A Letter to Sleep

Dear Sleep,

Thank you for always being there for me.  I’m sorry that these past couple of weeks, I have not been there for you.  I have been sporadically in and out of your life at irregular times throughout the day and night.  I think people don’t understand how much you mean to me and how much my mental, emotional, physical health, and sanity rely on you.  You have been the one true escape I had from the world that never ceases to overwhelm me faster and more intensely than other people around me.  I have always experienced a profound calm knowing that I can let everything in my sight and mind go for 8 or so hours every day.  Sometimes, I feel like nobody will understand how much I need sleep to function—not just in terms of getting rest but being able to escape the world I sometimes feel I am not made for.  To put my emotion regulation skills and capacity to socialize with people, manage different expectations of other people and myself—all of these, I have always felt, have been things I need to work extra hard on to get the same outcome as everyone else around me.  

This semester or these couple of weeks, two of my loves have been taking up more than healthy portions of my life and cut into my time with you.  My job as an EMT has been my love but I forget how much it rocks my sleeping cycle on Friday nights. Coupled with this Div III project I am living, eating, and breathing, it has pushed me to the brink of irregular sleeping habits, bad boundary setting, and just unhealthy immersion of self going in over my head over my project. I have been struggling with drawing lines between me time and project time and I think it has been too overwhelming for me, especially when I feel like the whole world is different from me.  Like I have to try so hard to just be at the same output level as everyone else every day.

I guess this letter has no real objective.  I am just writing this to let you know what’s going on because it’s been so frustrating and upsetting for me to try to sleep earlier than 3am because my sleeping clock is just rocked from the night I had a Friday shift with a 3am call—please know that I get so frustrated at myself.  And even more so when morning comes and I try so hard to wake up at 9am and either succeed and feel groggy the whole day or fail and repeat the late night cycle. I can't remember the last time I really had much appetite to eat and so I've been trying really hard not to succumb to just skipping a meal.

I am writing this to you because I feel you may be one of the only ones who can truly understand how overwhelming it is and how anxious I get about myself, about what other people think, and how the world is.  And I’ve just been feeling all these feelings intensify and having lesser time and consistent capacities to just shut the world and its worries out of my mind and body for 8 hours.  

Thank you for understanding me and allowing me to breathe and just exist in your space.  Thank you for making me feel like you take extra care of me for being more overwhelmed by the world than other humans—and not needing me to try and justify or explain myself.  Thank you for helping let go of things I cannot change, put difficult emotions, anxiety, and thoughts aside for a night, and most importantly, for accepting me for my whole self.

Your underdog,

Andrea

The Mystery of Trees

There is empty space between us.

I want to think that it sounds like waves crashing but I have a feeling that it’s just white noise of separate worlds across the sea.  It is a void of shared beginnings growing in two separate directions and I do not know if they are the same.  

I think about growth and all its beauty. 

I think about change and the ugliness it can entail.

And I wonder if they are the same things.

The plantling is sprouting leaves it doesn’t think it has, in directions it doesn’t know exists.  Its roots will always be grounded to the earth - it is what keeps it alive, thriving from the nutrients and water from the soil.  But when the seasons change, it needs to shed its leaves, as beautiful as they were in the summer.  But just before it falls in fall, it dances its most amazing fiery dance in the most surreal colours of blazing orange-yellow-red, stroking the blue sky in the wind - it is at its most beautiful.  Even as the leaves find its next home on green-brown ground at the foot of the tree, it realises that it has returned to the very roots it first came from.  Whether it is raked away by those trusty but sometimes scary metal fingers or left to disintegrate back into the rich earth, it looks above, to see the branches that once held it.  Sometimes, the wind blows and the branches sway its sturdy sway and waves its scaly arms, “hello again” or “goodbye” - sometimes, you are never sure which.  

Those darker, greyer skies of winter scare me a little when the branches look like they are dying or dead, and that maybe it wasn’t a good idea that it had no leaves in the abominable snow.  But the warmth of the yellow sun creeps up and the faint hue of the rainbow emerges just before I give up. And they remind me that trees grow, seasons change, leaves sprout, and we are designed for these changing seasons.  If we started off in places with only one season, we can move and the nature of the world may not move with us.  But we learn, we shed, we grow, we sprout, and we keep growing, even if we thought we were not made for it.  I don’t know if we get the same leaves next time but I know that we cannot hold on to the same ones forever.  And maybe that is just the beauty and ugliness of change: discovering vibrant colors you didn’t know existed and learning to let go when seasons change.  Because as much as the sky turns grey-blue-orange and the world gets cold-warm-hot-cool, my roots are still the same, continuing to reap from the nutrients and water the soil brings, from whichever corner of the earth.

Ancestor Dreams

I wonder how my ancestors felt as they braved the South China Sea to get to a new place they may or may not have known much about. And as they set foot onto the soil of Borneo, what did they find? Were they having second thoughts? Were they anxious about leaving their entire home behind and finding a new home in this jungle? Blacksmithing was the trade my great grandfather had and I assume it was the trade of his ancestors that first arrived here? I don't know. I wonder if it ever crossed their mind about love? About places that they would go, places their children's children would go, and the people they would meet--the relationships they would form and the big family tree that was going to be built. I am curious about them, my ancestors, and what they were like. Would I have gotten along with them or not? I probably wouldn't have been able to communicate with them, would I?

I don't know. But the thoughts play and dance in my dreams and I think about it occasionally--about moving and stuff.