Without sleep I spend the following day feeling queasy and borderline psychotic, and there is no greater misery than lying awake, staring into the darkness, worrying about all the important things I have to – have to – do when morning arrives.
There are many varieties of insomnia: there’s the one where sleep refuses to show up at bedtime; there’s the one where I’m awoken abruptly at 4 a.m. and that’s my lot for the night (with that version, the sound I dread the most is the first bus – it means the night is over and there’s no more chance of sleep). Then there’s the 5.15 a.m. version, when – oddly – I eventually tumble back into sleep, ten minutes before the alarm goes off, and I wake up feeling like I’m coming round from a general anaesthetic. I’m prone to them all.
Every day, my preparations for sleep begin about twenty minutes after I wake up. I have my lone daily permitted cup of coffee and instantly wish I could have twelve more, but I chide myself, ‘No, no! Think of the caffeine! In fifteen short hours’ time, you’ll be desperately trying to fall asleep and you don’t want to scupper all chances by flooding yourself with stimulants. So I’m sorry, but no.’
‘They’ say that lavender is the insomniac’s friend – that if, at bedtime, I drench my pillow in lavender mist, I’ll tumble easily into eight blissful hours of oblivion. But surely I can’t be the only person who thinks that lavender smells gank? Because, yes, I bought the spray and drenched my pillow with it, only to wake in the darkness-of-the-night, thinking, ‘Christ alive, what’s that horrific stench?’ And I was only able to get back to sleep by putting the ruined pillow outside the front door and borrowing a smell-free pillow from the spare room.
A long soak in a hot bath is another frequently recommended sleep-lurer. But I hate water, I hate getting wet, and if I had one great wish for the human race, it wouldn’t be something worthy like us all being able to live in harmony, but that we could be ‘self-cleaning’ – that we’d have no need to ever wash ourselves.
Nevertheless, during a recent bad bout of The Awakes, I gave the hot-bath thing a go. But when Himself looked in on me, and saw me sitting bolt upright, among the bubbles, anxiously watching the clock, he said sadly, ‘I don’t think you’re really getting the best from this experience.’
‘Grand,’ I said, eagerly clambering out. ‘I tried, I failed. C’est la vee. Pass me the towel.’
I usually ‘retire’ before Himself, hoping to be asleep before he arrives, because he nods off in two seconds flat and I lie staring into the darkness, feeling like a lonely failure.
If I’m still awake when he comes to bed, we have a little snuggle, but if I feel stirrings in his nethers, I have to say, ‘No. No! Not now. Leave it till the morning and I’ll see you right, but not now. Now I need to concentrate hard on going to sleep. Goodnight, goodnight, sorry, but goodnight.’
I’ll tell you what does work with insomnia – tablets. Yes. Sleeping pills. They are lovely. Ambien, Stilnoct, Zimovane, those sorts of things. They do all the hard graft, they welcome me on board the Sleep Express and soon enough they’ve whisked me away to merciful oblivion. But after a while they stop being lovely, and higher amounts of them are needed to achieve the initial blissful effect, and then I find myself in my doctor’s, begging for more and being told to hop it, that they’re addictive and only intended for ‘short-term use’. Also, there are countless reports of people doing very strange things while under the influence of sleepers – eating the entire contents of the fridge and remembering nothing about it, or more sinister stuff, like driving and crashing, and really, I don’t want to do that. So actually, sleeping tablets are very bad news.
Over time I’ve learnt some tricks to help me sleep – regular exercise is one of them. (I realize this isn’t exactly breaking news, but when you’re in a queasy insomniac fog it’s hard to muster the will to exercise, so you never get to find out that actually it really does help).
And all that blah about having no electronics in the bedroom is also true. As is reading an extraordinarily detailed biography of an army general.
Lists, too, they’re handy. Each night I list all my jobs – from ‘google Gucci nail varnishes’ to ‘lose two stone’ – then the notebook has to be placed outside the bedroom door because otherwise I can ‘feel’ it at me all night, disturbing me with its countless demands.
Next I do some sort of gratitude list; it doesn’t have to be a War and Peace-length opus, but it’s good to write three or four things I’m grateful for (e.g. a lavender-free pillow, the gift of sight, the fact that the cold sore on my lip didn’t burgeon across my entire chin, that sort of thing).
Most importantly, I do a scan of my day, seeking unpleasant emotions that I tried to gloss over at the time: shame is usually a biggie – shame that I didn’t stand up for myself, or shame that I did stand up for myself. I try not to bury any negative emotion, because it’ll burrow up through me and emerge as awakeness at 4 a.m.
Even so, there are still some nights when I literally don’t sleep at all and I feel like I’m going insane.
Himself says I should just admit defeat and get up and go to the spare room and read. But I lie in bed in the dark, raging to myself, ‘Sleep is a basic human instinct. It’s like hunger and lust and the desire for lovely shoes. I am entitled to it. It is my right. I’m not moving, I’m staying right here in this bed, where I deserve to be, and I am not leaving until my needs have been met!’ I’m on the verge of singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.
