By: Revanche

Insomnia: there’s always something to think about

February 20, 2014

It’s 3 am.

Doggle’s migrated yet again out of his crate, he has a nightly rotation with more cycles in and out of the thing the later I keep him up with my confounded lights and electronics, sleep growling and barking like, in his dreams, he’s a real, fully fledged dog. (I warrant you he is not. He’s a dog-cat-camel.)

I finally stopped working at midnight tonight, leaving half a pile of things undone because I was just too tired to keep going. It’s an early night, so of course my mind and body conspire to keep me awake. Having dutifully re-read Elizabeth Moon’s Once A Hero to ready my eyes for sleep and clear my head, I turned in only to discover my mind was just waiting to race with all the other things still undone.

It’s been a rough several weeks, feels like months, since things at work kinda went smash.

Every work day, and every day is a work day, has spanned two days. Starting mid-morning, I’ve worked straight through to 2 am, til at the end of each week I’m only pretty sure I know what names are but I couldn’t properly use one. The dog has been patiently waiting for me to come to bed most nights, even disregarding the fact that his precious master had long since stumbled off to bed first. Canine pity. You know it’s bad when that kicks in.

It was just last year I was saying that I couldn’t do business school or a graduate program; I don’t have the energy to repeat the feats of my 20s, working round the clock, stumbling out of bed at six or seven am and falling back into it after 1 or 2 am. Granted, I’m eking out a few hours more this time around but, unshrouded by the invincibility of youth, it feels a whole lot worse!

This will pass, not soon enough for me, but I will survive. Thanks to a husband who does his share around the house and in the kitchen when he comes home to a cold and semi-lighted home, his spouse glued to the computer, we still get fed on the really rough days and don’t worry too much about the other details til we can.

In the meantime, I can lay here and mull over those follies of youth, presumably the price you pay for having the kind of energy that we old ‘uns can only remember fondly.

Why I’d never want to be 19 again….
When I bought my first car, I knew enough to dicker for it, but not enough to avoid the usual moneymaking dodges like GAP insurance or being heavily overcharged for insurance on my own policy. The best part, though, the moment I realized that maybe I was in over my head and shouldn’t have done everything on my own, was the moment of taking ownership. I slid into the new seat, shut the new door, buckled the new seatbelt, turned to roll down the windows and gasped to my best friend in the passenger seat, horrified: where are the window controls?!?

For a long panicked moment, we both thought I’d managed to buy a car with no window controls at all, let alone power.

Of course I hadn’t. But that sheer lack of experience and knowledge at that age crystallized for me in that moment.

I like to pretend I made up for these shame by paying the car off in 3 years instead of 5 but I think we all know that’s not true.

At 19 I was faced with a sick mother and a bedridden grandparent, a partially employed father, an idiotic older sibling spending money like it came with an expiration date, newly dating a boy who’d never love me til I left him (and then couldn’t scrape him off my boots for two years as he tried to show the dedication he couldn’t muster in the same amount of time we dated), still morally and absolutely certain that if I just worked hard enough it would all come out in the end. Because that’s totally how the world works.

Sure, something came out of something’s rear end but I can assure you it wasn’t my happy resolution with a bow on top. But you probably couldn’t have told me that in any words that I’d believe back then.

Ahh youth. Blindly optimistic youth. I would never go back. Not for all the lovely lovely energy that came with it.

There are a dozen more stories of inexperience and stupidity I could share but in the spirit of generosity, how about y’all share instead? (she said, cajolingly) Would you ever go back?

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