i cannot rest
sick girl has a mental breakdown after watching one documentary
I always considered myself good at resting. When I was in middle school, I could watch eight hours of Law & Order: SVU on a Saturday like it was my job. I’ve always been a “go to bed early” kind of person, and for most of my life I was the girl at parties who would call her parents and make them pick her up by ten at the latest. I don’t do things I don’t want to do unless I am forced, and most of the time that just means I enjoy my quiet alone time, doing nothing but reading and watching TV and eating and sleeping.
Of course, in reality, that time of my life was a long time ago. I haven’t been in high school for over a decade now, and when I was in college, rest started making me antsy. I still remember the first day of classes, when I got back to my room to do homework or worry about anything, and I was just supposed to…live my life. I didn’t feel the pressure of AP classes or college applications or life at home, and suddenly a whole world opened up to me. My freshman year, I remember trying out Netflix for the first time in my life, spending a week of my fall semester binging the most ridiculous movies and shows just because I could. I read a lot of books, and by the time it was finals week in the spring, I had so little on my plate, I read five books in five days just because I could. I was bored. I was understimulated. I had to make my own fun.
My mom has said I’ve always been very intrinsically motivated. I’m very creative, love spending time by myself and making art, and I can entertain myself pretty easily most of the time. Leave me to my own devices and I’ll code a website or write a book or watch forty seasons of television. It’s not that difficult. Except the older I get, the more I struggle with rest. Because in some ways, I don’t think the way I spend my time is as restful as I once believed.
As a child of the 90s, I distinctly remember growing up and hearing from all the adults in my life that TV would rot our brains. Forget about the internet, that wasn’t even that important yet, they were all worried about the television. Back when we’d turn on the TV at 6am before we went to school to watch Fairly Oddparents and Jimmy Neutron. When we’d get home from school to turn on Disney Channel and watch Even Stevens and Kim Possible. If we were at home, the TV was going to be on. And I think part of the joy back then was that there was always something you could watch. Flip the channel and you could watch Spongebob. Wait thirty minutes and there was a different show coming on. But you didn’t have to make the decisions, you could let some executive across the world decide for you. Your brain could shut down and you could rest.
Was it really restful though? Not really. We didn’t have phones or laptops back then to side-track us while we watched (and we had longer attention spans, I’m convinced), so we were engaging the entire time with our screen, but I never walked away from the TV feeling refreshed. I just wanted more. I just wanted to avoid the inevitable moment when Dad made me take a shower or I had to get dressed for school or we had to go to church. It was an escape.
And if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that I’m a pro at escaping reality when I want to.
There was a phase of my life a few years ago that really felt like I was having my teenage rebellion moment at 26. I was going downtown to bars, drinking Jack & Cokes (okay, more like drinking one every few weeks, which was more than I’d ever had in my life), and being Spontaneous. I started exercising four or five days a week, stayed out past eleven most nights, and woke up for my barista job at four am most mornings. I had managed to disorder my eating into such a bizarre state that I was only really eating dinner and a few snacks along the way, and I convinced myself that it was to save money because I was broke. But man, I was having the time of my life. Or, actually, I was pretending to have the time of my life while in reality, I was falling apart.
I was barely making any money, working at a coffeeshop in the early days of an active pandemic, trying to navigate overwhelming grief and weird interpersonal relationships with people who didn’t care about me as much as I believed at the time, and for the first time in my whole life, I couldn’t escape from reality in books or television or movies. I felt like the horrors were coming from inside the house, that it was sitting still that had put me into this mess.
We’d spend most of 2020 inside and distanced (obviously), and in the first six months of 2021 I read a hundred books. Which is faster than I’d read ever in my life. I was trying to hold on, to tell myself things would get better and that I wasn’t as traumatized as I was and that I could handle a bunch of once-in-a-lifetime historical events back to back to back. It’s normal to live through a global pandemic. It’s normal for election day to become election week. It’s normal to watch thousands of people storm the US capitol. It’s normal to run out of savings at twenty-five because your freelance career is in the toilet from said global pandemic. It’s all normal. No need to escape reality. It’s all fine.
In theory, all I did for a year was rest. I gained weight just like anybody else, ate a lot of cinnamon rolls and creamy pasta and sugary treats. I lounged around on our couch, binging movies and television shows, reading romance books and fantasy novels. I barely went anywhere or moved around at all. I was lazy. And you probably remember that too. That we spent so much time inside and cooped up and isolated that you felt like you were going to lose your mind. That suddenly when you did get out, you made the most of it. That you had gotten too much rest, and we needed to fix that.
