Hello, my name is Jenn.

And I’m an insomniac.

It’s not that bad; I know people have it much worse. [In fact, I’VE had it much worse, than this.]

But that’s not what I’m thinking about when I’m snarling at those numbers on the alarm clock and they’re glaring back at me, smug and defiant (especially the 3’s. And the 4’s).

I experience two kinds of insomnia. The Nighthawk kind, and the The Neurotic kind.

The Nighthawk kind isn’t so much “insomnia” as it is

A) Surrendering to the fact that I function better between 12 and 3 am than their pm counterparts, and

B) An intense curiosity for what goes on while I should be sleeping/the fear of missing said goings-on.

“You were always like that,” my dad said last night. He told a story of singing me to sleep as a baby (“If you want to call it singing,” my mom interjected. “It was more like a series of la-la-la’s with no apparent melody.” This jab likely stems from the fact that my mother is pretty much tone deaf, while my father actually has great pitch. Seriously, people have told him this in Church.  I digress.) Baby-Jenn could be rocked and lulled into a half-slumber, but the second it stopped? Hi! What’s happenin’?! I was up, alert, not wanting to miss a damn second. During middle-school sleepovers, I was always the last to go to bed, the first to arise.

By my early twenties, I had gained some sort of kinship with the wee small hours of the morning. I could concentrate better. My thoughts flowed more easily. Ideas came more fluidly. In the latter years of college, I scheduled my classes so that my morning was everyone else’s afternoon. And let’s not forget the two years of working overnights at the radio station. Listeners would call in and we’d chat, sharing that unspoken sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

But the nights that spanned years twenty-two through twenty-six brought a lot of changes: jobs and relationships and dreams, and the pursuit of them and the failing at them and the wondering why I was failing at them. Knowing I’m inevitably going to fail again and trying to figure out ways to fail better – that’s what still keeps me up at night. Enter the Neurotic kind of insomnia. On particularly confusing nights, my body is flooded with the reactions to events that haven’t happened yet. Events that might never happen.

If you don’t know what that’s like, let me demonstrate with a very scientific and masterfully crafted diagram:

It’s just…my mind. I can’t quiet it down. And my stomach is like, “I CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REAL AND FAKE! BLUGHEHRHEHE NAUSEA.” By 3am, it’s too late to take anything for sleep, when my only refuges are my books and the exercise my shrink taught me to “bring me into the present.” [In this moment I feel my body against the sheets I feel the cotton against my skin I feel the weight of my head on the pillow I hear the train whistle in the distance I am breathing and healthy and alive and alive and alive right here right now in this moment].

Oddly enough, the past couple weeks? Some weird hybrid of the two has formed. It’s a restlessness that seems to say, “You’re sort of quietly freaking out here, but it’s because you’re capable of doing something awesome. You just don’t know what it is.” Like instead of that jumbled nest in my stomach, I am pregnant with all these unformed ideas just waiting to be hatched. (THAT IS A DISGUSTING METAPHOR THAT DOESN’T EXACTLY MAKE SENSE. GO WITH IT.) I have no idea what it’s about right now. But I hope it’s good, you know? I hope it’s The Greatest Story Yet to Be Told, and not… Chronic Indigestion.

I know this phase will pass; I’ll get back to my regularly-scheduled snoozes. Down the line, I hope to have the type of career that allows me regular, voluntary dates with 3:30am again. Some day, my eyes will close with the satisfaction of being exactly where I need to be.

But until then, they’ll spend a few more nights boring a hole into this skyline.