This story mentions child sexual abuse.
I am holding my dog's paw in my hand in the dark, clutching the animal's foot as if it is a talisman. It is 2:37 am and again I cannot sleep. The grey fur and blunt claws in my palm bring me comfort. I nuzzle my face into the miniature schnauzer's furry neck, cuddling his body against my torso. There are benzodiazepine pills in my purse to bring comfort at moments like this but I am terrified to take them.
In my late thirties, I have become an insomniac, familiar with the silence of the small hours and suddenly a stranger to rest.
When I wake in the night, as I often do these days, I pester my dog. I open the door to his crate and rouse him. I lift all 11.2kg of the sleepy creature and, leaving the lights off so as not to wake my fiancé, walk slowly - toes gingerly reaching out to avoid colliding with objects of furniture - back towards the bed. I tuck the dog under the sheets with me. He is my teddy bear and he is alive. As my mind races I try to focus on the reliable rhythm of his breathing to help me remain present. With the man I'll soon marry on my left and my nine-year-old dog on my right I feel safe, sandwiched between two living breathing reminders of reality who love me.
Watch: Did you know that with your dog at night is actually good for you and your sleep? Post continues after video.
If I were well-rested, perhaps I would be a woman who socialises more easily. Maybe my shoulders would be slack instead of feeling as firm as cement and always rising high with tension to meet my ears.
Self-aware, I judge myself as too uptight when I meet another woman for a glass of wine after work. Friendship doesn't come easily to me. My anecdotes are always angled on the negative, I judge myself. I'm not fun enough. When you ask me how something in my life is going, I'll make a mocking comment to deprecate myself in order to undercut my immense good fortune. I have love and plenty of money, so I tease myself when I tell you how I am. I don't want to appear to gloat but then I go too far the other way. I'll tell you how we still haven't hung all our artwork yet because we're useless when you ask how we're settling into our new home. I'll admit the attic and garage are crammed full of crap we haven't organised yet before I tell you how much I adore the open-plan living, dining and kitchen space in the new house. I don't want to seem too lucky so I come off bitter when I try to be humble. I use the word "hard" too often as an adjective. There is no aspect of my life that I won't describe as somehow "hard" but beneath those comments what I really want to tell you is that I'm just so goddamn underslept and I am suffering night after night.
If I slept well, I might laugh lightly. I could be one of these people who greets others with a wide, warm smile and offers casual genuine hugs instead of holding this pinched expression on my tired face. I might be laid back enough to participate in team sports where one trades banter with those on your side while throwing or kicking or hitting balls about. The only exercise I do is intent, solitary and serious running. My headphones are on and I am alone as I strike the pavement with my sneakers seriously along the streets of the suburb I live in. But if I slept well maybe I'd join the local tennis club. I could have my own racket and whack a lime green ball, lobbing it with a smile at my opponent, knowing we'd drink gin and tonics and chat together after the game. In order to relax, you need to be relaxed. And I am not.
My colleagues like to do karaoke. This is an activity I have never in my life participated in. I always go home early from work drinks and almost never have more than two glasses of wine in an evening, fearing the unfamiliar way my limbs feel when they begin to loosen. I'm used to my body feeling taut and brittle as if I'd like to unscrew each of my limbs from their sockets, bathe my bones in a cleansing lavender sea salt warm water mixture then lay them out in the sun to dry before putting myself back together.
Perhaps if my nights were less stressful I would grab the microphone and belt out 'We Are The Champions'. Maybe if I slept well I would perform a rendition of Taylor Dayne's 'Tell It To My Heart' in front of others with the same enthusiasm I give the song alone in my car, as a way to bond with others and make my friends laugh.
I wouldn't know. I am not a well-rested woman.
I lose my mind in the night. It escapes me. My thoughts are no longer my own.
This year, I was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. While I've never fought in a war or lived through a terrorist attack, I've endured violence at the hands of men and it haunts me, especially after midnight.
As a woman who has completed half marathons and a Masters degree, I pride myself on independence and intelligence but this year I've had to surrender. My lack of sleep has rendered me simply unwell.
In the planner on my desk, I record how well I've slept. Flicking back several weeks I can see I haven't slept well for two consecutive nights in a long time.
