Day 11 - Cracks in the Armor and a Totem Animal

The past few days have been a flurry of activity. It's not that I've been too busy to write, it's simply been the case that I've opted for doing other things and, in a few areas, ran into hitches that made it difficult for me to confront my daily writing task.

Sleep deprivation aside, dealing with that zombie horde was rather time constraining.

So allow me to explain. We're now at Day 11. I've been averaging about 3 hours of sleep per day over the past week, with some spikes in sleep duration when I managed to oversleep or pull a sleep-walk and go back to bed.

I had a rather large question about this attempt come roaring at me on Tuesday night. The days prior, and really most of this week, I've been feeling pretty good. I usually manage to get 2-3 dreams in my 6 nap cycle, and for the other ones am usually out so deeply that I feel like I've slept for hours when in reality it's only been minutes.

As per usual, the 6-10 block has been the rough one. I slept through it on Monday and Tuesday of last week - Monday due to my inability to set an alarm properly (yes, it happens), and Tuesday for what I would call the catalyst for me questioning my continuation of this experiment.

On Tuesday I spent my night at the library, from 9p-4a, building a website for the course I TA/take. During this time I pushed my 10 o'lock nap back to 11, because I was jamming on the site and unable to feel remotely sleepy. That nap was highly rejuvenative, and I felt freakin' awesome as I powered through the entire site and managed to design it at least moderately nicely (something entirely not required by the course, but more for my own problems of looking at ugly web pages).

When 2 rolled around I was again not tired. I was still jamming on the site, and since I had pushed my 10 nap to 11 I figured I'd just wait until 3.

Once 3 rolled around I was within arms reach of completing the site and was getting more and more pumped about having 6 hours of work come to fruition. So I soldiered on.

I finished the site about 40 minutes later with a triumphant fist pump.

 My friends were all hanging out and, being that the library portion of olin had been closed for some time, I joined in socializing with them to fend off my sleepiness, as I didn't find any of the locations available particularly nap friendly, due to noise and odd sizes.

We ended up getting to my friends' at what I think was 5 o'clock. Everyone simply crashed and I, fearing for my ability to drive anywhere, went to the common room to get rejuvenated. However, after waking up from my nap, I was by far the most out of it I have ever been. Michelle had come in to check up on me or wake me up (I honestly cannot remember the circumstance) and I babbled some moderately coherent words to her before she left to get me a pillow and blanket, as it appeared I would be there for awhile.

If you wake me up again I'll stop loving you

When she left, determined as I was to not have another 6-10 block failure, I stood up and tried to snap my brain back into functionality so that I could get home where all of my night/dawn activities lived. I was basically trapped away from the things that I use to fend off sleepiness, because I was so sleepy. The standing didn't go so well, and I quickly slumped back onto the couch. I slept over until 9 (about 3.5 hours) before waking up angry and heading home.

Since Tuesday night/Wednesday morning I've been met with moderate success. I was so ashamed (strange, perhaps) by my inability to stay awake during the 6-10 block, for what is now the 3rd time, that I had a hard time approaching the blog to even share my experiences. In a sense, I have failed the kind of crystalline adaptation I had had for the first 5 days of the project -- the kind that made me both more pumped to do it and actually made it easier to stay up. Due to these setbacks my heart in the project fell out a notch, and I've been slowly putting it back in while actively questioning whether or not its something I even want to do in the first place.

Now, if I was anxious to be done simply because I had failed that would be one thing, but the reality is that on that Tuesday night I felt something that I have never felt before. As we wandered back to the Village, I reflected on how I had just worked for a straight 6 hours, and what I was going to do for the next 6 while everyone else hibernated.

Upon considering the next 6 hours I was overwhelmed by one simple desire. Startlingly, it was not a want to sleep. Rather, it was a want to simply not be conscious. To not exist, or to be aware of anything happening in real time. I wasn't particularly tired at this moment (the tiredness hit me about 5 minutes later), I just wanted to be able to put my brain on hold. I didn't want to have to continue doing in order to stay awake, because the value of the doing suddenly became questionable.

Perhaps it is easy, then, to see why on Thursday morning I intentionally slept from 6-10. I had decided that, given my needs to drive to Iowa for 5ish hours with my beloved friends in the car, a monophasic sleep may be best to keep me alert and competent. As a friend later pointed out, and I see in retrospect, this seems to be a thinly veiled excuse to indulge in that lack of consciousness, and to further an issue I've known about myself since my Senior year of high school.

