a small space in this busy world
let's talk about what matters to us
sleep and stuff
This is the text that started it all - it led me to rediscover my passion for writing and inspired me to create a blog. I started writing it last January, and finished it about two months later. Through writing it I discovered how powerful the writing process is - it is a tool that can lead to clarity, that can lead me to find answers to questions about myself. My driving question for starting this piece was why can't I fall asleep? but as I wrote, it become something so much larger. It became who am I, what do I care about, how have the things that have happened to me in the past influenced my perspective on life and people and happiness today?
I copied some of my reflective piece into the box below. I didn't want to overwhelm you with too much personal rambling on this page, but if you are interested in reading more of it I will likely share more through my blog.
love and souls and stuff
In some ways this piece is a continuation of my "sleep" piece. I started writing it last March, just a few weeks after finishing the other one and sharing it with my friend. "Sleep and stuff" did not end on a note of clarity, but rather on one of questioning, as it led me to the realization that my way of viewing the world around me did not align with reality. And I had to keep writing to figure out how to come to terms with this... how to move forward. So that's what I spent this past summer doing - writing, reflecting, about love and souls and my past and my present and my future.
I wrote close to 40,000 words on these topics, but some of them are pretty personal so I'm just going to share bits and pieces with you. Below is a sample in which I try to hone in on my beliefs on soulmates.
Okay. I think I am in the midst of a personal change… a change in way of thinking about myself and my relationship to the world around me… eek. Maybe I am just being overdramatic.
All right, so what is driving my thoughts about this is the matter of sleep. Recently, I have kind of been freaking out about it. It first happened in this way about two weeks ago. It was a Sunday night, and I was ridiculously exhausted. I had been awake until about 6:30 am the previous night, and then had to wake up in time to make it to a 12:00 meeting. I made it through the day without taking a nap, and instead resolved to go to bed super early so that I would wake up early and refreshed Monday morning. And this would all help me get on the schedule of my new semester, in which I have 8:30 classes Monday through Thursday.
So I am lying in bed on Sunday night, and all I can think about is how much I need sleep, how tired I am, and how great I will feel in the morning after 8-9 hours. Thirty minutes later I am thinking the same thoughts, only added to them is a slight sense of panic: why am I not yet asleep? What if I cannot fall asleep? These thoughts of panic escalate over the next hour or so, and before I know it it is around 11:30, and I begin subtracting hours from the lovely 8 hour total that should have been all mine. I get up to go to the bathroom, walk around a little. My sense of panic is still growing. I sit at my desk and try to do some reading for my philosophy class the next day. Still cannot bring my mind away from the nagging preoccupation of sleep. I freak out to Katie. She offers words of sympathy and advice. We start to talk about some deep shit… why do we care so much about other people? Do we care at all about people we don’t know? Is there anyone we would die for? Would we take it on us to preserve the human race? Not quite sure how all this came up… haha I guess insomnia leads to this kind of probing.
I climb into Katie’s bed with her. Sophia comes in. They talk about something. I lie there, unable to distract myself for more than half a second at a time from that central thought in my head—how tired I am. I vent my freak out to Katie and Soph. I want to take nyquil. They won’t let me, because I have already taken two benedryl. Fair enough, but it irritates me because I am so tired. Sophia says that I cannot try to force thoughts out of my mind: I need to start allowing myself to think about anything. I disagree strongly with her words. One of, if not the, primary goals of the past few years of my life has been to figure out how to control my thoughts, how to control my mind.
It started around sophomore year of high school, when I wanted to become less sensitive in my feelings, particular in regards to other people. I was hyper-sensitive towards other people’s feelings, to the point of stress and discomfort. I was envious of my friend who always seemed nonchalant, distant and unphased when it came to others (looking back, this does not seem like an admirable trait.) And it was this envy that led me to research meditation. I read up about it, and began to practice it on a daily basis. The driving goal of my practice was to become in control over my thoughts and emotions… and achieve a state of mind, a state of perspective, that would help me maintain a certain cool at all times.
My practice of meditation and application of it to social situations coincided with some other developments in high school, and they all seem very much related. One of these was academic: I stopped really stressing about school, about grades. It was sophomore year when I stopped looking at my grades on tests or essays; rather, I would shove the pages into my back pack and not give it a second thought. I avoided thinking about it all together, and I think this made me a happier person. I truly was of the mindset that all that mattered was the work put in: if I did my very best, and was learning, what did the final score matter? Truly cliché, and truly annoying, I know. But it worked for me.
I also experienced some losses in high school that made me very socially independent, and I guess reluctant to rely on other people for happiness. One of these was the loss of my best friend during my Junior year. Not an actual loss—she didn’t die or move or anything—but a loss of her in my life. It was a really sad, painful time I had cared more about our friendship than really any other relationship in my life at that time. I felt closer to her than my family members—she was the consistent rock in my life, that thing there that helped everything make sense… that I could bounce everything off of, compare everything else to. I never quite figured out what caused our friendship to end. I think it can be boiled down to miscommunication and insecurity.
