The Slow Apocalypse of Not Sleeping Well

once upon a time, we were children & snoring was music & life was magic

Artwork by Mariam Chagelishvili

At 3:47 a.m., I’m having a conversation with the ceiling. It’s not going well. The ceiling is stubborn & eggshell-white & says nothing back. I check the time again. I open & close Instagram like a nervous tick. I make a mental note to finally buy blackout curtains, & then a louder note to stop making mental notes at 3:47 a.m.

There’s a version of me who only exists in this hour. She’s spiraling. Into an oblivion buoyed by invisible hands. Nothing as dramatic as serial diagnosable insomnia I’d say, for I do eventually sleep but rather something duller…more slippery.

A kind of not sleeping that’s casual at first. A little bedtime betrayal. A night here, a night there. Then, all at once, it becomes a lifestyle. I start calling it “bad sleep hygiene” as if I can scrub the fatigue away with the right bedtime tea (so far I’ve tried chamomile, rosemary, & home-brewed hand-grated ginger-fennel).

But the truth is this: I’m not resting. I’m not even trying to rest. I’m orbiting rest. I’m an alien lost at sea in the vast somethingness of space.

Let me be clear, the problem really isn’t precisely that I can’t sleep…& perhaps you feel that too…that, no…it’s not just that YOU, that WE can’t sleep. It’s that we don’t know how to stop being awake. Awake like a clenched jaw. Awake like a 32-tab browser. Awake like someone who thinks if they keep refreshing their inbox, something will finally arrive that explains everything.

& in the meantime, the body…my body…slowly breaks up with basic order & function. I forget words mid-sentence. I cry because I drop a spoon. I Google “writer burnout” & then immediately after that something ridiculous like “writer burnout stupid overrated reddit.”

I’m trying to remember when I last felt well-rested, & realizing… maybe four apartments ago? maybe four lifetimes?

This is how burnout enters the bloodstream…not as fire, but as soft haunting gothic fog. We don’t crash. We just kinda…blur.

I used to think sleep was a habit. Something you optimized, tracked, performed. Now I think it’s something as silly & common as glue. It holds the pieces of you together. Without it, I become a stranger to myself. I stop daydreaming. I stop being interesting, even to me.

There’s a psychic cost to never powering down. When you don’t dream, your life shrinks. Everything becomes either practical or performative. Nothing feels earned. Nothing surprises you. You don’t grow. You just… scroll, through your phone, your apps, the various windows of your life you’re supposed to look through in the hopeless hope that someday you’ll find yourself looking back...

Many nights, I both sleep & witness myself not sleeping. Maybe you’ve felt that sometimes, too?

We live in a world where sleep is treated like a reward. Something you earn after being “Good & Productive”. Another weird lil extra thing to optimize with apps & gadgets, so even your rest becomes a kind of performance metric.

There’s no dignity in exhaustion anymore. There’s simply the branding of it all. Those “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” vibes. That sweet suave burnout aesthetic: chic under-eye circles, iced coffees the size of our heads, TikToks about crying in the Whole Foods parking lot.

Netflix’s CEO once said — out loud, in public, to actual humans — that their biggest competitor isn’t Amazon or Disney or even boredom. It’s sleep. Sleep. “It’s a very large pool of time,” he explained, as if dreaming was the last frontier for capitalist colonization.

This is the logic of a world where 100 million people staying awake is a fucking KPI. Where addiction is baked into the UX. Where being human is bad for engagement.

& God forbid you say you’re tired without someone offering a solution. “Have you tried magnesium? Melatonin? Ooh, turn your phone off at 7pm!?” Yes. I’ve tried everything except becoming a tree & photosynthesizing my way to peace, tysm.

This isn’t a call for rescue. I guess it’s more like a weepy anti-siren song. I am awake when I shouldn’t be, & sometimes it’s terrible, but even I have to admit that sometimes it’s wonderful.

The silence feels different. Time dissolves. I read poems I’d never reach for in daylight. I cry at a sentence in a stranger’s essay. I remember people I haven’t spoken to in years. I think of those long gone into other worlds or no world at all. Sometimes, I even write things that shimmer with a kind of ephemeral, fleeting beauty by the light of the sun…before I overthink & forget them too. There’s melancholy here, alongside magic.

I’m not here to sell you a sleep routine. I’m not cured myself, after all. Last night I fell asleep with an audiobook playing at 1.7x speed & woke up three hours later convinced I’d written a novel of my own in my dream.

I’m learning how to be gentle with the exhausted version of me. Rest’s a way of mothering myself, helping turn back time, because sleep…good sleep…ought to be like that. Not that any of us can get back even a second of this infinite life, but sleep has a way of weaving a momentary illusion. It helps us feel rejuvenated, & really really good sleep — that Princess without the pea kind — helps us step into another day with less overall days of life left feeling more full of life than before.

Back when I was a female monk in an ashram in New Zealand¹, I remember reading a story about how Vishnu lies down on a serpent bend floating on an ocean of milk in a great blue endless expanse & then closes his eyes to dream.

What does God dream about in this story?

Us. You. We are the dream of God. All of us, all our lives, all our stories, & all the stories we tell.

Psst, my favorite part of writing this thing (is it a newsletter? is it an unhinged emotional spiral?) is hearing from you. If you have a bit of time, please:

1. Long story for another time. 🔮