As you may have gathered from Friday evening’s post, I am wrestling with insomnia. Possibly also a touch of dysphoric mania on-ramp action. It’s par for the course (onset of winter, hormones being wacky, somewhat stressed out), familiar enough, but still difficult.

In a comment on my earlier post, Cabrogal referred to that state in which your mind is still blazingly awake and alert but insomnia has begun to make your body tired. I can relate: that’s where I am tonight. I felt tired at 9:30 PM and crawled into bed. Despite many efforts to sleep, I’m still awake.

When I close my eyes, my mind whirls away at 3,000,000 miles per hour: musical compositions (which arrive with regularity at the onset of mania) playing themselves at various tempi (often inappropriate ones), sometimes elaborating themselves into staggering crab-canons that wheeze and clatter along like seige engines. Hard and bad thoughts intermittently surface. I try to just acknowledge them and let them go, but they persist. None of this feels like a conscious process; in fact, the music leaves little room for intentional thought.

When I’m just having difficulty falling asleep (read: almost every night), I tell myself stories. Apparently, my stories are very boring, because often they do the job. (Okay, so actually I think they just distract me from the horrid life-long anxiety about being unable to fall asleep — another trait El Roberto and I share)

When my brain won’t stop musicking, I often can’t tell myself stories. I can’t “hear” them (more like see/feel/smell/hear them) over the din of my mental calliope hammering out my setting of Psalm 137, which is actually a lovely piece of music, but not like this.

It’s almost 3:30. If a miracle occurs and I get to sleep soon, I should be okay in ballet class. I don’t want to keep missing class. I don’t want this to be my new reality, always sliding away from the thing I love the most (after Denis, anyway).