On not sleeping,

I stopped sleeping one balmy night in 2007. My relationship with my boyfriend was failing, or starting to fail pretty badly by this point. I had started to notice other people and crucially, they had started to notice me. I stopped socialising around this time, conscious that the pretence of being "a couple" was challenging even my finely honed acting abilities. And so, I would sit up, night after night, playing music and talking to friends on MSN. I would create elaborate projects that would eat into my evenings, time previously spent talking to the man I once thought as my other half became silent, him on the X Box, me on the laptop. Tapping and sighing, pausing for cups of tea or a passing comment about the day, neither one of us really taking in the others response, just acknowledging the noise with a polite "hm".

He worked night shifts, that boyfriend. A lot of our time was spent dancing around the cold spaces of the bed as he, weary from work would slide in beside me, my eyes would snap open with a start, before a kiss or a touch on my shoulder could be received, I would slide out of that bed almost simultaneously as he slid in. Nobody is that keen to get up at 7am. My body was betraying me, I didn't want to be there.

"I'm going up" he would say, yawning and  balancing a glass of water on top of his study books. He didn't ask if I would join him, by this point we had accepted the unspoken issue, I wasn't sleeping. At least not in bed and certainly not with him. Lying in the dark until I could hear his breathing slow to a steady rhythm I would get out and go and sit in the armchair that was now a permanent fixture in out bedroom. He never asked me why it suddenly appeared one day, but he knew. I think we both knew.

You probably think I was doing a lot of thinking in that chair, hour after hour as the light cast funny shapes on my folded limbs, but I don't recall any of it. Sleep deprivation consumes pretty much all your energy in allowing you to simply function. You feel fuzzy, leaden, like you failed at something so intrinsically human and natural that the frustration makes you feel itchy and uncomfortable. Anxiety becomes intermingled with peace and tranquillity and slowly starts to conquer everything. A disrupted sleep cycle is more damaging than poor diet or a lack of exercise. My eyes were permanently bloodshot, with the skin around them translucent and lilac, pallid cheeks with the texture of paper. Lips so dry, I could peel the skin from them with my teeth. My hair, Oh my hair! my beautiful mane of thick, dark, hair started to abandon me, shedding itself from my ruined body in alarming quantities as I cried quietly in the shower, unsure of it was day or night.

When I did manage to snatch some sleep, it was fitful and unsatisfactory. A brief blackout that was never enough and never deep enough to recharge me. I felt the whole time like I was drifting on the surface of sleep, never immersing myself fully in it. My limbs felt achy like I had flu and people started to notice as I made mistake after mistake in my work and at home. Like pouring half a kettle of boiling water over my stomach, just because I was too brain dead to remember if I had boiled it or not.

We tried everything, my boyfriend and I. I think in some ways him trying to fix me was a last ditch attempt to save the unsalvageable. I think he knew, from the moment my body started to deny his company even in sleep, he knew the real reason why I couldn't relax. No amount of hot water bottles, lavender spray or herbal sleeping tablets can fix something that broken. We never slept in the same bed again.

A few years and a couple more relationships down the line I am still prone to those terrible periods of time where I feel I will go mad through lack of sleep, I still sit up until the small hours, trying to calm myself sufficiently, listening to music and over thinking things that I know I cannot change thought the power of irrational thought. I take sleeping tablets at times like this, though I prefer not to. I always find the sleep is not worth feeling like a Zombie the next day for, no matter how much I want it.With less to worry me, I trust my body will override what my head says and that I won't need an armchair in my bedroom again. At least not until I am married, perhaps.