One worried day during winter, when I hadn't slept well for over two months, I cried in the office of a new doctor. I had just met this medical professional but I loudly laid my life story at her feet, through sobs, pausing to wipe away snot. Wearing the Uniqlo light tracksuit pants from Tokyo that I put on for bed and kept on when morning came without me having slept, and a waterproof black puffer jacket, I told the doctor how I was raped at the age of three.
When I was six, an awful ex-partner of my mother's broke in through the glass of my bedroom window in the middle of the night (the police came, we never slept in that house again), and that same man later rammed his car into my mother's car on the motorway while I was in the back seat. He contacted me two years ago. I still feel the impact on my shoulder and neck of how my body had slammed against the side of the vehicle that day. I still hear the glass breaking, I still feel the pressure of the rapist's hand on my chest and see the way he'd avoided my eyes and hear how he spat out, "This is what men and women do" as if in explanation for his actions when I protested, not understanding at the age of three what was happening but knowing I felt unsafe and violated.
All of this happened in the 1980s. I am safe now. I am an adult. I live in a different city. The only sex I have is consensual. But it's now, as I near 40, that I cannot sleep and the memories are crowding into my mind against my will. They march in like intrusive thoughts. I feel under siege. The doctor prescribed melatonin and recommended prioritising self-care.
I've come to fear sleep. I drop off okay but wake as alert as if I'm in the act of fleeing an intruder. My dreams are stressful and taunting. The scenarios change but I'm always under an immense time pressure and failing to achieve what I need to. I often dream in painstaking real-time of being late to the airport for an important flight, living through each panicked step while I sleep. This is not restful. I wake up heartsick and fearful. As a kid, I often dreamed of being chased by a man with a knife - a child's oversimplification of the psychological and physical abuse my mother's ex-partner unleashed upon us, capturing how I felt on edge at all times after experiencing a surprise attack of violence when I had been asleep in the safety of my own home.
Before seeing the doctor, I wondered if my inability to sleep was hormonal. Early menopause can come for some women and perhaps I was one of them. Given I went through puberty early, sprouting hair at my crotch aged only nine, it could make sense that my fertility ends early too. I had that one weird, chunky, period recently - all tissue, no blood flow - then skipped a bleed. I've read two different books about menopause written by women who are not medical doctors - although they researched scientific articles - and both claimed menopause could come as early as 37. I am 39. Perhaps my lack of rest is due to the onset of a lack of fertility. I experience all the sleep deprivation of having a baby, without an infant to love.
Perhaps it could be stress. The Government has changed here in New Zealand to a more right-wing leadership that does not consider climate change to be a top priority, and my partner and I both work in public sector roles that focus on climate change. I often think about work over the weekends and in my off hours.
Maybe it's just all the change I've been through this year. My fiancé and I moved in together six months ago. The process of combining two households and blending our families (his six-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, and my dog and my cat) has not been without complications. My day-to-day home life has been upended. I no longer live alone in a reliably quiet home with only my pets for company. I am surrounded by love and confronted with the moods of two other people when I sometimes wish for solitude.
Six months after I'd cried in the office of my new doctor, I had an appointment with a psychiatrist that the GP recommended. It took half a year to be seen because I did not report any urgent symptoms like feeling suicidal. My insomnia could wait, the medical profession decided.
I repeat my spiel of all the acts of violence I endured as a child and how they affected me. I describe for the psychiatrist how I'm overrun with vivid thoughts of my most painful childhood memories when I'm washing and blowdrying my hair - using both hands, unable to distract myself with the narratives of a podcast. It's like a shopping list that I go through line by line, item by item. Remember that time when. Remember this moment. Recall this feeling. I relive the most stressful instances of my childhood repeatedly.
I explain how I've been triggered to recall the fear and panic of the home invasion.
The psychiatrist hears how certain gestures during sex can trigger memories of the childhood rape. She hears me explain how often I think of it - at least once a day. She dictates a letter to my GP in front of me at the end of our appointment, reporting how I appeared distressed and became flushed while explaining my symptoms. She describes me as overweight, blonde and wearing a blue summer dress and glasses. She prescribes a pill for nightmares and an SSRI to take while I continue seeing a psychotherapist to work on my responses to the triggers, and a just-in-case benzodiazepine for if I become additionally agitated while adjusting to the medication. She explains how people can become more anxious while they get used to the drugs but that means they're working because the parts of your brain they're intending to treat are responding. She encourages me to ride it out, saying that many people give up in the first few weeks when they feel worse before getting better.
