For the past two weeks I have endured one of the worst bouts of insomnia that I have known in recent years. I average four hours a night. Having reached the stage of desperation and crying down the phone to the GP I have exhausted the medical options. Although, I'm hugely grateful to my GP for his kindness and his instruction to me to "go for a little run, buy this book I'm texting you the details of and take whatever drugs you need to get through"*. I have been prescribed Sertraline, Diazepam and Beta Blockers. Nothing gives me more than Margaret Thatcher's four hours. Nothing really addresses the racing heart and thoughts and, oh God, the sweat. All my so-called natural processes feel blocked; the breathing, the eating, the fucking and of course, the sleeping. Perhaps you are reading this and apart from reeling from the over-sharing you are saying the word 'mindfulness' to yourself. Well, mindfulness is a wonderful theory. I'm a therapist and I get it but I am still not sleeping.
But here's the funny part. I am OK. I am on high alert. The anxiety infiltrates every cell in my body. It's not nice. But, having reached the sharp end of tearful exasperation I am now at a point where I realise that all efforts to push the insomnia and anxiety aside are counter-productive. It takes up too much of my precious energy but to no end. The only path now seems to be to invite these insistent bed-fellows to the table, to accommodate them as best I can and to hear what they have to say.
I don't know what they are trying to tell me, except perhaps, that for so long I was living for others rather than myself and now I am being forced to pay attention before it is too late. But I know that all growth, for me, is painful. I have gained the greatest insights about my own identity from suffering. Carl Rogers called it the actualising tendency, the urge in all of us to grow towards the light. But some people never actualise much. Their self-structure is rigid and they are reasonably content with their predictable lives, lived within a small, safe comfort zone. Still, theory has it that the tendency is there in all of us. My own therapist has a slightly different take, she likens it to shaking up a bottle of fizzy liquid and unscrewing the cap quickly. I am aware that my preference is to unscrew the cap very slowly. To have complete control over how the pressure is released but this may not be possible. For now, one of the obvious consequences of being tired is being tearful; a heightened emotional response to everything. Rather than seeing this as an inconvenience I am trying to see it as a new power, an elevated empathic ability. The words of Rogers seem potent to me right now when he states:
"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming."
*words to that effect
