36. Sleep

that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care

I really disappeared unannounced for a month—I’m sorry! Suddenly I was swamped with schoolwork and made the decision that it was not in my best interest to force out a subpar essay. I needed a rest. Which is part of what I’m writing about.

Lil sketch of my attic bedroom

My junior year of college, our track team threw our winter ”track formal” the night before a hard workout. We thought we’d be stealthy and get away with it, but we weren’t and we didn’t. When we came to practice, our coach sat our hungover asses down on the floor of the fieldhouse and said, “Go home. I can’t put you on the track when I don’t know what I’m working with.” 

It was one of her best coaching moments. And it drove home the point that all my coaches have harped on in the decade I spent running competitively: get your sleep. 

I existed in a campus culture where sleep was the first thing to go—everyone showed up to class bleary-eyed, sometimes delirious after late nights of studying or partying or both. Most of my peers were willing to compromise on eight hours of shuteye in service of finishing an assignment or ripping shots of Dubra and dancing at Toad’s Place, our local 18+ dive club. 

At first, it was hard for me to give those things up, too. But it got easier, knowing that if I wanted to have a chance of success in running, a deeply energy-related sport, I couldn’t afford many late nights. And so I approached sleep with a seriousness and diligence most people reserved for their classes. I prioritized sleep above problem sets and readings, because I had internalized, largely correctly, that I wouldn’t run well if I wasn’t sleeping well. 

Much of my adolescent and adult life has revolved around running, and I have bent my lifestyle to accommodate the demands of the sport. I have turned down invitations, left parties early, and come to class a little (or a lot) unprepared because I chose to sleep. I became protective of my sleep in a way that felt laudable: I was committed enough to running that I put sleep above most other priorities.

When I moved to California, the first time I’ve ever landed in a new place without following a serious training plan, I felt the hangover of my previous approach to sleep. Obviously, sleep is critical whether or not you’re putting your body through the physical stress of a training program. But the stakes felt higher when I was racing and when every decision I made was calculated by how it would help or hurt my performance as an athlete. When I moved across the country and decided I was only running for fun, sleep, while still important, could afford to slip a little further down my hierarchy of priorities. 

But I found it surprisingly hard to deprogram myself. I’d go to a party with friends in Berkeley and feel suddenly anxious when I realized it was midnight. I’d get back from a night out, climb into bed and do the math of how late I’d need to sleep until in order to get a full eight hours, then panic when I realized it was unlikely. I’d feel the impulse to decline invites just because I was worried I’d be out later than I planned, and I’d have to remind myself: “I want to see these people and do these things.” 

It’s antithetical to everything I know about sleep and bodies and memory and performance to actively choose to get less sleep, a sort of anti-wellness, trash-your-body ethos. And I haven’t necessarily swung so far in the opposite direction. But in always going home early, in trading waking hours for unconscious ones, I missed out on time with people I’ll never get back. What’s more, my previous approach to sleep was rigid. I could never go where the night took me because I cut the night off at 10pm. What I’m trying to do now is not necessarily sleep less, but to sleep, and live, with more flexibility. 

I went to a Halloween party in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. It’s not convenient to get there from where I live in the East Bay, especially at night, and my friends had orchestrated the cars and DDs that would shuttle us there and back. I climbed into the back seat as Piper Chapman (my signature costume when I have no good ideas) and fully relinquished my control over what time I would get home. We drove across the Bay Bridge into the city a little after 9pm, and I felt like I was giving sleep away before I was even giving sleep away. 

A good night is airtight, an inflated balloon. When I wake up in the morning and push against a good night of sleep with my finger, it pushes back. A bad night of sleep is full of holes. Sometimes they’re small—pinpricks—and the air leaks out slowly, throughout the day. When I push against the bad night of sleep with my finger, it deflates even more. Sometimes, the holes are so large that the bad night doesn’t hold anything; it’s just the casing of a night of sleep that could have been.

I have mostly thought of sleep like this, how my sleep will affect my next day. A fully inflated night of sleep will make the next day better, a deflated one, the next day worse. Sleep impacts me tremendously. Whenever I was falling apart in the evening as a kid, my dad would propose sleep as the antidote a meltdown by reciting Macbeth’s famous lines: 

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

I will never discount great nature’s second course. But it’s not a crime to let the night shrink and deflate. It’s okay to let some of the rest escape from the membranous skin of sleep. No one is waiting for me at practice to reprimand and send me home. No one is assigning me workouts. No one is guilting me for sleeping too little; I’m capable of doing that to myself. 

At the Halloween party, one friend would not, could not, be torn away from the fun. “I never wanna leave,” she said, at a point in the evening when I was feeling tired and sated by social interaction, ready to be home in my bed, and trying not to telegraph that desire. For her, the party was worth a bad night of sleep. She wouldn’t trade the richness of waking hours for an unconscious she wouldn’t remember. I tried to think from her perspective: by going to sleep, what might I miss? What do the dregs of the party look like—bodies huddling on the apartment roof when everyone else has left and the San Francisco skyline glows with the hint of the next day? 

We didn’t stay long enough to find out, and maybe I missed out on the private night-morning hours—the afterparty. I felt content to return home, relieved to climb beneath the covers and fall into another world. But I liked my taste of staying out late, a rare delicacy for me, decadent and delicious and dose-dependent. It was worth the minutes lost of great nature’s second course. It was dessert. 

Fortnightly Faves

1. We Were Three, Nancy Updike’s new fabulously reported, heartbreaking podcast of family secrets and loss. I absolutely tore through the three episodes.

2. And this gorgeous poem by Rachel McKibbens, the main character of “We Were Three” which is read at the end of the last episode.

3. And this interview on Longform with Nancy Updike and Jenelle Pifer about the making of the show (and being a phenomenal reporter and producer). Can you tell I really liked this show?

4. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow which I breezed through and absolutely loved. It’s a story about a collaborator relationship, a dynamic I haven’t seen explored in literature nearly so often as “friendship” or “romantic partnership.” The book, which spans 30 years, is truly epic in a literal sense.