Something To Help Me Fall Asleep

"O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

and steep my sense in forgetfulness?"

-- William Shakespeare, Henry IV

Polymer clay head 8-12-14

"Many things -- such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly --

are done worst when we try hardest to do them."

-- C.S. Lewis

Because sometimes I just can't do it on my own, no matter how hard I try.

Exhausting My Body, Calming My Mind

"Studies suggest that the brains of insomniacs may be in a constant 'on' state,

continuing to operate at high levels even when it's supposed to be dialing down ..."

-- Alice Park, "Insomniac? You Might Have A Hyperactive Brain," Time online

Self portrait 6-27-14

"If your dog has a lot of built-up energy, a really vigorous dog walk 

is another excellent way to redirect it where YOU want it to go. 

Once you've burned that extra energy away, your dog should be pleasantly exhausted 

and too tuckered out to jump and nip."

-- Cesar Millan, "How To Calm A Hyper Dog," Cesar's Way

I love The Dog Whisper.

I don't even have a dog.

I don't even particularly like dogs.

But I've discovered that you don't really need to have a disobedient, overactive dog to use Cesar Millan's helpful advice. 

I have used some of his common sense principles of dog psychology in parenting. I particularly like the concept that an overactive, naughty dog is much more likely to settle down and obey when it has been properly exercised -- when it is good and worn out. Same with overactive, naughty kids.

My kids are grown and no longer have behavioral issues. But this particular dog-rearing principle is still massively useful and effective in managing my own wildly disobedient, overactive mind.

"Overactive mind" is a real diagnosis that is often coupled with anxiety and insomnia, both of which I have. When you have an overactive mind like mine, it's as if the "on" switch is permanently stuck. And the more you try to switch it "off", the more "on" it gets. Imagine a light bulb that is being pumped with more voltage than it's supposed to conduct, so that it's constantly on the verge of shattering.

Or, imagine a hyperactive dog that is constantly barking, biting, jumping around and knocking all the tchotchkes off the tables (and then eating them). Now imagine that same dog racing around inside of your head, and every time you shout "No!" or "Bad dog!" it's as if you're encouraging its misbehavior, and so it just ramps up even more.

It's exasperating. It's incessant. It's constant. It's oppressive. It's maddening.

It makes you want to shoot the damn dog.

This is why I love The Dog Whisperer.

Thanks to Cesar Millan's advice on how to calm and quiet, rather than shoot, a hyperactive dog, I can use exercise to calm my overactive mind effectively enough so that I don't go off the deep end.

Cesar says:

"If you don't provide enough exercise, the dog's excess energy in its body will 

override everything else. That dog's mind will not be focused and its heart (or feelings)

will go completely out of control."

Mine too.

Yesterday, my yipping mind wouldn't shut the fuck up. It was barking, biting, jumping, scratching ... all that shit.

So I took Cesar's advice and used my body to get inside my head. I climbed on my road bike and pedaled, hard, for about 3 hours without stopping. I pumped music through my ears while I pumped out excess energy through my legs, and I didn't stop until my body was so exhausted that my mind finally came to heel.

The thing about overactive dogs is that they'll be overactive again tomorrow and they'll require their good, hard playtime again. And again. And again.

It's the same with my overactive mind.

That's why you'll find me out there pretty much every day, working my mind issues out through my body's tissues.

I guess that's why they call it a workout.

Anyway, I do it because Cesar says.

Sit. Stay. Good dog.

Columbine

"If I choose to look up and not down,

it's because I know what waits below."

-- Sally Brampton, 

Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

Columbine flower 5-30-14

Columbine is one of my favorite wildflowers.

Happy, sun-drenched clumps of it run rampant along the south side of my house. They remind me of the funny stilt-walkers at a circus with their silly little belled, jester-hat blooms perched high atop long, leggy stems.

Up close, their demure, down-turned blossoms are a particularly delicate and lovely example of nature's wondrously deft hand at intricacy.

According to legend, the Columbine flower is the symbol for foolishness.

If you Google the word "Columbine" though, you won't get images of happy wildflowers. You'll get a startling barrage of words like massacre, rampage, psychopaths, shootings, murders, killers, monsters, bloodbath, horror, rage and tragedy.

Do an image search and you'll be smacked with an even more disturbing collage of photos depicting all of the above.

Sadly, ever since an April day in 1999, this happy, innocent wildflower that never hurt anyone is forevermore linked with unimaginable darkness.

It's the polarity of life, I suppose, the dramatic through-line of all existence, the tug and pull of opposite ends.