Listen to Fill My Cup where Allira shares the reasons you're always so anxious. Post continues afer audio.
Sleep is essential to survival. It is something we all need to maintain basic health. It is one of the simplest things the human body can do, something we usually learn to achieve on our first day of life outside the womb. Babies are bad at sleeping because they're just learning how to live. Women who are almost forty, like me, are supposed to know how to sleep through the night.
Being well rested, behaving calmly and looking beautiful (aka not tired), is prized in our culture. Telling someone they look tired is a great insult. A 2017 article on Slate counsels that it is better to ask someone how they are with genuine interest and concern than to tell them they look tired.
Vogue magazine touts that it can teach me an eyeliner trick that is the secret to awakening tired eyes (draw an off-white or nude eyeliner pencil across the waterline of your eyes). Victoria Beckham claims it is very rare for her to get a full night's rest but thanks to an eyeliner pencil that promises "instant brightening" she says "nobody has to know" that she hasn't slept.
Perhaps women are expected to endure a lack of sleep and just slather on make-up to hide it. Why rest when you can just pretend? What matters isn't how healthy your tired body feels, the magazine seems to say, but how pretty other people think you look. Your appearance is more important than your ability to perform the basic bodily function of sleeping and make-up is here to save your face from the shame of others knowing you have failed to rest. Vogue can also tell me which concealer Jennifer Lopez prefers for hiding her under-eye dark circles, which is important.
Modern Beauty Wisdom recommends that you rub cold crystals over the circles under your eyes You can get a twenty-four karat vibrating gold wand that rubs over the face for a youthful appearance for US$195 from Goop. They also sell an eye mask contraption with 96 LED lights inside it that you wear over your ugly dark circles for three minutes a day to look "refreshed, luminous and noticeably more awake". The Goop writer who penned the copy promoting the device gushed that it made her look as if a magician "did a vanishing act" on her dark circles.
Some beauty blogs advise you should use haemorrhoid cream on these unsightly dark circles. Apparently, it reduces puffiness. I wear make-up most days so I cover the dark circles anyway but it's the look in my eyes that gives me away - I appear frantic. It is clear I am not rested. The dark circles are nothing compared to the look my pupils convey. There are no products I can buy to magic that away.
Sleep is something graceful women do. Fairytale women like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White rest for long periods of time. It is an elegant act. They are sacred and vulnerable while at rest.
Peaceful women close their eyes, keep their faces impassive, rest their bodies and do not speak. I have my eyes open in the dark. I feel rabid when I am meant to be at rest. I am not graceful. I am failing to be pretty.
I don't even like to take paracetamol. I avoid pharmaceutical relief for a headache until the throbbing inside my skull becomes unbearable. Eat a vegetable and go for a run, I tell myself harshly if I feel run down. Taking the pills I've been prescribed to help me sleep feels annoying, insulting and against my nature. But I'm desperate. Look in my tired eyes: I need some help.
The version of me who didn't experience violence during her formative years played netball at school. She wore short pleated uniform skirts and Nike kicks. She yelled across the court to other girls and huddled in group hugs with her fellow sportswomen.
Instead of hiding out alone in the darkroom at high school perfecting analogue photography skills with techniques that would become outdated by the time she graduated, she would focus on the faces of her peers instead of her own art. She might have laughed with classmates and sat out in the sun on the school's field instead of breathing in the chemicals in the photography lab. She might have felt the fresh air more often.
Maybe I would have found more joy and less bitter transactional power in sex if I hadn't been abused in my infancy. If I hadn't experienced great stress and trauma in my childhood maybe I would have had the pragmatism to work harder at sciences and languages at school, instead of focusing only on the arts that came naturally to me. Maybe I would have stuck with Japanese lessons and learned to write kanji. Maybe I would have spent more time walking to class with others instead of keeping my head down and forever holding a cigarette in my right hand. Maybe I would have spent more time in the shared dining room at the University of Otago hall eating awful meals (peas mixed with mayonnaise was a common side dish at dinner) instead of smoking cigarettes on the second-floor balcony alone. I only lasted six weeks there, returning to my hometown of Auckland to complete a BA instead of stretching outside my comfort zone. It was expensive to be at Otago and besides, I was too stressed to try new things.
