I Translate Other People's Words All Day and Could Not Quiet My Own at Night

The Ceiling I Knew Better Than My Own Face

There is a hairline crack in my bedroom ceiling that runs from the light fitting toward the window, and then stops, as if it changed its mind. I know it the way some people know a poem. I have looked at it at two in the morning more times than I can count, and at three, and at the pale grey hour when the first delivery vans start up in the street below and I finally understand that the night has beaten me again.

I am thirty-eight. I work from home as a translator, mostly French and Italian into English, legal contracts and the occasional cookbook when I am lucky, and my whole living depends on a brain that is good at holding two languages in the air at once and choosing between them quickly. That same brain has never once, in my entire adult life, known how to stop. People say they lie awake worrying. It was not worry, exactly. It was more like a radio left on in an empty room, playing everything at once. A phrase I should have rendered differently that afternoon. The exact Italian for a word that does not quite exist in English. A conversation from 2009. The sound of my own heartbeat, which I could hear if the house was quiet enough, and the house was always quiet enough.

I want to be honest here, because I spent years being dishonest about it. I told everyone I was simply a night person. I was not a night person. I was an exhausted person who could not sleep, which is a different and much lonelier thing.

The Difference Between Tired and Sleepy

I used to think those two words meant the same thing. They do not. For most of my thirties I was profoundly tired and almost never sleepy. My body felt like a phone at four percent that somehow would not switch off. I would finish a long document, my eyes gritty, my shoulders up around my ears, and I would lie down fully expecting to drop, and instead the radio would come on. Sometimes louder, as if it had been waiting all day for me to stop moving so it could finally have my full attention.

I tried the obvious things first, and then the less obvious ones. Herbal tea that smelled of a field and tasted of nothing. A blackout blind. A weighted blanket that made me feel pleasantly buried but no less awake. No screens after nine, which lasted about a week. Magnesium. A sleep app with a man reading Norwegian train timetables in a low voice, which was genuinely lovely and did absolutely nothing. I went to my doctor, who was kind and careful and gave me a short course of something that worked, in the sense that it knocked me down like a mallet, and left me feeling for two days afterwards as if I were translating my own life from a language I was only partly fluent in. I did not want to live like that.

What I wanted was almost embarrassing in its smallness. I wanted to put my head on a pillow and have the room go quiet. Not the room. The me.

My Friend Said a Word I Did Not Trust

It was Hannah who said it, over coffee, when I had made some joke about being awake to hear the four a.m. church bells. She did not laugh. She said, carefully, that her sister had done something for her own anxiety, a kind of training for the brain, and that it had helped, and that I might look into neurofeedback therapy before I dismissed it. I did dismiss it, to be fair. It sounded like the sort of thing that comes with scented candles and a large bill and a practitioner who tells you your energy is blocked. I nodded and changed the subject and went home and lay awake thinking about it, which was at least a new thing to lie awake thinking about.

But the phrase stayed. I am a translator. Words lodge in me. And a few weeks later, on a particularly bad morning, I typed it in and started reading, and what I read was not what I expected. It was not mystical. It was almost dull, in a reassuring way. The idea, as best I understood it, is that your brain produces electrical patterns all the time, and that some of those patterns are better suited to rest than others, and that you can learn, slowly, to shift toward the quieter ones, the way you might learn to relax a clenched jaw you did not know you were clenching.

Sensors, a Screen, and the Oddest Afternoon

I made an appointment, mostly to prove to Hannah that I had tried. The room was ordinary. A chair, a desk, a monitor. A woman roughly my age who talked to me for a long time before anything else happened, which I appreciated, because she asked about the tiredness and the not-sleeping as if they were two separate problems, which of course they were.

Then she put sensors on my scalp. Cold paste, a slight scratch of contact, clips on my ears. I expected something to be done to me. Nothing was done to me. That is the part I still find hard to explain to people. I simply sat and looked at a screen, where there was something like a film that played smoothly when my brain did one thing and stuttered and dimmed when it did another. No one told me what the right thing was. I could not have told you what I was doing to make it play. My job, she said, was essentially to do nothing and let my brain notice what made the screen reward it. It felt absurd. It felt like being asked to wiggle a muscle I did not know I had, in the dark, with no mirror.

And yet. About twenty minutes in, something loosened. I cannot put it better than that. A feeling I associate now with the exact half-second before sleep finally takes you, except I was wide awake in a chair with paste in my hair. The radio, for a moment, turned down.

The Slow, Unglamorous Part

I will not pretend it was a single magic afternoon. It was not. It was weeks of sessions, and the gains were small and infuriatingly inconsistent, the way real things are. Some days I left feeling nothing. One evening, maybe three weeks in, I realised I had been lying in bed for a while with no particular thoughts, and the strangeness of that almost woke me up again.

Between sessions she gave me small things to practise, and eventually we talked about continuing some of the training with neurofeedback at home so it could become part of ordinary life rather than a weekly outing, which suited me, since my ordinary life is mostly this flat and this desk. The thing I had been most cynical about, the idea that you could sit with a neurofeedback therapist and somehow coach your own attention, turned out to be the thing that quietly helped, not because it fixed me but because for the first time something was addressing the over-busy mind directly rather than trying to club it unconscious.

What Quiet Actually Sounds Like

I still have bad nights. I want to say that plainly, because I have grown to distrust stories that end with everything solved. The crack in my ceiling is still there and I still visit it occasionally. But the baseline has moved. Most nights now the room goes quiet when I ask it to, roughly, eventually, and the gap between tired and sleepy has narrowed until they almost touch.

The odd gift in all of it is that I understand my own attention a little better now, which has made me a slightly better translator, strangely, more able to notice when I am gripping a sentence too hard and to loosen my hold on it. It turns out the mind that would not stop was not broken. It had simply never been shown how to put itself down. I am thirty-eight and I am, slowly, learning. Last Tuesday I slept seven hours and woke up almost annoyed that there was nothing to report. That, I have decided, is exactly the kind of boring I was after.