Insomnia

BY KARIS LAI

CW: mentions of eating disorders, racism, and mental health

Cast of Characters:

Me:

Born 2003, nighttime–prose, daytime–script.

My Mother:

Born 1975, prose.

My Grandmother:

Born 1948, prose.

Night 1: The Darkness.

The room is not quite pitch black; it has neither the solidity of black ink nor the transparency of black cloth stretched toward the light. In the early morning hours, the room transforms from a formless void into an uneasy landscape.

I twist and turn under my sheets. No longer do they lightly cover me, but only hold me down. It’s been hours, but for me, tiredness and time don’t equal sleep. I’m occupying the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness that eternally taunts me when I hear a sound. My eyes fly open and search the room, but I can’t make out anything specific. My heart pounds.

I thought I’d outgrow my fear of the dark, but here I am, aged twenty and still afraid.

Vague forms dance around my room. The muscles in my body routinely tense, waiting for a figure to materialize and attack me. As a kid, when sleep refused to whisk me away, I became so scared of sitting in the arms of the undefined that I would hoist my mattress over my little shoulder and urgently drag it out of my room into the light of the hallway. When my arms gave out from fatigue, I would nudge the mattress forward with my foot, watching it inch slowly away from the darkness until the tip of my mattress was wedged comfortably against the door of my parents’ room. Sandwiched between light and protection, I would curl up into a ball and finally let my mind be at ease.

That same feeling of relief floods my body as the light comes in. It’s reluctant at first, weakly struggling against the weight of my blackout curtains, but it gains strength by the second. Soon, even the heaviness of my curtains can’t hold back the light that trickles in, sneaking across the room and streaking across my walls.

In the distance, the birds warble an opening symphony. I stumble towards the source of the light and open the curtains. Instantly, a forceful beam radiates onto my face.

A spotlight.

It’s morning. Scene one begins.

Act 1 Scene 1.

Princeton, New Jersey, 2018.

(Lights up. Kids filter into a cafeteria that has been converted into a rehearsal space. There’s been whispering about the new girl, an eighth grader, who landed the titular role in the high school musical. They clump together in the back corner of the room and wait. “Cinderella” walks in tentatively, timidly. )

(A singular black plastic chair acts as a stage prop. It’s the first full show run-through, and the cast has reached the climax scene: Act 1, Scene 8. In it, Cinderella’s stepmother rips her dress from her hands and shoves it into the fire. Cinderella weeps, and the fairy godmother, hearing her heart-wrenching crying, runs quickly to her aid. )

Director: Alright, Act 1 Scene 8! 3, 2, 1, action!

(Everything goes as planned. Cinderella’s dress is wrenched from her hands, and her stepmother heartlessly throws it into the fire. Before she leaves, she hurls insults at the kneeling Cinderella. “No one will ever love you,” she shrieks, “You’re worthless!”)

(Desperate, Cinderella falls to the floor, fighting back a smile, drops her head into her hands, and limply shakes her arms to denote crying. The cast holds back laughter. )

Director: PAUSE! Cinderella, what was that?

Cinderella: (giggling uncontrollably, immediately stops and looks down) I’m sorry, I don’t know what …what came over me.

Director: Ok… let’s try that again. FROM THE TOP! Act 1 Scene 8.

(Again, the stepmother grabs the dress and tosses it into the fire. She narrows her brows and speaks furiously to Cinderella. In response, Cinderella contorts her face and tries to bring tears to her eyes. Then, the corner of her mouth twitches. She begins to laugh, shaking her arms limply as before. )

Director: STOP! (Muttering to herself) Has this girl ever cried? (To the Cast) Again! From the top! And Cinderella?

Cinderella: Yes?

Director: Please don’t shake your arms like that. No one does that when they cry! Pretend that you’re breaking, combusting!

(Blackout.)

Internal Combustion

Chinatown, New York City, 1969, My Grandmother.

The other high school girls had no responsibilities except their schoolwork. Often, her schoolwork was the least of her responsibilities. Every weekday, she was tasked with cooking every meal while her brothers idly sat by. On Saturdays, while her friends were out ice skating with the school’s pastor, she was the one lugging the family’s laundry to the laundromat to sit for hours on the hard-backed plastic chairs. As the clothing was roughly tossed like a salad in its soapy dressing, she thought about what it would be like to be an American girl.

The worst part was, she was an American girl. Born in the capital of the United States, her life in Washington, D.C. had been idyllic. Surrounded by family and friends, she’d never felt more supported, but her father’s new job sent them packing to New York City without warning. She wasn’t too surprised by the seeming spontaneity of the move because her parents never informed her about things anyway. Chinese parents were different. It was her Chinese blood that barred her from becoming a “real” American girl.

The moment she set foot in New York City, she hated it. The golden glow of her days in D.C. taunted her as she picked her way through the bitter cold of the crowded streets. The people were louder and rougher here. Although she lived in the enclave of Chinatown, it didn’t feel like home for her the way it did for her parents. As her English surpassed her Tui Sun, she grew tired of translating for her mom at every English-speaking store and being judged by her Chinese peers for being interested in American guys.

Since her mother worked all day at the clothing factory, Brenda was left to figure out how to navigate a world that her parents couldn’t even speak the language of. She felt like she had one foot in America and one foot out. During the day, she struggled to fit in with the girls who lived with such unfettered freedom.

She could conform during the day but never at night. At night, she was under the strict supervision of her mother. At night, her mother talked endlessly, but she never got to say a word. At night, she was pulled back into an outdated order, a life of submission and service, a world where she was expected to sacrifice all for a mother who never truly knew her.

A Sick Reversal.

Chinatown, New York City, 2002, My Mother.