If a violent home invasion hadn't interrupted my sleep when I was only six years old maybe I would be more confident and carefree when interacting with senior people in my career. Maybe I'd be less reserved, removed and polite and more able to help others warm to me by making jokes and being at ease enough to find points of connection between us. Maybe I would be less terrified of life, less on edge. Maybe I'd feel breezy.
If careless, spiteful men hadn't chosen to behave violently towards me when I was a young girl maybe I would have a more open expression on my face. Maybe I would sleep through the hour of 3am.
What is it like to feel at ease? What does your body feel like when you are not greatly stressed most of the time? Really, I want to know. I don't get it.
Stroking my dog, concentrating on his breathing, I feel panic rising. Nothing is happening right now but my mind is slipping away from my control, racing. I've been taking the SSRI and the nightmare pills for about nine days now. I pick up my phone, despite knowing blue light is bad for sleep, and read through the muscle-relaxing body scan exercise I have saved on the Notes app that my therapist had emailed through. I raise my eyebrows, hold them for five seconds, release them. Arch my back, curl my toes, tighten my biceps and release. Methodically I work through each muscle group and then picture a bright white light entering my body from the top of my head down through each limb.
Forty-five minutes later I'm more panicked than before, thinking through bad childhood memories and feeling the fear as if those things are happening right now. I give in. I take half a benzodiazepine, feeling guilty about it and nervous about addiction. I've failed to get myself to sleep. I feel like such a loser. But I sleep not long after that.
I wasn't just robbed of my innocence. I was robbed of relaxation. I was robbed of a lifetime of sleeping well. I was robbed of the ability to enjoy sex with freedom from flashbacks. I had confidence stolen from me. I had rest stolen from me. My rage will never be sated.
I often wish I had a smash room in my house. I need a private space that is always available where I can dispel the tension in my body by taking beautiful pieces of crockery and launching them at a concrete floor, creating a roar of sound as the object smashes and feeling the satisfaction of destruction. I want a way to release anger. Something more tangible than writing down my ugliest feelings on a scrap of paper and then burning it in the kitchen sink, washing away the ashes of my fury. I want damage and noise. Something tangible, physical. I want relief and release.
With a therapist, I talk through picturing my young self before I was raped. There's a photo of me in a grey leopard print sweater with choppy bangs, grinning with bright eyes. It was taken not long before it happened. I see myself aged three animating from the moment of that photograph, walking out of that room, down the hallway and to the front door of that house. My little self reaches up on tiptoes to the doorknob and exits the property where the bad thing happened. She walks across the verandah, down the steps and out the path to where I - my adult self - am waiting on the sidewalk with open arms. I scoop myself up, kiss her cheek and walk her (me) down the street talking sweetly and reassuringly about how wonderful our adulthood will be. I'll have pets and plenty of money and a nice home, I tell myself. The more I imagine this visualisation the stronger it becomes. I see my childhood self walking faster. I catch my own eye at the top of the steps and run to my own adult arms on the sidewalk, gleeful and relieved. The images become clearer the more I picture them. The visualisation completes faster and feels more satisfying. More convincing.
It's not real. But I like to pretend.
I imagine there is a single bed in the office of the house where I live now. Instead of a worn old armchair which actually sits in the corner of that room, I see a bed made up with clean sheets. I picture my clean, un-assaulted childhood self who I rescued from that house through my visualisation here lying in the bed. I've brought her home to my adult house I currently live in, where she can rest. She's safe. I see her there clear as day. Before I go to bed I sometimes look in on that room and see an imaginary bed instead of the real armchair and picture myself, sweet and trusting, tucked up and getting the rest she deserves. Goodnight, I tell her, sleep well.
If this brings up any issues for you, contact Bravehearts, an organisation dedicated to the prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse, on 1800 272 831.
And if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service.
Mamamia is a charity partner of RizeUp Australia, a national organisation that helps women, children and families move on after the devastation of domestic and family violence. Their mission is to deliver life-changing and practical support to these families when they need it most. If you would like to support their mission you can donate here.
Feature image: Ebony Lamb.
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