But my god. We’re all out of minds if we truly believe that all we did in 2020 was rest.
Even though I lived through that time, and in some ways it’s in my recent memory, I still feel this weird cognitive dissonance about the whole thing. I read journal entries where I made comments about how “One day I’ll look back and wish that I could be doing this…but I wish I was anywhere but here.” I read entries about how I fear it’s the end of the world. How I’m terrified. How I don’t know what will happen or where I’ll be in a few weeks, months, next year. I remember the summer of riots, of fearing for the lives of so many people outside of myself, of wondering when we’d finally hit a breaking point as a nation. My body was fully horizontal, but my brain was jumping up and down screaming at the top of her lungs.
I was not resting. I was in survival mode. And truth be told, I’ve been there ever since.
It’s hard to know just how much of my life experience is a result of normal feelings for my age demographic and how much of my life experience is a result of living in a post-pandemic, late-stage capitalism world. Would I feel this terrified if I was growing up when my parents did? Would I feel this exhausted and burnt out if I was growing up when my grandparents did? Did they feel so lost and overwhelmed? Did they worry about the state of affairs like I am? Did they struggle with insomnia like I do? Because yes, my parents have lived through the same events I have in the last thirty years, and they’ve maybe been traumatized more because they understand the context better than I do, but they are established adults. They had already created lives for themselves by the time they were thirty. They didn’t have to navigate post-graduate life, starting a career, building a foundation for the next fifty years in the middle of hell. They had each other in the early days of the pandemic while I was twenty-five, seven hours away, living with one other person who was even younger than me. They might not have been rich when they were my age, but things were different then. How did the wars of their youth change them? How did the horrors of the past shape them? What horrors will shape me in my thirties?
A few weeks ago I met with my therapist and I proudly walked in to let them know that I was actually doing just fine, thank you! Life was going as well as it could, I had almost no complaints, except, well actually, I wasn’t sleeping well. But I’ve always had trouble sleeping, so that’s nothing new.
If you read my previous piece about horror movies, you’ll remember that when I was in third grade, I was forced to watch Poltergeist at a birthday party, and it fucked me up for years afterwards. But even before that movie gave me nightmares, I had trouble sleeping. I remember being little and constantly trying to sneak out to go to the bathroom just because I was restless. I used to sleep with the door open and the hall lights on, a nightlight next to my bed because I was scared. I’ve never been able to fall asleep without music or daydreams or devotions or a sleep mask or some goddamn melatonin. And it only got worse in college when I had roommates. I started seeing things in my sleep, screaming and sleep-talking, upsetting almost everyone who slept in the same room as me.
It was horrible during the early days of the pandemic. I remember May 2020, back when my full-time gig was freelancing so I not only had no reason to get up at a certain time but I also was stuck in the same room every single day in isolation…I would stay up until 2 or 3am, making playlists and listening to music, trying to do something to distract myself from the fact that when I laid my head down on my pillow, all my brain did was yell.
I always expect that if I run my brain ragged like a hamster on a wheel, then eventually after an hour or two it will shut itself off. Like a fuse with too much power running through it. But it’s almost like my thoughts just make my brain go faster. It’s working overtime, but the harder I think, the longer it goes.
Ironically (or actually, it makes perfect sense), the only time in maybe my whole life that I felt like I was sleeping easily was when I was overworking my body when I was 26. My therapist said it was probably because I was well-past the point of burn out, that I was pushing myself further than ever, but all I remember was the sweet bliss of putting my head down and immediately falling into a deep sleep. Of course, it’s important to remember that I was laying down at 11:30pm, sleeping for a grand total of about five hours, and then waking up by 5am to go back to work. But man, I felt unstoppable. Is that what it’s like to not have insomnia?
It’s funny because after 2021, I think I spent two years telling myself, Okay, now we’re getting out of survival mode.
Once I got to quit my barista job for a full-time nine-to-five, I thought, We get to rest now. Except the new problem was that I had to work a full-time job for the first time in my life. Then I had relationship issues and mental health problems and still the pandemic was raging and the mid-term election and I was still trying to learn how to feed myself three meals a day and I couldn’t talk to a therapist yet and I couldn’t bring myself to read anything. For months. I wasn’t watching television. I found almost no joy in the creative passions that once fueled me. I couldn’t spend too much time alone because I hated myself and I hated the world and I mean this completely unironically. My inner world felt like it was dying.
