I Woke up Like This

“I WOKE UP LIKE THIS”

(Feb. 2017)

I hesitate to share this photo. In fact, this photo was taken in February 2011. I’ve hesitated for six years.

As I write this, I haven’t slept in three weeks.

Actually…I would be in a coma or dead if that were true. Let me rephrase: I feel like it’s been three weeks since I’ve slept. I haven’t slept properly. Have you ever gone on with your day knowing that you slept but it feels like you didn’t? Or what about those nights where you don’t remember sleeping even if you know you did? You don’t feel energized or refreshed but somehow you’re alive and carrying on. This is what I’ve gotten used to because it’s been something I’ve dealt with since I was about two years old.

Sleep is a funny topic to me. In fact, it’s a complex one. With no exaggeration, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with sleep my entire life. There has never been a routine to follow, a healthy habit for it, or a way for me to explain it to others…most people look at me like I’m speaking another language when I try to.

This has been an enemy of mine since I was at least two years old. On Sundays, we would have dinner with my mom’s parents. As kids normally do, my brother and I would fall asleep on the car ride home. According to my mother, he would stay asleep and be put to bed while the twenty minute crash would completely recharge me and I’d be up way past my bedtime running laps in the living area. It was exhausting for her.

But I don’t remember ever being affected by either sleep itself or lack of. If I found the ability to sleep then I would do so, but I could also easily do without or even on just a couple of hours. I’ve never experienced mood swings because of it…they’ve just occurred on their own.

The only time I have been affected by a disturbance in sleep is when severe depression is involved.

The longest I’ve ever stayed awake—my personal record—is three days. It’s not something to brag about though. It occurred during my darkest days. I was downright manic and the experience was the polar opposite of where I was at just two years prior when I was in a similar position but in a different state of mind; happy. During the happy period, I would stay awake until four in the morning on a school night, needing to be up by 6:30 at the latest. All my lights would be on. I was already dressed…or sometimes still dressed...right down to my shoes. I’d be engrossed in various activities; fulfilling my youth and replacing grief with excitement, savoring any positivity. After school, I’d nap until dinner when my mother would walk in the door from work.

“Kel, are you OK? … Kel? … Kelly! What are you doing?” she’d ask worryingly.

“Making time go faster!” I would eagerly respond, preparing for the weekend in the city.

But in 2007 I had a lot of fears keeping me awake. I wanted to stop time. I wanted to turn off life itself. Sleep wasn’t much of an enemy, but my biggest problem was that life was moving fast and it was becoming unfamiliar to me and I just couldn’t hang onto it. So I spent those waking hours trying to salvage time and be proactive but all I did was worry about it, worry about who I was and who, or what, I was becoming.

At the time, the Writer's Guild of America strike was happening. Practically everything was on hiatus, and so was Saturday Night Live, and I was also out of school now. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I had never felt more lost in my entire life.

Throughout my childhood, I always had problems and bouts of insecurity, but I was able to do something about it—come up with things to help define myself and fill those gaps, or had people to help me along. I always found ways to keep myself busy. Say what you will about school, everyone is eager to graduate and leave that bullshit in the past once and for all, right? But maybe that’s what I liked about school. The person most likely to drop out is the one who actually enjoys the routine and socialization that comes with school. As I think back to those years now as a young adult and being single, it’s probably what I miss most about grade school...how easy it was to just hang out and form relationships and not realize the time. I was eager to leave school too … when they told me I wasn’t graduating. A teacher had overheard that my plan was to skip out on returning in the fall and I told her I wouldn’t be able to come back without the classmates I grew up with.

Now I’m laying on my couch in the dark, coincidentally without them, thinking about my future.

Everyone experiences depression for different reasons, and depression itself affects people differently. But if there was one way to describe how I felt, I think it’s similar to the dead of winter. I think it’s because that’s when it was at its worst and how it left such a distinct feeling: Fresh out of high school, no obligations, a frigid January when the holidays are over and it’s just too quiet, I go for a walk at the break of dawn when the sky is purple and orangey-pink and the snowy icy landscape ahead of me is captured in a Tungsten filter, I can smell fireplaces as I tread along the suburban wooded area. My experience with depression is like being stuck in that wintertime daylight-to-nighttime transition.

