Tag: insomnia

• November 13, 2012

  Life is a Question Mark

  

  When I was very young, I wanted to grow up to be a baseball pitcher. I spent a portion of my days throwing things. I imagined I was Greg Maddux on the mound, sizing up my opponent before throwing the perfect sinker. I had a pretty decent throwing arm, but I couldn’t catch to save my life (I still can’t), so my parents suggested I try soccer. I played for a number of years, but I was never much better than a less-than-average midfielder and a rotten defender. My mind was too lost in the clouds to focus on the game and I gradually lost interest in sports entirely.

  Over the years that followed, I was never sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. An astronaut, a firefighter, a detective, an actor, a director, a novelist, a journalist, a professor, a social media marketer. I could never settle on a direction. Whenever anyone told me to follow my passions, I responded with, “Which one?” Even the concept of being “grown up” proved to be a social construct. We don’t grow up, we just grow less enchanted with the world around us.

  So, as I pour over graduate schools, it’s not surprising that I still don’t know what I want to be or where I want to be. I just hope that if I keep doing what I love, I’ll find a way to survive. Maybe one day, it will all make sense. Maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll fail over and over. Maybe I’ll make a living as a writer or maybe it will forever be a supplement to another career. And maybe, if I’m very lucky, I’ll pitch that perfect game.

  — 30 —

  The soul searching continues on Twitter, where I go by the handle @jonnyeberle. Please follow, share and comment.
• June 20, 2012

  Insomnia Never Sleeps

  

  At the time of writing, I have been wide awake for almost 33 hours. You see, I suffer from bouts of insomnia. For no reason at all, I simply stop sleeping. It’s not that I wake up during the night, have trouble falling asleep or get up before my alarm — I remain totally conscious all through the night.

  Below is a timeline of my night (Note: times are approximate).

  11:45 pm — Get home from a late dinner with the local swing dancers. I’m exhausted.

  12:00 am — My teeth are brushed, I’m safely tucked in bed and the yawns are unstoppable. It’s a great feeling.

  12:30 am — I can’t get comfortable, no matter how I lay. Even laying on my trusty left side doesn’t do the trick.

  12:50 am — I’m not good enough at math to count sheep, so I pull up Netflix and put on a boring documentary.

  2:00 am — After having learned waaaay too much about Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, I’m still not sleepy, despite having been tuckered out not two hours ago.

  2:30 am — I try reorienting my sleeping position to so that my feet are at the headboard and my head is at the footboard in the hopes that a novel sleeping arrangement will lull me off to dreamland.

  3:30 am — I move to the couch.

  3:45 am — The streetlight outside is blindingly bright. I move back to the bed.

  4:15 am — I start talking to myself. My “you can do it” pep talk about the importance of getting 8 hours of sleep a night is pretty good, but not good enough.

  4:35 am — I start talking to inanimate objects. Bedside table, if you’re reading, I’m sorry about what I said. You’re not tacky.

  5:00 am — Light is streaming in through the windows, birds are singing and some wiseguy a few houses over thinks that now is the perfect time break out the old circular saw.

  5:05 am — I hide under the sheets.

  5:25 am — I get up to close the window, then go back to my linen cave.

  5:35 am — I force myself to keep my eyes closed and pretend it’s still dark.

  5:37 am — Geometry strikes. I do the math on heating costs of a new apartment I looked at the day before. The results do not look good.

  5:45 am — I set my alarm for an hour later, thinking that the stress of waking up soon is keeping me up.

  5:55 am Removing the stress doesn’t help.

  6:00 am — My neighbor switches from the circular saw to the hammer; sunlight light streams in under my bedroom door.

  6:15 am — I hit myself with the pillow. Repeatedly.

  6:30 am — Psychologists call this part of my night “acceptance.” I turn off my alarm, knowing I won’t need it. I decide to go to work three hours early.

  7:00 am — No one at the Y is used to seeing me in the building before eight, leading to a string of bemused stares, double-takes and people remarking, “Well, you’re here early.”

  Fast forward to now. It’s nearly half past four and I’m typing as my mind dribbles out my ear and floats off into the clouds like puffs of smoke. I tried napping and I tried herbal tea. Now, all I can do is wait for the sleep to come. I don’t need sympathy; all I want is some shut-eye, but at this point, I might as well tough it out until my regular bedtime.

  And here ends my fascinating blog entry about the horrors of the waking world. What I would give for it all to be just a bad dream, but that’s a terrible way to end a story. Don’t you think?

  

  — 30 —

  When he’s not busy being sleep deprived, Jonny tweets under the name @jonnyeberle (clever, right?) and talks about himself in the third person. Please feel free to comment, but please don’t gloat about your amazing powers of infinite slumber.
• December 31, 2011

  A Year Like Any Other: 2011 In Retrospect

  

  Once more, we stand at the precipice of a new year. For some, the passing of 2011 is like saying goodbye to an old friend you fear you may never meet again. For others, this blasted year can’t be over soon enough. For me, it’s a little of both.

  I am physically and mentally more mature than I was 365 days ago and in retrospect, I feel like I grew a lot. Yet, it’s worth remembering that in the grand scheme, 2011 is no different than any other year that has come before or will come in the future. Once the headlines have faded from living memory and smeared themselves onto the neglected pages of history books, what will remain?

  Two thousand eleven was a year like any other — people lived; some died. We destroyed more than we created, but what we did create was beautiful, if short-lived, like a flash in a pan of gunpowder at the moment of ignition.

  We wasted time. We isolated ourselves from each other in the name of connecting with each other. We doubted ourselves. We thought we were too fat or too thin or that our gums showed too much when we smiled. We thought we weren’t brave enough or smart enough or talented enough, but when we really gave it our best effort, we proved ourselves wrong. We promptly forgot our success.

  We tripped over ourselves. We messed up. We misspoke. We misunderstood. We jumped to conclusions. We ran red lights and sped on straight stretches of desert highway. We told brutal truths. We lied.

  We lost faith. We broke down and we refused to admit fault. We slammed doors. We self-medicated. We fell in love out of love in lust in love again. We were certain that no one had ever felt as heartbroken as we did in that awful, lonely hour.

  We let our loved ones down; we let ourselves down. We criticized and tore each other down to build ourselves up. We failed, yet we tried anyway.

  We spent hours staring at a blinking cursor on a blank Word document and couldn’t think of damn thing to say.

  We lived out our part in a continually unfolding story; a narrative as old as the universe that will continue to be written long after we have taken our last bow. Here, at the closing of the year, I take comfort in the fact that I am a small piece of a greater whole. I find solace in the knowledge that my time is brief and that my contribution, be it a sentence or just a word, is going to live on in some form. The years will pass, but the words will remain and the story goes on.

  Happy New Year.

  — 30 —

  Follow me on Twitter at @jonnyeberle and please feel free to comment. I love hearing from you.