I pushed my body even further, still exercising, still staying out late when I could. I ended up going to see a sports doctor (words I never imagined I’d get to say about myself in my lifetime) and got loosely diagnosed with metatarsalgia - which is a fancy way of saying that my foot was mad that I was making it do things, and all I could really do was wait until it stopped being mad. I started reading a bunch of self-help books, as if reading about feelings and people-pleasing would fix me and shut up my tired brain. (It didn’t work.)
But, no matter, things changed in 2023 when I could finally get a therapist. I was slowly dipping my toes back into reading, I reread a bunch of favorites and found some great shows to watch, and I moved into my own apartment, and surely everything would be better. I fell a little bit in love with myself and rediscovered some of the things I used to love, but I still could not sleep. I still had a hard time genuinely resting.
The first time I got COVID was in May 2023. I held out a long time, and when it finally found me, I had been vaccinated for nearly two years. I had health insurance through my employer by then, and my doctor gave me a Paxlovid prescription. All things considered, I had a mild case. There was one night that was particularly brutal, and for about a day I had the worst sore throat I’ve ever had, and ultimately I got sick at the move inconvenient time of year (I was trying to move), but I had a job that gave me paid sick days, so the nightmare that could have been, was more like a little bump in the road.
But the thing about being sick is that it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, sweet relief, you don’t have to do anything but sit on our couch for hours on end. You can finally binge that show you’ve been waiting to watch. You can eat junk food and allow people to take care of you and you can feel bad for yourself. Woe is you, you’re sick. But even for someone like me who is great at sitting on the couch for twelve hours straight, COVID isolation is torturous. (Not nearly as bad as the early days of COVID, mind you, but thankfully we have great scientists and okay politicians and I guess we have pharmaceuticals that exist to do…something.) At least if you had a cold when you were a kid, you were stuck at home for a day or two and then they shipped you off to school again after you felt kind of like a human. You got the joys of a little break, but it didn’t feel too long or too short. You weren’t shamed for not working enough or getting back to the office. You could just watch your cartoons and eat ice cream and let your mom take care of you. But COVID isolation is days on end of being by yourself, when you inevitably were hoping to see a friend for dinner on Monday or go to a concert on Wednesday or, I don’t know, go confront your new leasing office because the apartment you were trying to move into smelled like smoke and nobody was around during the holiday to talk to you about it and you’ve been anxiously preparing the angry words you’d say to the property manager but you couldn’t actually go see them until your isolation period was up. Hypothetically.
Three days is a restful vacation. Five days is sad and lonely. But once you get past seven days, going on ten days of seeing your best friend or going to buy a little treat at a coffeeshop or running to the store for basic food ingredients, suddenly the world is a very dark place.
The second time I got COVID was this past week. Thankfully, it was even more mild than my first time. I live alone, so it was easy to isolate and get tested and expose as few people as possible. I spent a weekend by myself, called out of work for the week, and by the end of the second day of symptoms I was ready to jump into the ocean and scream at the top of my lungs.
It’s not restful to be sick. You get to - no you’re forced to - “rest,” to sit around and drink copious amounts of tea, to read the book you’ve been putting off and watch that movie and try that new docuseries that just came out, but I’m not resting. I still haven’t been able to sleep. I wake up in the middle of the night feeling sick. I’m bored out of my skull, but I can’t go see my best friend even though she’s off work. I can’t go back to work even though I feel like I could work. I only want to go back to work to have something to do and because I feel guilty that my co-workers have to pick up my slack. Do all my friends hate me? Nobody will text me back. I can’t call anybody because I’m gross and I can’t talk without getting tired. I wish someone would call me. I want to go outside but there’s nowhere to go because I live in an apartment complex in the city. I want to exercise but you’re not supposed to exercise within two months of getting COVID. I want to clean but what’s the point of cleaning if the germs are still inside me? I’m running out of honey. I don’t want to read another book. I don’t want to watch another movie. I don’t want to be stuck here.
