My Year of Rest and Relaxation
(No, not that one)
I didn’t know how tired I was until I wasn’t.
For most of my life, I thought being exhausted was just part of who I am. I thought everyone felt like they were dragging themselves through the day, fighting to stay awake, waking up tired and going to bed even more tired. Then, a year ago, I started air pressure therapy using a CPAP machine.
I had seen my mum and my uncle use one and always thought: that’s a them issue, not a me issue. Except it turns out it was very much a me issue.
Since starting to use that machine in July last year, I have slept better than at any other point in my life.
The title of this article is somewhat misleading. Unlike the character in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I have not achieved my rest through a cocktail of prescription drugs and sleeping my way through life.
And despite getting more rest, this year has been far from relaxing. It’s been full of upheaval, uncertainty and change. My life didn’t magically become easier because I slept better. I just stopped have to face it while chronically sleep deprived.
It seems wild to me now to think back to those nights of restless sleep. When I had my sleep study, the hospital told me I was waking up around 80 times an hour on average. That’s more than once a minute. I genuinely cannot comprehend that.
Looking back, I think I always assumed I was just someone who was bad at sleeping. Which sounds ridiculous because I can usually fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Anywhere, anytime. I have fallen asleep on sofas, on planes, during films, probably during conversations if you gave me enough time.
But sleep itself has never been simple for me.
As a child, I developed severe anxiety around it after an operation. I genuinely believed that every time I fell asleep, something terrible would happen. My family would leave me. Or they would die. At the very least, I thought I would wake up and everyone would be gone.
I remember going under for my adenoidectomy and the last thing the nurse said to me was:
“Say goodbye to your family.”
Now, obviously, she meant “say goodbye because you are going into surgery”. My child brain heard: “Say goodbye because everyone is dying.”
Not quite as casually as that... I went under absolutely terrified, and I came around equally distressed. My parents could hear my screams from the waiting room.
Once I was home, I developed some interesting sleep habits. I had to say a specific string of words before bed. Most of them I cannot remember, but one was definitely “beh-leh-beh-leh-beh-leh”, which I believe was my childhood word for a balloon. Don’t ask me why I felt the need to include this in a list of words before sleep, who knows what was going on in that tiny little mind.
My parents also had to sit outside my bedroom door where I could see them until I fell asleep. Slowly, they tried moving further and further away, which was met with absolute outrage.
“IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULD SIT OUTSIDE MY DOOR.”
“ALL THE OTHER GIRLS’ DADDIES WOULD STAY OUTSIDE THE DOOR.”
Man, what a knob, right? I was that classic age of just learning how to negotiate (cough, manipulate) and, in that moment, I felt no shame because I genuinely believed I was doing this to keep them there, to keep them safe.
Isn’t the brain bizarre?
Eventually, my parents graduated from sitting outside my door to sitting on the stairs where I could hear them. Then they moved downstairs where I could hear them typing on the computer or even further to the lounge where I could hear the television playing in the background. Slowly, my brain learned that they could leave my doorway and still exist.
The list of words I had to say before bed was solved in the most scientific way possible: bribery. My older sister told me she would give me chocolate if I replaced the entire ritual with simply saying “I love you and all the things I say”. And just like that, chocolate defeated anxiety. What can I say? Sometimes bribery works.
Finally! I was getting down quicker, and my family could have their evenings back downstairs.
Then came the sleepwalking.
I can’t remember the first time it happened, but I know my sister was still living at home, which means I must have been young. It was probably around the same time as the whole adenoidectomy situation, thinking about it now.
One dream I remember vividly involved climbing down the pyramids in Egypt in the blazing heat. I woke up to a loud screeching noise. We had a cockatiel at the time, and I had managed to sleepwalk downstairs and stand next to her cage.
My parents woke up to find both me and the cockatiel in absolute hysterics, me screaming the house down.
Another time, I woke up devastated because my favourite Tigger toy had disappeared. I refused to sleep without him. Turns out, I had sleepwalked during the night, stuffed him into a drawer and closed it, much to my Dad’s amusement.
My sister also regularly got the worst of it. I would sleepwalk down the hallway, open her bedroom door and stand there asleep. Imagine a scene from The Grudge. Long hair hanging over my face. Arms dangling. Head tilted forward. A tiny sleep demon.
Once again, my parents were woken up by screaming.
But my greatest sleepwalking achievement happened on holiday. I shared a hotel room with my sister, while my parents were staying in a room upstairs. During the night, I managed to unlock my hotel room door, navigate the stairs, find my parents’ specific room and knock. When they opened the door, confused and half asleep, I woke up.
“I need the toilet,” is all I said.
They walked me back to my room, only to find the door had locked behind me. They had to knock to wake my sister, who woke up to find the bed next to her empty.
And you guessed it - more screaming.
