The absurdity of American high school scheduling also played a role in my lifelong insomnia.
From an article at the Cleveland Clinic:
Teenagers need eight to 10 hours of sleep every night, but the research shows that up to 50% of teens don’t get the sleep they need. Many only get around six or seven hours of sleep per night. One reason?
“Teenagers start to naturally shift their preferred sleep time to much later at night,” Dr. Goldman says, “but because of early school start times, they still have to wake up early, and they end up losing out on sleep.”
My high school started at 7:20 AM. I had to get up at 5:30 at the latest to make sure I had time to get ready and catch the bus. The bus ride was usually close to an hour (I grew up in the Atlanta metro area).
We still ate dinner late, at 8 or 9, and I usually stayed up until 11 or midnight. To offset the sleep deficit, I’d usually take a nap. Of course, I’d take a “bad” nap, one that was an hour or two long, not the recommended 45 minutes or less. And I couldn’t always nap, since I had extracurriculars, too.
Already an apt lyric, one of my friends misheard “I’m so tired but I can’t sleep” from Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” as “I’m so tired that I can’t see.” Getting to sleep was not the problem, dealing with the consequences was.
In 11th grade, with several years of bad sleep under my belt, and now dealing with my dad’s illness, I plunked down in my Econ class, and closed my eyes while waiting for the bell. My teacher, Coach Something-or-Other, said if I could convince everyone else to sleep, he’d let us sleep for the whole class.
I did and we did. That day is one of three things I remember from that class 30 (!) years later. The other two:
- The concept of supply and demand
- The idea that just because something is worth doing, it’s not necessarily worth doing well. Which was pretty refreshing, actually. I was a Millennial Gifted Kid ™, so the idea that one didn’t have to give 110% to every task was revelatory.
Of course this carried over into college. After my first semester, I avoided 8 AM classes whenever possible. (“High school started an hour earlier, I can do this!” was not really a flex.) Writing this now, I remember a class I took with Professor Whomever, a man with a long and respectable career, a class I was really interested in. He taught almost exclusively at 8 or 9 AM, but also had narcolepsy. Even my tiny attempts at a better schedule were thwarted. Though, it was worth it for the day he dressed in drag and recited the Wife of Bath’s Prologue.
In high school and college we all said the same jokes and all thought we were so fucking funny:
What are your hobbies? “Sleeping and napping.”
Sleep is for the weak.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
Though to that final one, I’m reminded of Frasier‘s Daphne Moon, explaining that her grandmother would say to take naps now because “there’s no naps in hell.” Even as a life-long atheist, I kind of believe that. An eternity of exhaustion, or an eternity of sleeping “normally” but with crippling bad dreams, the final scene from Preludes and Nocturnes*.
Not that I have an answer. What could I have done differently back then? “Sorry Mom and Dad, I need to have dinner at 5 so I can go to bed at 9”? Not participate in after school activities or go out with friends? Spend less time crying in my room about boys, girls, and impending doom? Cut back on the amount of time I spent online downloading pictures of Sailor Moon?
Maybe that last one.
*At the end of the first collection of Neil Gaiman Sandman comics, Preludes and Nocturnes, one of the people responsible for trapping Dream for decades is punished with a never-ending, never-waking nightmare. He sleeps, realizes it’s a nightmares, and awakens to find himself in a new nightmare.
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