The Beauty of Sleeplessness

Hello friends,

the title of this post is somewhat sarcastic and slightly sardonic, since at the moment it is 1:27 in the morning and I woke up about an hour ago for no apparent reason after going to bed at 10:00 at night, because that's the sensible thing to do when waking up at 5 or 5:30 a.m. I also have a raging sore throat. But I digress. I'm not here to complain.

This is actually the third night this week that I have either not slept well or slept very little for various reasons, and when I finally realized I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep I had a few different choices. I could find something amusing to watch on Netflix (but I've been trying to cut back on mind-glazing entertainment), I could make a list of all the things I needed to do (which seemed sensible and adult-y), or I could write. What I used to do when I couldn't sleep was write. I wrote fiction, raw material that turned into blog posts, I journaled, I thought onto the page, often very messily. There were times I looked at my words the next day and didn't really know what to make of them.

Now the "beauty" of sleeplessness comes in the fact that to my mind and body, it is no longer an option to be asleep. This means that my brain is awake as well, and it wants to do something. I am encouraged by the fact that although I briefly considered "glazing" and watching something on Netflix, it did not feel like that attractive of an option. So I opened my blog and clicked new post, intending to close it immediately and link to my blog drafts. After writing many—oh, so many—posts in my drafts that had nothing more than an interesting title and no body, I really wanted to finish one of them. But I knew that in my also very awake perfectionist self, I would scroll through, find all of the titles wanting, despair at having to choose any of them, and ultimately, feeling discouraged and frustrated with myself, write absolutely nothing and turn to Netflix for solace. That wouldn't do. And so, taking a deep breath, I clicked new post, and promised myself that even if what came out was raw and something that I doubted people would relish, I would post it, if only to force myself back into a writing rhythm.

So here I am, sleepless and madly typing, and feeling the strange euphoria that only comes from creating something where there was nothing, watching words appear out of the depths of my strange brain, and knowing that if I hadn't woken up at a bizarre time, this post wouldn't have happened. That is not to say I don't write blog posts at "normal" times, but THIS post wouldn't have happened. These thoughts wouldn't exist on the page. I think that's kind of crazy, and more than a little cool. Ergo, the beauty of sleeplessness.

It has been said that the best time to write is right when you wake up, because you give yourself a chance to be creative before your inner critic and editor entirely wake up. There's a flow and a freedom that is different. And I agree. It's also important to make sure you edit when you write in this state, unless you're writing a blog post like this, which I feel is important to leave as is, kind of to make a point. The point is that polished and perfect is not all that all the time, just like having a routine and a regular schedule is not all that, and making perfect [lists] of things to do isn't all that. We are so beautiful in our messiness, in our craziness, in our sleeplessness. Thank you for reading this post, as is, hardly backspaced or overthought, and I wish you both beauty and (occasional) sleeplessness. At least metaphorically.

Cheers,
Camila

P.S. I know that writing about writing (so meta!) is sometimes discouraged. But since a lot of my issues with continuing to write have to do with the insane struggle of writing itself, I made an exception. ;-)