My dad then had to explain to the night manager that they should probably keep an eye out for a small child sleepwalking her way out of the building.
I think that experience cemented my fear of what I was capable of when I wasn’t conscious. I have always loved the idea of staying on a canal boat, for example, but I avoided it for years because I imagined myself sleepwalking straight off the side, in to the murky waters.
Eventually, I got over that fear and went on the big boy barge.
(Otherwise known as a cruise ship. I’m pleased to report I survived.)
Alongside the sleepwalking, I also had incredibly vivid dreams. Often recurring. Sometimes lucid.
One recurring dream involved standing at my parents’ lounge window looking over the valley. I would see a tornado forming in the distance, then I would realise it was moving towards us. I would desperately try to convince everyone else that it was coming, but nobody would listen. I remember the frustration and fear tearing through my chest when nobody would listen. I always woke up before the tornado reached us.
Another recurring figure was a fox. In one dream, I was sitting in my friend’s family car while they went into a shop. The sunroof was open. I watched a fox slide across the car park, climb onto the bonnet and make its way inside. I couldn’t unlock the car doors to escape. I always woke up before anything happened.
The fox kept appearing in different dreams. He never reached me. Always approaching but never arriving.
(I’m sure there are some dream analysts out there having a field day over this.)
There was also a period in my early teens where my sleep became completely disjointed. Let’s blame puberty for that one.
My brain would latch onto a repeating pattern and refuse to let go. A Manic Street Preachers song on a loop: “Your love alone is not enough, not enough, not enough.” Or a hula hoop spinning endlessly. I would think, “I’ll sleep when it stops”. It never stopped.
Slightly dramatic there, I obviously did sleep. But it felt like it never stopped and it felt like for a few months I never slept.
As an adult, the strange sleep continued, just with less dramatic sleepwalking and more embarrassing physical re-enactments of my dreams.
I would dream about cycling and wake up with my legs moving. I would wash my arms in thin air. I would kick out. I would throw myself out of bed. It felt like as I aged, I got lazier and my body wanted to sleepwalk but couldn’t be bothered to trek around the house and down the stairs.
I would wake up multiple times a night to go to the toilet, convinced I could reset myself and finally fall into deeper sleep. I later learned that the adrenaline from constantly waking up and feeling like I was falling off a cliff was probably the reason I needed four or five toilet trips a night.
I would look at the clock: 1am. 2am. 3am. No matter how tired I was, I could never reach that deep, restorative sleep.
I woke up exhausted every single day. I have a 60-mile round commute, and I used to struggle to stay awake while driving. I would feel myself drifting off at my desk. I would lose focus during conversations and worry people would think I was bored. I wasn’t bored, I was just fighting my own brain. I googled narcolepsy constantly, convinced that must be what was wrong with me.
Eventually, I normalised it. Everyone says they are tired, don’t they?
So I joined in with the jokes everyone made about how tired they were and how was it only Monday and how they couldn’t wait to get to bed already.
I told myself the depression I was feeling was just prolonged grief. I didn’t consider that my brain was basically being deprived of oxygen every night. I was not able to face the fact that I needed help, both physically and mentally. And I am living with the consequences of that today.
But now, every night, I wear a mask that blows air into my face and makes me sound like Darth Vader. And that might not be forever. But it is my now. And my now looks like ACTUAL UNINTERRUPTED SLEEP.
The strange thing is that even when I have a “bad night’s sleep” because of my mental health, and I only get four hours, those four hours are deep, proper sleep.
Four hours of good quality sleep is enough to function. That has shown me just how little sleep I was truly getting before.
My mind and my body feel brighter and lighter. I can focus. I am not constantly running on adrenaline. I don’t have to eat while driving to try and stay awake. I can sit through an entire film. I can drive myself places late at night. I have my freedom back. I can walk more (although also getting diagnosed with asthma would have helped that – it’s been quite the year).
I actually enjoy going to bed now. I enjoy reading. I enjoy the whole ritual of an adult bedtime (steady on).
Because I no longer fear the battle waiting for me every night.
Since starting CPAP, I’ve bloody gone and written the first draft of my novel and am working through the edits. I never thought that would ever be something I could achieve.
I joked with my friends that I was now like the film Limitless, suddenly accessing some hidden percentage of my brain that had been locked away.
Part of me is curious what I would have created sleep deprived. Maybe there was some strange, altered-state potential creativity there. Something like Aldous Huxley writing Doors of Perception.
I did journal at times, and I wrote poetry. I keep meaning to go back through it because there might be some genuinely trippy gold in there.
Or it might just be the work of a very tired person who needed a nap.
Either way, I’m intrigued.
So no, this hasn’t been my year of rest and relaxation in the Ottessa Moshfegh sense. I haven’t escaped from my life, I’ve just finally had enough rest to properly show up for it.