryl.

Recently I read an article about how dreams play an important role in allowing you to experience the emotions of the day and to reconcile them. People in a study who were sleep-deprived were troubled significantly more by a scary movie the following day than people who could get a full night’s sleep. Drugs like Benadryl or alcohol have been shown to hinder sleep’s emotion-reconciling process.  I wonder if my constant abuse of Benadryl has something to do with my lingering PTSD: that I didn’t have time to deal with all the emotions from that time of constant violence and failure. 

For years, I could mostly manage my insomnia at home with melatonin or Benadryl. When that failed, I would consume whole novels in a night. But at the apartments of my former boyfriends I was exposed. Even after taking my go-to pills, I’d be awake, envying their snores. I startled many of their roommates when they found me in the morning, reading in their living rooms, or restlessly scrubbing their stoves. Some nights I would give up and walk home at 3 AM, even if it meant a five-mile slog through not-so-safe streets.

Since my husband Sergey has come into my life, I’ve finally been able to get to sleep, pill-free. We have a bedtime ritual of talking over what we are grateful for and this soothes me. If I wake up in a panic, I know he is always there, to hug me without resentment. When I apologized to him for my need to use a sound machine and ear plugs every night he told me, “I know noises bother you. It is okay to be Lauren Allen.” Sergey makes me feel safe. He quiets my self-criticism that I’m a freak, a sleepless drama queen. He accepts me more than I accept myself.

So now it is Daylight Savings Time. Maybe I am sleeping too much, accomplishing too little. But I’m grateful for the privilege. I get to be the middle duck now.