So, yes, I have stayed awake for three days. Then I managed to stay in bed for an entire weekend without getting up (except to use the restroom of course). I laid there in the dark with only the brightness of the TV. Mind you, they were completely unrelated and happened at different times. My inability to care for myself was growing. I was truly lost. Some might call it “cabin fever,” but I knew it was much more than that.

I started to think about it more.

I started to torture myself with negativity. My dad’s death. All my failures instead of successes. My popularity. My personality. My relationships. My beef with certain people which I ended up digging into and read them all day long, all night, and developed a growing sense of self-hatred that grew into being suicidal. I started self harming … which is often described as doing it for the purpose of being alive … but for me, it was to beat myself up. I started losing my hair, weight, I couldn’t really wake up whether I slept or not. The days went on, but it was like time never changed; stuck in Tungsten.

My boyfriend and I would try to spend every weekend together. But that winter was tough for our relationship, so we still managed to keep our love afloat by being penpals in the meantime; ichat and emails and texts. I started to question our relationship. I started to question myself most of all. I worried about myself … whether I needed medical help … and whether I wanted him to be there for me or not. “Would you visit me?” I asked.

One night, I had another all-nighter after I had spent hours watching the live feed of Britney Spears’s meltdowns and reading up on her outcome which I sat on the edge of my seat … and cried. I hadn’t showered in a couple of days. My mind just felt like mush, I didn’t really feel much at all. I got up and put some dirty, baggy clothes on and stole $10 from my mother’s purse. It was still dark outside—probably 5:30 AM—and a sliver of daylight was peeking through the black. I was out walking with no coat, just a sweatshirt, and ended up at the luncheonette two blocks away. I just cried into a cup of coffee at the bar.

I had never really known darkness like that in my life; the loneliness, the ugliness, the quietness, the emptiness, the uncertainty, the burden.

My sleep habits have been known to impress people. I’m able to operate a full day on very little sleep. But I’ve always been fascinated by how I can do so, how sleep works, and how mental health is affected by it because it has been a skill that I’ve benefited from and also have had my ass kicked by—especially when I have panic attacks.

Like I said, it’s a love/hate relationship.

After my near death experience, there was so much that had changed in my life. I hate to put it this way; it’s more symbolic than true because depression does NOT work this way, BUT it was almost as if depression was knocked out of me. I compare it to being under a spell. But it still happened. It was a reality that could have killed me. It put things in perspective where you ask yourself “why me” after being suicidal and you kinda pick yourself up by vowing to fix yourself by any means, and then something almost kills you. So it messes with you.

For a while, I have been trying to write about that time in my life. My experience with depression happened while I was very young, while I was figuring out life as normal and building that life from the ground up, with and without medication, so it stands out very vividly. Funnily enough, I was trying to write about my life in this photograph at the time, but I remember falling asleep in the middle of writing. I must have been out for at least an hour, maybe a little less than, and when I woke up and bent my head back while stretching, my neck started to sting like soap on a fresh paper cut. I felt the surface of each mark while running my hand over my neck, but I had to take this photo to get a better look and for a doctor to evaluate. But I couldn’t believe how many there were and how bad they looked. Confused, I pulled the couch apart to try and find an object I may have laid on, but I had woken up face down and no object was in sight; no notebook with spirals or loose pen caps, and a pen itself would leave ink marks. I didn’t remember having any bad or weird dreams during my nap, and I still don’t to this day, no matter how hard I try. It really freaked me out that I did something like this for some reason, but it illustrates my issues with sleep, PTSD, and self harm and the guilt pretty clearly that people can’t understand or even believe.

Thankfully, while I still suffered from sleep issues, I never experienced something to this degree ever again.

People love to believe I lack sleep or proper sleep on purpose, or that depression is easily fixable, like snapping my fingers or like flipping a light switch. I always strive for positivity, for a healthy lifestyle, and yet it’s hard to break away from being a deep thinker, overthinker, and wishing you could take a break from your brain.