Good and evil.
Darkness and light.
High and low.
Happy and sad.
Love and hate.
Yes and no.
In and out.
Life and death.
Beginning and ending.
Now and never.
Here and gone.

I guess I'm writing this to remind myself (and you if you need reminding) that life's not all bad. Even the worst parts -- even the parts that seem unimaginably dark and hopeless when you're trapped in them -- have a flip-side.

Things get better eventually. Wounds heal, eventually. Even if eventually takes a lifetime.

At least I hope so.

I was reminded of this hope yesterday when I saw that despite the mud and blood spattered all over her good name (people used to name their newborn daughters Columbine. I don't have to do a baby names popularity search to know it's probably scraping the bottom of the barrel these days), my Columbine keeps blooming.

My Columbine keeps dancing in the sunshine.

Those silly little fool's caps keep bobbing in the Spring breeze.

Their heads may be bowed, their delicate faces may be down-turned, but they keep on reaching towards the sky.

A Reminder Of How Far I've Come

"Now you're beside me, and look how far we've come, so far."

-- "Robert," Enchanted

Self portrait 5-8-14

"What mattered to me in that moment was that I did not freak out.

I did not catastrophize as if it were a person I love who died ... 

Once upon a time, when anything went wrong, I fell apart.

Responding calmly for me is a huge victory.

So I decided to stop and celebrate that, to rejoice in how far I've come."

-- Lori Deschene, "Tiny Wisdom: How Far We've Come," tinybuddha.com

I've had a few rough, restless nights in the sleep department lately.

It's been a while.

Not that long ago it was a nightly thing, me struggling to fall asleep, and to stay there. Insomnia ruled my nights, my days, my life.

But I'm better now, right? Cured. Thanks to months of a rigorous "sleep restructuring" regimen I'm sleeping heartily, robustly, solid as a log night after night. 

Or so I thought.

But it's OK. My sleep specialists told me there would be nights like this. 

So I didn't panic when I started to feel that old feeling creeping back, that one where I'm still lying there wide awake and it's 2:30 a.m. and I'm getting more and more agitated. The one where I wake up night after night at 3 or 4 in the morning and then can't get back to sleep. The one where I'm reaching for the forbidden gin bottle, or Ambien bottle and taking just a half ... and then another half.

I'm not freaking out. 

Instead of reaching for the whiskey, I'm reaching for the rules and the tools I learned in "sleep school" and I am fighting back.

Old me would have had an insomniac-crazed meltdown.

New me feels the scary feelings of insomnia lurking in the shadows, then takes a deep breath and logically reassesses the situation and calmly says "Hey insomnia, I see you're lurking in the shadows there. And that's weird, you know, because I thought I kicked your annoying ass. Don't get too comfortable, because I'm going to make a few adjustments and send you packing again you pesky little fucker."

So I've tweaked a couple of knobs, turned a few dials. It's not fixed yet, but I'll get there. It may take a little while, but I'll get there.

Meanwhile, I've had a good little reminder of how far I've come. How hard I've worked. How much I've grown. Which choices I need to make to protect my sleep. Where perhaps I've grown a little lax, a little lazy.

Reminders are good.

A pain in the ass, but good.

A Beer At The Ball Game

"Beer needs baseball, 

and baseball needs beer --

it has always been thus."

-- Peter Richmond

Beer bottle caps 4-214

" ... there is only one game at the heart of America and that is baseball,

and only one beverage to be found sloshing at the depth of our national soul and that is beer."

-- Peter Richmond

Beer and opener 4-21-14

Ray Kinsella:

"So what do you want?"

Terence Mann:

"I want them to stop looking to me for answers, begging me to speak again,
write again, be a leader.

I want them to start thinking for themselves.
I want my privacy."

Ray Kinsella:

"No, I mean, what do you WANT?"

(gestures to the concession stand)

Terence Mann:

"Oh. Dog and a beer."

-- Field of Dreams

I've been seriously trying to curb my alcohol consumption. I'm doing it for a number of reasons, but primarily because alcohol seriously fucks with my sleep.

After a long, drawn-out, desperately-hard-fought battle with insomnia, trust me, a solid night's sleep is a lot more satisfying than a drink.

But what is a recovering insomniac girl to do when she's at a baseball game on a perfectly sunny day and she wants to enjoy the pure, simple pleasure of a cold beer? Every baseball fans knows beer and baseball just go together. It's a no-brainer, one of those unwritten laws of humanity, and baseball.

So you feel kind of left out when you're at the game and everyone around you is slurping a foamy, amber, cold one and you're, well, not. 

