I say that I have a sleeping problem. I tell people that I’ve tried different types of sleeping pills; and I have, they just don’t do anything other than give me dry mouth in the morning or leave my tastes buds bitter for the better part of the day. I say that I just can’t fall asleep, that I have racing thoughts. I tell people that I’m afraid of my nightmares or waking up from them and not realizing that they’re just fiction. I tell people that I have insomnia, that it’s something medical. Something clinical. A side-effect.
That’s not true.
I don’t sleep because I choose not to. I stay awake until five or six in the morning, fighting heavy eyelids and unfocused eyes. I feel the sleep-inducing effects of my psychiatric pills; fuck, that’s what half of them are supposed to do. I can feel the exhaustion in my arms, the tiredness in my legs, and the burning desire to sleep when I turn to my side and curl up. I lie on my back in bed, staring into the darkness, knowing that sleep doesn’t evade me; I try and hide from her.
I don’t sleep at night because I can’t stop hearing them. I can’t stop hearing myself. Yelling. Screaming. Shrieking. I can’t stop hearing my own voice, the one that’s supposed to be telling me what’s right in the world, yell at me about how much I should hate myself and how I should hurt myself and how many reasons that there are that I should jump from the highest building I can find. I hear my voice, filled with rage, and disgust, scream at me about how ashamed I should feel, that I am pathetic, that I don’t deserve to live. The voice I hide from the world behind a veneer of false normalcy comes to me at night, unmasked, and filled with fury and hate.
The other voices are worse. Sometimes they say things, random words and phrases. Sometimes I hear people talk about me, treating me like a child. Sometimes they pretend that I am right here with them; but sometimes they make it well known that they are gossiping about me, criticizing me, disgusted by me. Sometimes they just parrot whatever hateful and self-loathing things I say to myself. Sometimes they just scream; they scream and scream and scream with a voice that needs no air to sustain itself and whose vocal cords will never break from the rawness of unending sonic dissonance and degradation.
There are images too. Random things. Fantastic things. Faces from my past. People who I let down. Those that hurt me. Loved ones I miss. The gallery of every suffering complexion I have ever seen. The people who I wished I had said I loved them, but I never got the chance. They flash. They linger. They are all that I can see. Sometimes I scream for them to go, and sometimes I do everything I can to just try and remember them before I lose them amongst the pain. Faces twisted in agony mixed with glimpses of smiles I wish I remembered more vividly. My mind is a cinema, with every screen playing a different horror, a different memory; and I am bound to the chair with eyes held open forced to absorb it all.
I try to numb myself. I watch hours of YouTube. I binge episode after episode after episode. I take more drugs. I do anything to try and make myself as close to mindless as possible, anything to drown it all out. Replace the voices with a laugh track. Replace the faces with actors from a sitcom. Stop the screaming; just anything to stop the fucking screaming.
I want to sleep, I really do. It’s just that I would rather pass out exhausted and numbed from meaningless content and wake up tired than fall asleep begging for everything to stop, praying that this is my last night, that I die in my sleep so that at least I have a chance of my last moment being in a pleasant dream rather than this reality. The one where I hear mothers crying over their dead children. The one where I see bruised faces, and children whose faces hide their lost innocence. The one where my backing track is just samples of screams at different pitches. The one where I cannot stop telling myself that I hate everything about the man that I see in the mirror. The one where I am my own torturer, tormentor; where I whisper to myself to just die already.
I’m not scared of the nightmares anymore or waking up not knowing what’s real and what is just a horrible dream. Those things are fleeting, the constant repetition of my own hate-filled voice is always there, my own personal white noise machine.
I’m going to try and sleep soon, but I need to watch one more episode. Or two. Or maybe just finish the season. I would rather hear the same lame jokes and follow the obvious plot lines than keep on hearing myself tear myself apart.
I don’t want to sleep yet, they’re still here with me.