Insomnia

I slept really well last night. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow and I didn't wake up once during the night. I woke up this morning fifteen minutes earlier than normal feeling refreshed and ready to attack the day with the strength of a gorilla.

This all made possible with another week-long stint of not sleeping. A relapse back into my insomniac days when I would literally go four and five days at a time without getting any substantive sleep. At first I hated this. I was tired all day everyday, but couldn't sleep. I'd lie in bed for hours upon hours just waiting to fall asleep, just to give up once I realized it was morning already. I was living on coffee and the occasional Adderall. However, at the deepest point of my despair, a strange thing happened. I started to enjoy it.

I liked having no constraint on the things I wanted to do. The hours of the day become inconsequential when they weren't defining when you slept and when you didn't. The excuse "I don't have time" went right out the window. I found myself reading the books and watching the movies I'd always sidestepped, citing a busy schedule or lack of free time as my excuse. I'd take walks, clean stuff, and go on stumbleupon.com for hours on end. Eventually I began looking for something that helped me separate the days from one another. Sure, you've got sunrise and sunset, but how often do those phenomena actually define people's activity? This went on basically my entire freshman year of college. Up for three or four days, crash for fifteen or twenty hours, repeat.

Then, like a lightswitch, I could sleep again. My life again had a rhythm. Sure, I gave up watching the short films of the great foreign directors like Olivier Assayas and Frédéric Auburtin and I haven't really read a book that wasn't required since then.

But hey, at least I'm one of the living now.