Then the summer between my Junior and Senior years of high school I lost my mom. She had been sick on and off since before I could remember, ever since she had been diagnosed with breast cancer when I was five. But that year brought on a rapid, previously unseen decline in her health, culminating in her death in mid July. The Sunday after the fourth.
After these losses I became increasingly independent and self-reliant. I did not look to anyone, or anything for that matter, for happiness. By the time the end of high school came upon me, I was pretty detached from, well, everything. But not in a bad way. I was happy - filled with a constant contentment that I was confident would remain no matter what. I had come upon the exhilerating truth that my happiness did not rely on the things and people around me, but was something that I created it from within.
I even wrote about this phenomenon in my personal essay for English 125 :
Sometimes I think I sound like a life coach, spewing out cheesy lines, “It’s the work that counts, not the final product....” My college roommates make fun of me. “Is everyone from San Francisco like you—so carefree, incapable of stress? Happy all the time?” When they worry about an upcoming exam, I sprawl out on our carpeted floor and stretch like a cat. “Don’t worry about it. Live in the moment.” I hear myself, and recognize how annoying I sound.
“Look on the bright side of things. Every cloud has a silver lining.” For me, these clichés are guidelines. They are truth.
“Don’t cry over spilt milk. It won’t change anything.”
I ended my essay, however, on an ominous note: I am terrified of what will happen if the numbness wears off. What if my emotional toughness, my ability to always be happy no matter what is happening around me, is temporary? Am I subconsciously pushing other feelings—of stress, grief, and worry—down, deep down, so that they will rise up and overwhelm me when they can no longer all fit?
So how is all of this related to my several sleepless nights?
Maybe it’s not at all. But I think that since my insomnia led me to all of these reflections, there must be some correlation between them.
This is what I think:
Over the past few years, budding from the loss of my friend and my mom and building up ever since, I have developed a belief that happiness comes from within. It was intuition paired with deductive reasoning that lead me to this conclusion. First, I realized that I cannot look to other people for consistency. And not in a negative way— I’m not trying to say that all people are flaky, all will hurt or betray or leave me… not at all. Rather, its simply a statement of fact. We all change, and so do those around us. People get sick, people die. People move. People change their minds, and fall in and out of love —with places, experiences, and each other. People lose control over their emotions. People experience things that alter them in slight ways that will leave them forever changed. All of this is inevitable, and it is not bad. It just led me to realize that I cannot rely completely on those around me for my sense of self, my sense of the world, or my emotional stability, because if I do, there is always the chance that I will be left with nothing solid at all.
But over the past month or so, I have started to reconsider this mindset. And one of the triggers of this reevaluation was my insomnia. On those nights when I couldn’t sleep, I was putting an extreme amount of pressure on myself to control my thoughts. If nothing around me can touch me emotionally, what is to stop me from being in complete control over my emotions, feelings, and thoughts? I should be able to focus on anything I want whenever I want to. When I am studying, I should be able to tune out everything around me, and when I am socializing I should be living fully in the moment, my mind not once slipping into a state of concern or anxiety about something else. Furthermore, I should be able to shut off my mind whenever I want to, and fall easily into unconsciousness each night.
But that night earlier this semester, I felt an uncontrollable anxiety, because I realized that I had no control over my mind after all. I was physically exhausted and had nothing to keep me from sleeping… except my extreme need to do so. The more I thought about how much I needed sleep the more anxious I became. I began to panic. When this anxiety about sleep became a recurring issue, I realized that my anxiety was not just about sleep, but about my theory of happiness that seemed to be crumbling. If I do not have control over my own thoughts, my own feelings and emotions, what is my rock? Where can I find stability, consistency? What if I cannot control my own happiness after all? What if there is no source of constant joy and contentment, inside or outside of myself?
When it comes to love I am an idealist. It’s tricky to explain without sounding annoying and cliché, but I envision love as a relationship with another person that is so deep and intimate that we in many ways merge into one. I imagine myself being so close to this person that I tell him/her everything; there are no secrets, no hidden faces that come out when I am not with him/her; rather, s/he is inside of my mind, a piece of it, looking out of it, and I am inside his/hers. I think of it as a merging of souls—those pieces of us that remain constant and present throughout our lives and after.
That being said, I understand that love is a challenging, painful enigma that does not work in black and whites. Every person changes over time and has doubts and feels things that he/she cannot understand—this is inevitable. If love is based on the minds and hearts of two human beings, who are both filled with imperfections, contradictions and anxieties, how can it conceivably be a simple thing? But despite all this messiness and ugliness, I have faith that true love exists. And I believe that it can endure. That even though people change and shift over the course of their lifetimes, there is that center, that slice of raw soul that always stays the same…and that the bond that forms between two of these centers can last indefinitely.
