Sleeplessness and Italy:

Choosing the story we tell

Moonlit night at wedding in Italy

I wake at midnight, doze briefly, then wake again when the clock starts with a three. My brain thinks it’s the middle of the day. I compulsively refresh my Fitbit sleep calculator, hoping it’s wrong and wondering vaguely if this device is serving me or if I am serving it. I start drinking coffee at four am, and by noon, I’m hardly functional. The alarm bells go off in my head each time I speak at a work meeting. What did I just say? Do I even remember?

Jet lag is evil: This is the first story I tell myself about what is happening.

The next night is worse, and my mind returns to old bouts of insomnia and starts to panic. I try reading, deep breaths, the kind of meditation where you just try to be where your feet are. I become convinced my future will be a sleepless one in which I’m haunted by poor Fitbit sleep scores. I’m as terrified and cranky as my four-year-old self who ran up to my parents’ room every night at midnight, heart pounding from the witch shadow on the wall. Sleeplessness makes me feel really, really vulnerable. I tell myself that my body isn’t doing this thing that it needs, and I can’t do anything about it. I listen to David’s breath as he sleeps soundly beside me after a late night putting Noa down, and I suddenly feel an intense desire to shake him awake so that I won’t go through this alone. Misery needs company sometimes.

Now we’ve gone over to the bad place.

I remember that idea about how we always have a choice between stimulus and response. Even my hyper-analytical brain hates this idea.

But I decide to roll over and do something besides thinking about sleeplessness. I finish the book I’m reading and cry. I read a few more things that I know will make me cry. I journal.

Eventually David wakes up, and Noa is still sleeping, and I ask if we can have a cup of coffee and sit in bed and talk, and I cry a little more. I know my tears will be close to the surface all day, which is a strange sort of relief. It means that my outside world can match my inside one. I make a list of people I want to call and talk to while I’m feeling this way.

One story that I tell myself is that I haven’t been sleeping because of jet lag. Another is that my body knew I needed something else more, and before sleep.

Both stories are true, but the last one has made me feel an eerie, tired peace all day.

***

One tale of four days on Italy’s Amalfi coast is the crowds, the train strikes, the cancelled ferry, the other ferry that went somewhere other than where it was supposed to go, and the sprint in unforgiving ankle boots to catch a train so packed there wasn’t even room to reach down and swap at the biting flies.

Another is a crescent moon hanging beside a cliff like a storybook drawing, a long wedding table so beautiful it made us gasp, and four courses of conversation that never stopped being good. Time softened around the night, and the toasts hit all the right notes and spirited us into a dance party that never quit.

Both stories are true, but I think a few years from now, only one will be worth telling.