Malorie Nilson

I cannot be held responsible for what I write while under the influence of a desperate lack of sleep.

It is 7:47 a.m. as I am writing, and I have been awake since just after three. Cocooned in my room, I turn to my old friends (films) to keep me company in these wee hours, trying to relax back into sleep or at least have the benefit of familiarity as I gaze affectionately at the flickering glow of the television. Sleeplessness has been a haunt as of late, and my inner voice is starting to lag behind my thoughts in an echo that unmoors my sense of reality. Many people with chronic insomnia have experienced something along the lines of profound depersonalization at the hands of severe sleep deprivation, and it is always a sign to me that I have achieved a critical mass of hours lost. When your interior monologue starts to phase in and out like it has been trapped within a malfunctioning teleporter, one knows that something has gone a bit wacky in the factory. 

In this most recent bout, a new kind of insomnia has found me, and I wake up after only a few hours of sleep when the rest of my little world is sleeping, and I am left to my own thoughts or to find a way to completely drown myself out. There is an unsettling bigness to the interior that leaves plenty of room for thoughts to echo and amplify if you’re not careful, and, unfortunately for me, I am extraordinarily effective at browsing social media, reading through my backlog of newsletters, quoting along with my approximate 4,579th watch-through of Pride and Prejudice all at the same time and generally avoiding anything that remotely resembles being “left alone” or “with one’s thoughts.”

But despite my best efforts, the thoughts persist (I mean, of course they do; I have insomnia, for chrissakes! Insomnia that is mostly an irritating side-effect of having Too Many Thoughts), and I have found myself thinking more about the past three years than I have yet allowed.

I am not well. This feels like a simple fact, and I have very little emotion attached to this statement. But it is true. I have not been well for a long time, if ever, and I am staring down the barrel at the COVID years and finally coming around to the idea that maybe this whole THING had a profound impact on my life. We all nod in agreement as we read newsletters and Twitter threads about needing proper space to grieve and process, and yet! And yet. I don’t know that many (maybe even most) have done that. I certainly haven’t. We may not have had the space within the pressure that comes simply with the persistent marching along of time. And I am certain that I don’t really know how. 

A few weeks ago, I was visiting friends in Toronto, one of them an old pal of nearly 25 years, the other (heretofore referred to as A) introduced to me by said eld freond (heretofore referred to as B) as his partner, who is now one of my dearest people in the world. Being outside of my home, traveling for the first time since 2019, and being in the soporific embrace of a new city (for some reason, I sleep better when traveling than anywhere else) unlocked something I had buried deeply within my chest, hoping to ignore. Myself. 

In his 1978 commencement address at Fredonia State College (If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?), Kurt Vonnegut suggested that those of us living in the North do not experience four seasons but rather six:

One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on.

Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold!

What comes next? Not spring. ‘Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They’re Unlocking.

Cruelty is an apt description. While I am wandering along the river, oppressed by the last days of summer heat as we crawl at a pace entirely too slow for my liking toward autumn (and subsequently locking), I am excavating the inner workings of my own heart and mind and am finding I am out of season. Like a fruit transported to a wintry harbor where it could not grow, I find myself in an internal cruelty of March and April while also ready for hibernation. 

But I have been in hibernation for years, my den a sound bath and a constant stream of information, my sustenance the sweet liquor of avoidance. Many years ago, for a blog that no longer exists, I wrote a short piece called The Life of an Infomaniac.

1.) Recognize that I need a zero distractions environment to work effectively. Turn off all music & avoid the Internet & write. Generally like the work I have done. Hooray! 

2.) Feel like I accomplished something by having a really healthy and productive time (step 1). Deserve to reward myself with some Internetting.

3.) Get back to writing, interrupted by thoughts, e.g., “I wonder what is happening with that one thing that I care about now that it has been *time frame*?” Stop writing to check on thing. 

4.) Realize this is bad behavior and successfully put it off until the end of the day. Feel v. productive, but evening consumed with trawling the Internet trying to catch up. Repeat daily until…

5.) Next day: There are a lot of things that I now care about that are all happening on the Internet while I am spending all of this time writing about things that will certainly no longer be relevant by the time I am able to get back to the Internet to catch up. Go check Twitter to see if stuff has happened (stuff always happens). 

