Hibernation Sickness

An intermittent transmission from somewhere in metropolitan France to somewhere across the Atlantic.

June 15, 2005

What's the Story, Morning Glory?

I am continually amazed at my new-found ability to wake up at a decent hour regularly. This is trivial and meaningless to anyone reading this, I'm sure, but to me it is revelatory.

For as long as I can remember I have lived in the helpless clutches of whatever Sleep demanded of me. At least, that's how it felt. Actually, now that I have been out of it, I realize that's really how it was. Depression is a very vague thing and who knows whether certain people have it or it's just their disposition, a front, or whatever else. What I know for certain is that I have taken for granted practically since childhood an inability to get out of bed without help. In any case, the experience was always painful--I have put my grandmother through many morning trials over the years.

It is difficult to convey what this is really like, but I have probably bored all of my friends with agonizing details of trying to fix my sleep schedule. I never figured it out, of course, because it was impossible. The hour at which I went to sleep, or didn't, was entirely irrelevant. Lastnight I stayed up all night listening to Scorsese's commentary for The Aviator, of all things, finally passing out around 5:30 am. At 8:15 am I was awake and ready to rip through my homework in about twenty minutes.

EIGHT FUCKING FIFTEEN IN THE MORNING!!!!

I don't know if this makes sense to anyone, even to those of you that know me well. For me to sleep less than three hours at once is amazing in itself, let alone not having gotten a good night's sleep the night before (a whole story unto itself, involving around fourteen hours of driving in less twenty). And this is without any significant effort, too. I simply did not feel like sleeping any longer. This would have been inconceivable to me not more than a couple months ago. And indeed, it's pretty hard for me to deal with now, as you can see.

So, I am feeling triumphant of late. Without knowing why, I have surmounted an incredibly malignant and seemingly insurmountable trend. For how long, who knows? My instinct is to remain skeptic and to mistrust anything resembling happiness. Crazier things have happened, though, as they say.