There is no loneliness like the middle-of-the-night loneliness, and recently I actually did go to the spare room and into the emptiness of cyberspace I tweeted, ‘Is anyone awake?’
But nothing happened, and I felt very sad.
Then my tablet made a little noise – a tweet had arrived. One word, ‘Yes.’ So someone else was awake! Next thing another tweet arrived: ‘I’m awake too.’ And then more: ‘I’ve been awake since two’; ‘I’m breastfeeding my baby’; ‘I’m still on LA time’; ‘I had a bad dream and I’m afraid to go back to sleep’; ‘I’ve got a big presentation tomorrow and I’m catastrophizing.’
And suddenly there were dozens and dozens of us, all of us awake at the wrong time – then I felt really happy and sang ‘Message in a Bottle’ at the top of my voice: ‘Seems I’m not alone in being aloooonnne. Hundred million castaways looking for a HOOOOOOMMMME!’
And from the next room, Himself’s voice shouted, ‘Quieten the feck down, I’m trying to sleep in here.’
First published in the Sunday Times Style, December 2014.
Yoga
Did I ever tell you about the time I decided to become a yoga instructor? Only a couple of years ago, it was.
Well, like all women of my age, I’d ‘dabbled’ over the years, I’d done my fair share of ‘experimenting’. Yoga used to be a thing that only hippies did, but about fifteen years ago a new mutated version of yoga started doing the rounds. This yoga wasn’t an adjunct to meditation but a new way to get hard-bodied. It was cripplingly difficult. So difficult that it was okay for even rugby and GAA players to do it. (Although I believe they’ve stopped now.)
This new yoga pretended to be ‘spiritual’ like the old yoga, and every class would begin with a wafty speech from the instructor about how you should listen to your body and how you shouldn’t be in competition with anyone around you and it was ‘your practice’ and no one else’s, and everyone would nod in agreement. But in reality I found it horribly competitive and there were times when I’d be holding a pose and the sweat would be pouring off me and I’d feel like I was going to die but I was damned if I was going
to give my screaming muscles a break and topple on to the floor and let the girl beside me with the fake-serene look on her face snicker up her sleeve.
People – oh, they can deny it all they like, but it’s true – were even competitive about their mats: every now and again someone would show up with a springy new mat in a beautiful colour that you couldn’t get in Ireland and they’d be swanking around, acting all ‘Oh this old thing?’ about it, and everyone would be sickened with jealousy and stare at their own curly-edged old blue mat with hatred but then they had to get all spiritual and ‘rise above it’.
I hated yoga. In fairness, I hated all exercise but regarded it as a necessary evil. Yoga, however, was the most awful – I think it was the cod spirituality that made it difficult to stomach. A spinning class might be hell, but at least no one makes you think positive thoughts about people you dislike – you think about your thighs and that’s all.
So with yoga, I’d go for a while, then I’d stop. Then I’d read another article about how yoga builds core strength and gives you lovely long lean muscles and gives you peace of mind into the bargain and I’d start up again for a while, but always lapse.
I never got the serenity that people talked about. Then, when it all went to hell with me, mental-health-wise, and I flailed around, looking for a lifebuoy, I somehow started doing yoga again and to my great surprise I’d get moments at the end of a class when my tormented head would settle down and I’d have a brief spell of feeling like I could cope.
Yoga, I decided, was the answer. Yoga would save me. Yoga would give me a new life! I couldn’t write and I needed a job, so why not become a yoga instructor?! I had great plans: I’d open each class with beautiful inspirational readings; at the end I’d talk people through glorious visualizations and I’d cover them with pink cashmere throws – I spent the best part of a day on the Designers Guild site trying to decide which blankets to buy. I wondered about venues. And how much I should charge people. And other mad stuff.
Then I found a yoga school! Over the course of a year I’d do twelve weekends of practical and theoretical yoga and at the end I’d do an exam and, assuming I passed, then I’d be a yoga instructor. Earnestly, I began my ‘study’. I bought a fabulous jealous-making purple mat. And a notebook. But there was one thing I hadn’t factored into the equation: I didn’t look like a yoga instructor. Yoga instructors are lean and long and lithe and limber and lissom. They can do headstands and handstands and itch their eye with their big toe, and if they aren’t born that way, they get that way by starting to practise yoga at a young age and doing it all day, every day.
I was the wrong side of forty-five. Throughout my life I’d exercised sporadically at best. I was short and stout and my joints had already started to seize up – my right hip was gammy and my right knee was banjaxed.
Worst of all, I had the wrong kind of feet. Yoga instructors’ feet are as soft and pink as a baby’s cheek. My feet look like the Burren – my soles are insulated with layer upon layer of grey stony stuff. I went to a woman who promised to burn off the limestone, which she duly did, but the skin underneath was a startlingly bright yellow. It was hopeless, hopeless.
And to be honest, by then I was losing interest. It was too hard – I was expected to do a yoga class every day. And there were too many Sanskrit words: Savasanas and Padmasanas and Pranayamas. Reluctantly I admitted to myself that I’d have to find salvation and a new career elsewhere, and after the second training weekend I tiptoed quietly away, leaving my good purple mat behind.
Easons.com, August 2012.
