For my entire life, whenever things have been sad or hard or stressful or painful, I’ve gone to sleep. It’s a quality I share with my father, for better or worse. When I had my first serious break-up, I slept for twenty hours before waking up, peeing, and going back to sleep for another thirteen. I remember feeling so good when I woke up. ”Heartbreak so so refreshing,” I thought.
During the 1989 earthquake, when my mother was stranded her office building in San Francisco with no way across the Bay and no way of contacting us, my dad ate some ice cream and went to sleep. My mother’s friends were stunned at his apparent callousness when we didn’t know she was among the hundred trapped in collapsed buildings, but my mom was touched. He must have been so upset he couldn’t stay awake.
In the almost two years since my college graduation and my father’s diagnosis. I’ve slept (away) an entire lifetime. I rarely feel acutely depressed, but I have been amazed at the ease and frequency with which I can sleep until two, three o’clock in the afternoon. In Australia, I was painfully aware of how the family I was staying with had lived full days by the time I emerged sheepishly from the bedroom. I’ve built an entire romance on a shared faculty and enthusiasm for sleeping, napping, hitting “snooze,” resting, hanging around in bed.
A funny thing happened to me a few weeks back: I got a job. One of those jobs where I have to be at a place, and I have to be at that place in the morning, and I have to be at that place five days a week. When I told my mom I’d found a job she congratulated me, and added “You’re going to be really tired.” No kidding.
The other day, on the phone with my dad, he told me he’d been feeling down. ”Like sick or like sad?” ”I can’t really tell the difference anymore. I’ve been sleeping a lot.” My eyelids hung into my face. I considered reserving the small meeting room––I could say I had a phone interview––and taking a nap. But there was work to be done. There was work to be done, and I had to do it, and I couldn’t go to sleep.
You have to stay awake. You have to grow up, and you have to stay awake.
You guys, I really suck at Tumblr. From, like, a non-consumer angle.
