Sleep, perchance to dream

This story contains personal information about mental health, that some readers may find difficult to process.

It is said that sleep is needed so that the cerebral fluid can wash away all of the waste products of neurochemicals deposited between synapses during the waking hours. This purging of the fluid that surrounds the brain flushes away all wasteful and repeated thoughts and enables the brain to renew itself, establish new connections, abandon old ones. Dreaming may well be the result of this washing away, as new connections are formed and new thoughts emerge, but are unchecked by the restrictions of consciousness.

But, what would happen if you could not sleep. What would happen if no matter how hard you tried, your brain just could not fall into unconsciousness. What if you spent your life in a perpetual now, one now followed by another now, if all of your energies were put into battling your thoughts as though you were battling an enemy in a war that never ended.

This was the very position I found myself in, just five and a half weeks ago.

I work as a teacher, and I have worked as a teacher for more than eight years now. I teach Physics, Science, STEM, and Theory of Knowledge, and just thirty-eight days ago I was getting very close to a completely mental meltdown. I am just coming out of that meltdown right now. Each day I feel better and better, but ultimately I have had to face myself in my rawest form, and what I have found out about myself runs deep, as deep as the river of mantle that must run under the crust of the planet Earth, ready to explode when a weakness is exposed.

At one point I had not slept for ten days, and I woke up in the morning as though I was in a dream, disconnected from my body, with a perception of not really caring about anything that went on around me. Except, I did care. I cared profoundly about everybody around me. In fact you might say that I cared too much.

On Wednesday 23rd of October I woke up, and said to myself, enough is enough, I called in sick, called a doctor, and then began a long process of recovery from what can only be called mental illness.

I was surprised by what had happened to me. Before my mental health crisis I had thought that I had a very good relationship with my mind. I thought that I could get through anything, I had in the past, and I thought I would do in the future. There is nothing like experience, I said to myself, to help a person through a difficult time. 

It turned out on this occasion that I was wrong.

The exact reason for my crisis is still revealing itself. There are many layers of reason that I have placed over the top of my mind, just like the blankets of rock that lie over the mantle beneath our feet. 

I have, I think, found what the issue is, and it was a little surprising.

It seems that at some time in my past I made an observation about my father. To set some context, my father was in the second world war. He was in the Devon and Cornwall Light Infantry, the DCLI, and he was in a platoon of seven, where he was the radio operator. It was in late April 1943 while overseeing a tank battle at Banana Ridge, North Africa, that a German anti personnel shell exploded close to my father and sent several slithers of metal through his body. The medical records suggested that my father was close to death, and yet he survived and went on to live for more than fifty years more, the last twenty-three of which encompassed the first twenty-three years of my life.

The fact that my father was a “war-hero” and the fact that he often got upset with things when I was young somehow combined in the early logic of my young brain into a thought that my father should never be upset under any circumstances, because he had had a hard life, and needed peace. 

This idea then got mangled into a belief that no matter what, I should always prioritise my father over myself, and this I did all the way from when I had this thought which might have been any time between the ages of zero and ten years old, and today. The key thing is that I then generalised this thought to the point where I always put other people's needs above my own. I considered myself to be worthless. The only worth I had was in being exceptionally gifted at all things, and when, as mortals do, I failed, this sent me into a tailspin of depression.

You see I believe I can do anything, and when I find that I cannot, then I come unstuck very quickly, and then find out that I am not perfect. I hold myself to this standard of perfection in everything I do. If I am to run, I am to be the fastest runner, if I am to be a physicist, I am to be the physicist who discovers the answer to life the universe and everything, and if I am to be a father, a teacher, a husband, the list goes on ad infinitum, then I am to be the best, father, teacher, husband, etcetera that there has ever been. 

The problem with this is that even if I was the best, I would still not be good enough because no matter how good I am, I can always be better, and for that reason, I beat myself up continuously about my shortcoming, even though in many instances I have worked so hard to disguise these shortcomings. Eventually wanting to be perfect at everything catches up with me, and that is when I stop sleeping, because I cannot leave thought alone, I cannot leave something unfinished, I become obsessed with perfection, and since perfection is never possible in the real world, I collapse mentally, like a great star collapsing to make a black hole. 

At this moment I am trying to do what most physicists agree is impossible. I am trying to escape the event horizon of a black hole, but it is not possible, because physics is physics, and try as I might I cannot break the laws of physics.

That said, I am entering into better mental health. I am letting go of a few things from my past, and at the same time starting to build things for the future. It is a long process, and I am just at the beginning, but in time I hope that I will get to a place where I will be doing exactly what I should be doing and all of the anxiety, and depression that has come from me being a perfectionist will have gone, and I will be happy again. 

Until such time as I am completely cured though, I will continue to make bargains with the school where I teach so that I can emerge from this academic year as a person stronger, and more certain of his course, and going in a direction which I am happy with, and which fullfills me.

It has been a difficult time, and I cannot deny that there have been moments when I wondered if I could just float away into nothingness and that the world would be a better place if I was not here. 

The thing that stops me from acting on these thoughts are my children. My autistic son, and my very smart daughter. The other thing that stops me from acting on these thoughts is a continuing capacity to be kind to myself and to stop beating myself up about things that are just plain silly. 

For example, I used to beat myself up because I did not understand cosmology in its entirety, but now I just say that nobody understand it in its entirety and that it is far more important to focus on the journey to understanding than the destination, or to put it in more enigmatic terms, to “make the journey the destination”.

The second thing I have learnt is to give myself unconditional love. This second point is important. I cannot love others if I do not first love myself. If I love myself, with all my foibles and difficulties, then I may find myself to be something that is incredible.

The third thing is to say what I want and then go and get it. This is the most difficult thing for me to do. After about half a century of not declaring what I want, it is difficult to flick a switch and suddenly declare I want XXX or I need YYY. 

And so, in short I must:

1. Focus on the journey
2. Love myself
3. Declare what I want

That all seems a wonderful way to see the world, and how to avoid my worst nightmares in the future, my worst nightmare literally being my inability to have nightmares or dreams simply because I cannot sleep.

And that is all I have to say on the matter except that I hope you all can follow the same advice, FLD.