First Aid
Recently, I fulfilled a long-held ambition, something I’ve wanted to do for years and years, a dream that I’ve nurtured for as long as I can remember but the time just never seemed right. Anyway, last Saturday it finally came to pass – I did a basic first-aid course!
… and now I sense I’ve disappointed you. Maybe you thought I was going to say I saw the sun rise over Angkor Wat? Or I floated in a hot-air balloon across the Serengeti? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one to think that way – now and again, usually when I’m promoting a book, I get wheeled out from my Dublin suburb to do interviews. And a question that’s often asked is, ‘So what’s next for Marian Keyes?’ (Because they talk this way, interviewers. Especially if they’re on the telly.) I usually mumble something about hoping to write another book, because I like writing books. But they press their case, ‘What’s on Marian Keyes’s bucket list?’
Shamefaced, Marian Keyes has to admit that, apart from the first-aid course, she doesn’t really have a bucket list – which perplexes the interviewers no end. ‘What if Hollywood comes a-calling?’ So I explain that actually Hollywood did come a-calling and flew me over there and introduced me to lots of smiley, tanned people and showed me buffet tables groaning with food, which we all stood around and admired, but which none of us actually ate from, and everyone was really, really, really lovely and clearly we were best friends for ever, but bafflingly when I got home I never heard from any of them again.
‘Well, surely there must be something,’ the interviewers insist. ‘How about swimming with dolphins?’ (Always the poor dolphins, who must be exhausted from the endless swimming they’re having to do, as they help millions of people tick off the number-one item on their list.) Then I have to explain that I have the ‘Keyes Ear’, which means myself and my siblings get infections in our right ear at the drop of a hat and I was told by an ear specialist that I must NEVER get water in mine. So swimming is out. Also, I have to admit that I don’t exactly … trust dolphins. They’re just too nice. I can’t stop myself from thinking, ‘What’s their game? What are they up to? Where’s the catch?’
At this point, my inquisitor is openly contemptuous of me – because the rule is that we’re meant to have aspirations, five-year plans, things to aim for. We have to be improving constantly, ‘moving closer to our goals’. To stand still is to regress.
But here’s how it is: I spent my entire life in a state of yearning. During my (very ordinary) childhood, happiness belonged in the far-off future and the markers kept being moved. I’d be okay when I became a teenager. No, when I left school. No, when I got a degree.
My twenties were a decade of suspended animation – before I could declare my life open for business, I needed the right man, the right job, the right flat, the right hair, the right legs and the right lifestyle (Heal’s, jogging, Barcelona).
Unaccountably, everything remained wrong. Until, through a small amount of rare proactive effort on my part, coupled with a huge amount of dumb luck, I ended up getting a book published. And I met a nice man. I got almost everything I yearned for (not the legs, nothing can be done about them, not until bone-lengthening is invented), but to my great surprise, I was not yearn-free.
Even as I was writing the first book, I was already worried about the next one – what if I couldn’t write it, what if it was awful, what if everyone hated the current one and it all became irrelevant anyway? Those worries never went away, to the point where every book that I was due to write in my lifetime I yearned to have already written, so that I didn’t have to worry about them, if that makes any sense?
But I don’t want to live in a state of yearning. I don’t want to move through my days not touching the sides. I don’t want my life to be deferred until everything is perfect, because that will be never. Instead I want to want what I have. Whatever that is.
I’m at my happiest when I want nothing. Even happier when I realize that I’m entitled to nothing – but that I’ve been granted so much. It’s only an accident of birth that I live i
n a country that’s not at war; somewhere in a refugee camp made of endless rows of tents is a Syrian woman the same age as me – we might even share a birthday – trying to accept that her home has gone for ever. When I think that way, I’m filled with wonder at the water that flows from my kitchen tap and the electricity that works my lamp, so that I can read at night. I’m grateful that I can read. And that I have a book. And that I can see … And then I’m no longer yearning. Instead I’m giddy, almost queasy at my good fortune.
So anyway, my first-aid course. You know if you’re on a plane and someone announces, ‘If there’s a doctor on board, can they make themselves known’? Well, I wanted to be that person. Basically, I wanted to be a doctor but without having to do the seven pesky years in university, followed by three years of 72-hour shifts in A&E departments.
And because I come from a family that enjoys bad health, and gets no end of peculiar ailments, I felt I’d had a great medical schooling. To be honest with you, I felt I already was a doctor in all but name.
But on the course I discovered that being a doctor is harder than I’d thought. And having to save lives – that’s a big responsibility.
Still! At least now I know and I can tick it off my list.
First published in the Sunday Times Style, June 2014.
SOUL-SEARCHING
* * *
Therapies
You know, I was always a bit odd. Growing up in dull-as-anything Catholic Ireland I was convinced that I was adopted and it was only a matter of time before my real – much more glamorous – parents showed up and whisked me off to start my real life. Aged about nine, I fell in love with Donny Osmond, and during the sermon at Mass I’d disappear into my head and fantasize about our thrilling life together in Salt Lake City – then I’d get the ferocious guilts and do a great deal of kneeling by the side of my bed, saying decades of the rosary.