Senior year swimming was a hell of an adventure. I never much cared for sports, but swimming offered both camraderie and the chance to turn my body into a sculpted statue, so I was in. At the cap of this 4 year high school experience I had a chat with my coach, a grizzly, enormous, cave-man looking dude by the name of Stan. We had just come from a meeting where he had gotten the rest of the team pumped for the next meet, and he and I walked outside afterwards to our respective vehicles.

The image is still bright as day in my mind. It was during winter, so there were banks of snow all over the sides of the road and parking lot. The way we managed to arrange our conversation, I was standing with my back to my car and he with the back of his head facing the setting sun, which cast purples, yellows, and blues everywhere across the sky. This, juxtaposed next to his bearded mug, was quite the image.

As we spoke I told him that I had slowly begun to realize that in all 4 years of swimming I had been holding myself back. And that, in a few other areas of my life, I had been pulling a similar maneuver. As some sort of defense mechanism against failure, I had subconsciously decided that I would not give everything I had to any activity, organization, or what have you, because that way, should I lose a race, not make as much money in a fundraiser, or somehow fail spectacularly, I would always be able to say that I wasn't really trying as hard as I could. I could say that it wasn't due to my inability so much as my choice to not apply myself.

I remember he looked at me before growling out the beginning of his response, and perhaps its most important piece. 

"Now that you're aware of it, you're going to have to watch for it, and you're going to have to get over it."

courtesy of dinosaur comics. ball trippin all over the place.

So since then I have been doing just that. It's a natural protective tendency of mine, and I dare say that in my 4 years at washu I've damn near obliterated the thing. But in some areas it still comes creeping back, and I think this may be one of them.

As I noted in the majority of my previous entries, one of the biggest helps for me in this rather willpower-sucking process has been the support of my friends, random strangers, and watching the stats on this blog jump day after day. The darker edge of that is that it begins to bring about a fear of failure, a fear of falling short on something that a good deal of people are both curious to see in action and, from what I gather of my time-crunched friends, hopeful for. And, knowing what I know about myself, this is a perfect recipe for putting me in a place where self deception and weak attempts, as well as excuses, start creeping up. And they have!

So you know what? Fuck that.

Time to pick a spirit totem and get to work. If any animal is fitting for this sort of ridiculousness, I think it'll be the honey badger.

(Yes, I dropped a swear word on a site that is linked to in my LinkedIn profile. Honesty is important.)

I've been given another opportunity to prove myself not to others but to myself. I would argue based on the past 11 days that, in reality, I have already succeeded in a tremendous feat of willpower and self-control, as well as craziness. My various sleep-ins cannot take away the fact that I still sleep less than 4 hours a day on average and have been remarkably sleep deprived in the conventional sense yet somehow happy and functional. In a sense, I have done it.

But I haven't done it enough. If I end this thing I want it to be with a clear head, pure of any insecurities and defense mechanisms. I want it to be because I have grown tired of being conscious for 22 hours a day, not because I am preemptively selling myself short in an effort to save face that, in reality,doesn't need saving. I want it to be because I want to remember what it feels like to sleep next to another human for more than 25 minutes.

For now, I think this experiment is still worthwhile. My friends remain fiercely supportive-- taking turns driving the car up to Iowa, suggesting that I take a nap when I start pushing things around so I can hang out with them without being interrupted, and even napping with me for the brief respites from consciousness I get.

The reality remains that the failure rate on this sort of thing is roughly 90% after two weeks. I'm at 11 days and, save for some crises in self confidence, appear to be doing just fine. In truth, my schedule over the last few days, before I sat down to both think about this and reboot my dedication to it, has been more of an Everyman schedule (2-3 hour core sleep, naps during the day). But so be it. My past slippage has naught to do with what will happen today, provided I simply decide not to do it.

What I ask from those of you who read this, and who have been helping me along as we go, is a shift in conversation. I know it's pretty interesting that I'm possibly losing my mind, messing up my circadian rhythm, and being generally insane by doing this, but it'd be cool if I got to talk about what I did during my nights rather than how good/bad/ugly they were. I think we've established that I am capable of doing this, regardless of how painful it is, so it's time the conversation, and the project itself, moved into the more fun stages of discussion. I have had some interesting awakenings as to consciousness, productivity, and assumptions, and ones which I think may be valuable to those not doing this sort of thing (read: 99.9% of the population). Frankly, I'd rather talk about that than how I feel or how tired I am.

Besides, as Sankalp says, when I look like I got punched in the eyes you know my last nap didn't have any dreams in it.