We cannot rest in our society today. Like, genuinely, I think it’s not possible. We can take little breaks, little breathers while we take thirty minutes to go to a yoga class or take a trip to the beach for a few days, but even then it’s a half-truth. We’re still not resting because the chances are, we’re still checking our phones. We’re thinking about how we’re not at work or how we have to go back to work or how we can’t live without working. And if we do manage to forget about work, there’s still capitalism and racism and homophobia and, oh did you remember the 2024 election between a guy who is fully embracing a genocide and a guy who quite literally was impeached? Convicted? Encouraged a full-out insurrection? We cannot rest because we’re glued to social media. Because we need to be responsible and educate ourselves and know why so many things in our world are harmful. We need to take care of our mental health, but we aren’t allowed to stay home for more than a day if we have COVID now. We have to keep moving. But if we’re stuck in one spot, here’s fake news and misinformation and AI and TikToks and reels and ads and influencers and spend your money and hate that guy and vote for this piece of shit and if you don’t vote you’re the piece of shit and if you do vote you’re the piece of shit and we are running around in circles because we spent a single year in confinement and that’s a waste of capital.
Every time I get stuck inside - with COVID, during a snowstorm - I feel like I have two or three days where I genuinely am happy that I get to just be gross and alone and hyperfixate on some random films. I sit around, let my house get messy, and I think, Ah thank god, I don’t have to go into the office. But when I am left to my own devices for long enough, my brain starts to self-destruct. If it doesn’t have a movie to fixate on, it starts eating itself. And when I lay down my head to fall asleep, it becomes an ouroboros, an infinite loop of terror and excitement and wonder. It is the horror of a time-loop, that you will never get out.
In some ways, I was hoping this time-loop would reset me a little. That even if I hadn’t gotten true rest, I would at least be so shaken up that my brain would realize, oh, maybe we do need to sleep at night. Or at the very least, that I’d start appreciating my time with friends a little more. And I think that’s what most time-loops do. They make you appreciate where you’re at with newfound freedom, a desire to make the most of your time and your life, and that’s valuable.
But I also feel so goddamn defeated. Like we went through so much hell over the last few years (decades?), and even after all that…there is no reset. We don’t just get to start over with a new president in 2024. We don’t just get a free Palestine. We don’t miraculously get free healthcare or trans rights or an end to police brutality. There isn’t a break from capitalism or a chance to redo past mistakes. We cannot rest. We can only distract ourselves. Or put in the work to make something better. We can give in to the entertainment machine and watch the Oscars and pretend like cinema will save us. We can talk about our favorite sports teams and get excited for a new sequel and celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as if a few drinks will wash away our sins and our cleanse us from the horrors. And honestly, we don’t really have a choice but to distract ourselves.
I had a particularly difficult time around day three of my symptoms - I had watched a few movies already, and I missed my friends, and I had to sacrifice a few things I was looking forward to, and I ran down some dark mental tunnels. I knew everything was fine, I was overthinking and alone and sick, but frankly I was sad. But as Victor Hugo says, even the night will end and the sun will rise.
We have to keep going. We have to have hope. We have to remind ourselves how far we’ve come, how good we have it, even with all the bad. We have survived so much - as a generation, as a country, as a species. One of my earliest memories is 9/11. I remember being in fifth grade for Hurricane Katrina. I have vague recollections of being a teenager during the recession, of watching gas prices skyrocket but not really knowing why or how or what that meant. I remember where exactly where I was in my high school when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. I remember spending the entire day after the 2016 election crying. I lived through the start of a global pandemic. I watched the news when they stormed the capitol on January 6th. I am still, always thinking of Palestine.
I — we — are a generation who has grown up living through unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime historic tragedies, and that isn’t stopping anytime soon. But the only way I’ve been able to keep going, is to remember the unprecedented changes we’ve made in the wake of those tragedies. The good things that have prevailed. The art that has been made, the stories that have been told, the heroes that have arisen in the darkness. The vaccines and pills that have been manufactured in a short period of time. We maybe have lived through immense tragedy, but that tragedy shaped us into a generation that is fighting for justice. The tragedy cured me of my apathy a very long time ago, and I’m so grateful that I woke up.
Everyone I’ve talked to this week has been adamant that I get some rest. And for my poor body’s sake, I too wish that I could get some rest. But the truth is, I don’t know when I’m actually going to get to rest. Or rather, when I’ll feel rested. Because from where I stand, there’s work to do. And I’m sick of sitting around feeling useless.
well - I feel seen 💌❤