We spent Easter day at the Indians vs. Blue Jays game (Tribe won 6 to 4). The beer yearning started on the drive over, and then intensified sharply as we walked to our seats (which were awesome, by the way), and past every single beer vendor on the concourse. And this is Cleveland, people. Cleveland is a beer town. So the beer choices at Progressive Field are vast and wide, including everything from from the typical big name stuff, to a huge and lovely selection of little-known craft beers and local brews, offered every which way -- in cans, in bottles, on tap. I've heard that they even tweak their beer selections throughout the year to appeal to fans of the visiting clubs. And we were playing a team from Canada, for fuck's sake.

I was a sitting duck.

But I had a strategy.

At home, I've become quite the connoisseur of non-alcoholic beers. Don't judge. Some of them are pretty damned tasty if you give them a chance, and if you aren't in it for the beer buzz. My favorites are a German one (Kaliber, by Guinness) and a Canadian one (Labatt's, by duh Labatt's). Coors is a close third. Sharp's and O'Doul's are at the bottom of the beer barrel.

Anyway, I figured that any baseball stadium offering Spotted Cow Ale had to serve at least one n/a brew. 

My dear and persistent husband asked at almost every beer stand we passed. The concessionaires all shook their heads. Some referred us vaguely to a restaurant way back and up one level at the far stadium entrance that might have it, but they weren't sure.

Leo was getting a little impatient with the search.

Him: "Why don't you just get a Bud Light? It's the same thing."

Me: "I am not going off the wagon for a Bud Light."

Then we struck gold. Or amber. Or, well, watery amber, but still, it was better than nothing.

The last place we passed before our section had O'Doul's.

It took a while to get it, because the clerk couldn't find the button for it on her register, because there wasn't one. She said we were the first people to ask for it all season. She wasn't even sure how much to charge for it. My husband convinced her to charge me the soft drink price (since there's no booze in it), and he even finagled me a souvenir drink cup. (It helps to have a really cute husband in situations like this).

Clutching my hard-won prize, we made it to our seats and I took my first long sip. Yes, it was a little watery. Yes, the flavor was a little thin. But it was cold and foamy and fizzy.

Licking the foam from my lips, I didn't feel left out. I felt like part of the crowd.

It was a little thing, but a good thing.

Best of all, it was beer. 

And even better than that -- I slept like a baby.

Re-Emerging

"This world is clearly emerging before our eyes.

The shifts ahead, the opportunities ahead are massive."

-- Carly Fiorina

Tulip sprouts 3-21-14

"We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments."

-- Dane Cook

Tulip sprouts (2) 3-21-14

"You raze the old to raise the new."

-- Justina Chen, North of Beautiful

Tulip sprouts (3) 3-21-14

A year ago at this time I was in a dark and scary place.

I'd kind of dropped out of my life. I'd gone underground, buried beneath the pressing weights of insomnia, anxiety and depression.

I'd stopped doing some things that, until then, had been very important parts of who I am. Most notably, I'd stopped acting.

In addition to my 365 days projects, I am also an actor. Theater mostly. But performing on stage and auditioning for roles, in my then-current condition, was out of the question.

In the last show I did, I was so exhausted and sleep deprived that I forgot my lines onstage more than once, which is definitely not something I am used to. During a scene in the show before that, my persistent facial spasm went apeshit and the other actor zeroed in on it, and it totally threw him off his game. In the green room afterwards, he teased me about it and I tried to play along with the joking, but it hurt. A lot.

I do most of my work an hour away in Cleveland, and there were nights I drove to and from rehearsals after 36 hour stretches of zero sleep, nights when I had no fucking business being behind the wheel of a car.

It all scared the shit out of me. It left me snake bit, gun shy, and super skittish about wanting to try again too soon, if at all.

The thing that scared me most, though, was how easily I was able to let go. I was growing ever more lackadaisical and apathetic about something that had once been a driving force and a passion. I didn't give a fuck. And even if I wanted to give a fuck, I didn't have a fuck to give. The passion, the drive, the hunger, the need -- vanished.

I was honestly starting to doubt whether I'd ever get back on the horse.

But yesterday I got a sensation that something was stirring again -- struggling to break the surface and re-emerge after its long, hard, dark dormancy.

I went on my first audition in almost a year and a half.

I think I did OK. I felt good about it. I was rested, calm, confident. The atmosphere felt familiar and right. My facial spasm was wonderfully obedient.

And whether I get the job or not is beside the point. The important thing is that I did it. I showed up. I went. I tried. I pushed back up through the packed earth and peeked out at a world I feared I'd never see again.

Guess what? It's still there.

So am I.