6.) Follow that link on gendered spaces in language, now read about the philosopher that author mentioned in the article, watch a lecture by said philosopher, tweet about it because interesting and a deep-seated need to contribute to the information hurricane, get responses that lead you to a really insightful article about intersectionality in gendered space (AKA life), start panicking because none of this has anything to do with the topic you are actually writing about, and therefore is not actually relevant to work. Have existential crisis about whether my work should more closely reflect my life or if separation of interest in self-expansion and writing is okay. How do you separate those things now that I think about it? Google search interviews with authors you admire to make you feel better about your failures. Get distracted by Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a really wonderful article on Nina Simone. (This is also known as “My Day Today”)*

7.) Time to make dinner. Much less productive, with the added bonus of hating everything I wrote. Resolve to begin again in the evening. 

8.) Too tired. Want to couch and play video games. 

9.) Bedtime; can’t sleep. Read more news. Makes no sleep more. Post about it. Realize am insufferable, contemplate deleting social media for the eleventy-millionth time. Never really serious about it.

10.) Repeat 5-9 until so exhausted I wonder why I feel so terrible. Realize I have done this to myself & need to make healthy boundaries and restrictions. Go back to step 1. 

*Leaving out links to all of these things was to appease my conscience and not subject you to the spiral of link chaos and lead you down this path. I can not have your grey matter on my hands.

My therapist has instructed me that I need to learn how to sit in stillness. As a person with late diagnosed ADHD and ASD, this seems like a cruel joke to me. Even still, she stuck by her prescription: pick something to think about, set a timer, and just sit and think about that until the timer goes off. Herculean. Sysiphian, even. Who am I if not this, Malorie of the Many Tabs, Devourer of Media? In bringing this up with aforementioned friends in Toronto, A wondered if this was possibly why I have been struggling to finish writing anything. Alarmingly, she is correct. How can I spend time thinking about my own thoughts when I am so busy avoiding spending any time alone with them. 

When describing my difficulty to my therapist, she was shocked when I told her that I would simply forget—it is challenging to keep my mind going in one direction. This is a hallmark of ADHD. But this is where I think the rigidity of these types of assignments falls apart. It is okay for my mind to be itself, to forget what I was thinking about, or to let my professional grade stream of consciousness rev up to full power. The problem is that the Internet has been a coping mechanism that has gone a bit off the rails. With that, my impulse when my brain context switches is to impulsively seek out social media instead of following the meandering highways of random ass thoughts to see how they interconnect, to maybe find the idea diner on the intersection of How Bees Communicate and Faceblindness.

I feel like I will run the risk of mentioning Jesse Meadows’ newsletter Sluggish a lot, and while I feel awkward about it (hello, subtle pressure to find a wide array of things to share), it is a newsletter that means a lot to me. Jesse mentioned the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. I haven’t gotten far into it, but it is a perfectly lovely expression of precisely the person I am: I have this do nothing-at-all thing that I am supposed to do, so let me find a book to read on that. It is always a process.

Things I am reading: 

As mentioned, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

I have a complicated relationship with the word “addiction” and the ideas surrounding a typical understanding of addiction. Still, I do recognize social media and the Internet as a coping mechanism that has gotten a little out of control. So, my goal in reading this book is to attempt to generate some thought for how I might address the underlying issues that are creating a need for coping so that I may reduce the behavior that becomes so problematic for me. That isn’t to say that technology companies aren’t insidious and aren’t trying to make the feedback loop of endless soundbites intoxicating. 

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

Horror and speculative literature that invokes a haunting atmosphere with storytelling that grapples with darker themes has become an obsession for me. I resolved to read many more recently published works in this space, which is how I came to this novel. It is very eerie and captivating, and I am enjoying sinking into the use of water and haunting (past events) as metaphors. 

I just finished Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

It was truly refreshing seeing a raw and often humorous representation of Autism in a woman that doesn’t fall into the stereotype of quiet, weeping, and fawning girls. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with this expression of Autism (and it is also not exclusive in women, even though it is often touted as such), I am an often loud, aggressive, bitey sort of Autist. Big feelings come in a lot of packages, and Fern writes about her experiences in a captivating and relatable way. Highly recommended.