And I believe that there is potential for me to develop this closeness with any person in the world; gender, race, age, appearance: none of these things really affect the soul, thus there are no criteria that limit the range of people with whom I am capable of falling in love. I am sitting in a coffee shop right now and across the room from me sits a girl, she looks about my age maybe a bit older, dressed nicely—blazer, flats, hair neat and combed, and is eating a pastry and drinking an iced beverage out of a mason jar. At the table next to her is a man in jeans and sneakers, a grungy black hoodie and baseball cap. He has scruffy facial hair and is chewing on something—gum? and is tapping his foot while doing something on the computer. Beyond what I am observing, I do not know a thing about either person. Either one might have a soul that is compatible with mine.
Unfortunately, though, there are countless barriers, countless limitations that prevent people from having access to each other’s souls. Regarding these two strangers in the coffeeshop, it is unlikely that I will even interact with them in my lifetime. Sure, I could go over to either one and strike up a conversation but that’s not really socially acceptable. But say I did, would there be any chance of it leading anywhere? Probably not. The exchange would be pretty minimal. All right but what if I got the opportunity to interact with one of them in a different context, in one that allowed for more communication? Like if I worked with or took a class with one of them? A friendly aquaintance could easily develop. But even so, I think that there would still be a bunch of barriers preventing me from truly getting to know them, because there are so many factors that prevent a clear communication about the soul from passing from one person to another.
So what are these barriers? Beyond circumstantial factors, what things prevent us from seeing each other clearly and wholly? Well I see it like this: in an ideal social interaction, the two sides involved gain insight about one another’s souls through a process of mutual presenting and recieving. Every word spoken, facial expression expressed, and gesture gested accurately reflects an aspect of the presenter’s true self, and the recipient absorbs this information and subsequently deepens his/her understanding of that person. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so this process of presenting and receiving gets blocked and tainted in a variety of ways. This blockage, or taintage, if that’s a word, occurs on both the presenting and receiving sides of a social interaction: on the one hand, people portray themselves falsely to others—either intentionally, instinctively, or subconsciously; and on the other hand, people misinterpret or simply fail to absorb the information that others present to them.
But I think that if we have in mind the ultimate goal of developing genuine connections with one another, we can overcome these barriers that keep us apart. As recipients of information about others, the necessary traits are openness and awareness. In terms of openness I like to imagine the ideal recipient being almost spongelike—absorbing, sopping up all that information about the other person that is streaming in through his/her senses without analyzing or judging it. Of course, unlike a sponge the human mind is smart and active, and will inevitably make associations and categorize and jump to conclusions about the things that it observes, but this is where the awareness must come in: if a person knows that his/her own mind is biased and all that s/he thinks of a person might be based on inaccurate interpretations or assumptions, s/he will be more capable of seeing the presenter’s soul if it is made available.
Then on the other side of social interactions, the key for the presenter is honesty: s/he must speak and behave in a way that aligns with his/her soul. And this is easier said than done, because, as I mentioned above, false portrayal is often unintentional and done on an instinctive or even subconscious level. When I say instinctive I am thinking of all the times I have said something or acted in a certain way simply to “look good for an audience.” I will agree with what someone says even if I have no idea what s/he is talking about. I will embellish and exaggerate stories for the sake of eliciting a reaction from the people around me. I will pretend to care about an issue that does not really matter to me, or appear indifferent about something that is eating away at my insides. And while I am very much aware of all of these false portrayals of myself, I also not do have much control over them; in the heat of the moment it is very easy to slip from one’s true self. And these instances will lead other people to see a me that is not the real me, likely preventing or delaying their understanding of my soul.
And then there are all the times we present ourselves falsely and it is entirely subconscious, a consequence of not fully seeing or not properly understanding parts of ourselves. We likely all hold viewpoints and have tendencies that we think of as our own but have really been picked up from the people and environments around us, and these can heavily influence the choices we make and the way that we present ourselves to the world. But how can we decipher between the parts of us that are real, and the parts that have been absorbed from our surroundings? Of course, it is impossible to fully escape from the influences of circumstance, because our awareness of how we fit into time and space is so deeply engrained in our psyches. But I believe that through open-minded explorations of the world around us we can come closer to understanding our true selves—that is, the centers that are within us and constant regardless of where we are or whom we are with. This is why I try to experience as many different things as possible—through reading, talking to people, listening to music, travelling, etc.: I am striving for those moments when something feels right—when something in the outside world clicks or connects with what is inside of me. I believe that these moments will guide me throughout my life and help clarify to me how I am meant to live, that is, how I can go through the world in a way that most closely aligns with my core self. And the more complete that my understanding of myself becomes, the more capable I will be to display this self to others in the hopes of finding, for lack of a better word, a soulmate….or several perhaps, who can be alongside me in this lifetime.