Is it insomnia or is it just roadworks?

I’ve stopped defining myself as suffering from insomnia because otherwise it would make my whole life a tragedy. It’s not even correct to describe myself as a “bad sleeper” because that implies that there is the potential of a better me existing: a superior Susie whose worth is more significant because she sleeps. Right from day 1, this has been a complaint and judgment made against me. All of the worst diagnosis of disordered existence measure your ability or inability to sleep. I regularly fail to achieve the recommended hours.

I once spent a night in the Royal Free Hospital, to see if “someone could get to the bottom of this.”
It’s ironic to note that I wasn’t quite sure what the point of this sleep deprivation trial was at the time and google wasn’t available at the time (early 1990s). I’ve just googled it and still haven’t got a clue, but it seems I could pay a lot of money if I wanted to investigate further at any point. I doubt I am the only late diagnosed adult to have been put through any number of medical procedures and investigations.

Any how, I was admitted in the early evening and given a bed on a ward that I wasn’t allowed to use, other than for observations at several points during the night, including monitoring my heart and brain waves. It was a very dull night with quite a lot of time feeling very uncomfortable being hooked up to various beeping machines . Finding myself writing that sentence now and knowing that as an autistic person, those high pitched sounds hurt my soul, I can really appreciate where my aversion to hospitals and the related medical trauma responses come from.

This images are from here, if you want to find even more about The Fury

To pass the time that I was hooked up to the science,  I imagined myself in one of the leading roles of The Fury. Thanks to my late night googling, I can tell you The Fury is a 1978 film about supernatural powers, the separation of a father and son and the theme of studying the telekinetic powers of children in order to weaponise them against the enemy, very popular in the 1970s.

Amy Irvine played Gillian, who either starred in to space in a trance like state or pulled the most extraordinarily emotional and expressive faces as her powers overwhelmed her physical being.

As I wasn’t allowed to be on the ward unless it was time for the scheduled monitoring, I was permitted to be in the “day room” and that’s where I met the other none sleepers. These were the days when the "day room" was also the "smoking room". It seems bizarre to think of smoking inside a hospital now but at the time, it was perfectly acceptable and throughout the night there were people in there. The majority were from the psychiatric wards, some inpatients waiting for transfers to secure units for assessment, some accompanied by staff and the odd "normal" person who were nervous about operations the next day. The question, “what are you in for?” was common. The element of competition over the number of sectionings under the Mental Health Act 1983, dominated conversations, as did the tally of diagnosis and labels awarded to each individual. I ranked low. Firstly for only being in over night, secondly for not being on a secure ward, thirdly for the investigation of a sleep issue (these clearly were insignificant which was a fair point as we were holding these discussions in a day room in the middle of the night). Psychological and emotional distress was also a key feature of all of the people I met that night but no one questioned the pathology and medicalisation of their situation. I walked out the next morning with that bizarre numbness that comes with the exhaustion of being awake all night and went for a swim on Hampstead Heath. I didn’t sleep until much later that evening and even now, when I can’t sleep, I remember back to that night, where I didn’t sleep and all those medical tests discovered no reason for this. 

I didn’t sleep and I was fine, there was nothing wrong. 

I didn’t have an observable abnormality in my brain. This wasn’t the first or last time my brain was tested either, but this occasion did offer lasting reassurance that my not sleeping wasn’t a disease or an illness.

So as I lie here awake, reminiscing of how demonised not sleeping is by the medical profession and how insomnia is part of my existence, I do wonder what is the cause of tonight’s awakeness is. I could romanticise my restlessness and talk of the last harvest moon of the summer, rituals of cleaning, of letting go of everything that no longer serves me and charging crystals.

I could attribute it to the transition of kid 1 into an adult and all that is associated with that life changing event. 

Perhaps it’s just the stress that all teachers and students feel at the start of the academic year?

.... or perhaps it is just road works because my autistic ears do find it difficult to sleep to the sound of pneumatic drills and workmen shouting at each other and so does my dog. He’s been growling at them for hours and conned me into letting him out into the garden to bark at them. He even sneaked a quick chase and bark out the back, just in case the fox was thinking of paying us a visit. As to why I am so sensitive to sound and why I don’t always sleep at night, I now have diagnosis of autism, ADHD and complex PTSD to start to understand this better but I do still like to imagine it as a supernatural superpower for channelling my own fury.

An image of Eleven from Stranger Things