Walking briskly down the streets of New York City, a young woman makes her way through Manhattan to a looming brick plaza just as the birds begin to chirp. Right as the Chinatown elderly begin their morning stretches, the city sounds come alive, and she finally gets to end her day. Exhausted from her red-eye shift at the hospital, she rides the elevator to the 26th floor and swings open the door of her grandmother’s apartment. Immediately, she is greeted by the loud guffawing of her grandfather in cutting Toi San and the rude conversations of New York cars partaking in chains of beeping, each car unwilling to take responsibility for the delay. Head down, she walks quickly to the spare room of the apartment, the floor creaking under her.

Before her exhausted body can hit the mattress, the phone rings. She groans internally. It’s Mom. It takes every ounce of willpower to muster up a cheery front:

“Hey Mom, what’s up?”

“You wouldn’t believe what Dad did this time…”

She sighs. It’s the same conversation every time. A broken record. Her body yearns to escape it all, the horrid night shifts and her mother’s incessant talking. She tries to think of an excuse to leave. “I’m tired” simply won’t cut it, because then she’ll have to bypass the guilt-tripping…

She can hear her grandmother’s voice piercing through the walls, accompanied by the clinking of her knitting needles. Her grandmother had started going deaf a couple of years ago, probably from the loud factory environment, but her communication style was always one-way. If anything, going deaf only encouraged her to talk louder.

She knew her mom felt like her grandmother had always been a bit deaf. Deaf to her words. Deaf to her feelings, loyalties, and fears.

And she understood that feeling because she felt the same way.

Mom called her every night, a steady stream of her feelings, loyalties, and fears. She wondered how they could talk every day, and yet her mom knew nothing about her feelings, loyalties, and fears.

She was tired of it all.

Antisocial; that’s what her grandparents would call her as she collapsed exhausted in her room after hours of caring for holocaust survivors on the general medical surgery floor.

Antisocial, she tossed and turned for hours as her body rebelled against the daily chaos she subjected it to. Monday to Thursday, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Then the next week, from Wednesday to Sunday. Never permanent enough for her body to adjust, always just long enough to push her to the end of herself. All these hours, all this toil, all for a sliver of the income her boyfriend was making as a consultant.

By the time her mom finishes ranting and hangs up, it’s nearly 10 a.m. Another all-nighter. She reaches for the half-opened pack of Benadryl lying on her bedside table. She’s too emotionally and physically exhausted to fight her body to sleep. Yet even with the medicine, her body plays a nasty trick: the pull of her bladder wakes her up only hours into her fitful slumber.

After those night shifts, she was never able to sleep through the night again.

Scene 2:

(Cinderella kneels on the floor of her room. On the floor lies her phone. It is open to a YouTube video, “How to Make Yourself Cry Quick For Actors, Guaranteed.” Sad music is playing in the background. She stands in front of a mirror and contorts her face.)

Cinderella: (Frustrated). Cry! Just cry!

(The audio from the video cuts into the scene, “Step one: Envision something really sad. I like to think about if my partner was dying in a hospital bed”.)

Cinderella: (To herself). Ok, Mom is dying, Mom is dying.

(The tears refuse to come. She screams in frustration).

Breaking the Mask.

Hartford, Connecticut, 1986, My Mother.

Mom must be dying. She already was barely there, a sliver of herself.

She had snapped a while ago. The process of unraveling often happens in this way: no one can see what is trapped, building up behind the decades of wearing a mask of perfection. Repressing emotions is like trying to repress a rolling river. Then, one day, her outside shell simply cracked and fell off. Terrified by what she encountered, she retreated into her room and, ultimately, into herself. Mental breakdown eats at you first from within and only manifests in the physical realm when it’s far too late: a game of brinkmanship destined for destruction.

During the day, everything was fine. “I’m just tired,” was what Mom always haggardly muttered, and she let herself believe Mom. Unlike her Mom, who stayed inside all day, she had to go to school and be the warm, bubbly, pretty one. She was loved by everyone. It was no surprise that she had been elected class president. She was also dating the captain of the tennis team and the only student in her district who would attend an Ivy League school.

She was so liked, yet so different. As a child, Mom would force her pin-straight hair into tight ringlets. She hated the stench of the home-kit perm solution and how the curlers pulled at her scalp. Her natural hair didn’t have the “body” like the girls at school. She followed the unspoken high school dress code: chunky black Doc Martens, an oversized green plaid flannel, and loose low-rise boyfriend jeans. The problem wasn’t her costume, but her face.

Everything she could change, she did. Light beige foundation smeared so thick that it felt like clay. Eyeliner to enlarge her slanted eyes. Whenever she forgot it, her mom reminded her again and again.

“Don’t you want to put on a little makeup?”

It wasn’t actually a question, not even a rhetorical one. It was a command.

Every day, she perfected her persona. Even though it was nothing but a performance, at least it was a convincing one.

In the day, she basked in the light of people’s approval. So she’d stay as late as she could.

At night, things were different.

At night, she heard her mother’s screams of terror.

At night, she was stripped of her mask and felt naked.

At night, she was scared.

At night, she couldn’t sleep.

Scene 3:

(Lights up. A navy blue minivan pulls up to the school drop-off. A mother leans over to give her 13-year-old daughter a hug and stops abruptly. She pulls back, eyes narrowed. Her daughter can sense what’s about to happen. Quickly, she grabs her backpack and opens the door, trying to make a run for it. )

Mom: Stop. Are you wearing makeup?

Daughter: (A guilty look flashes across her face. It’s quickly replaced by anger. She narrows her eyes, which are coated in clumpy black mascara that falls in flakes as she blinks.) No…What do you mean?

Mom: Are you lying to me?

Daughter: (She’s a terrible liar; her cheeks redden and she starts to blink faster as she formulates a lie. The rapid blinking causes a cascade of mascara flecks to rain down her cheeks). Nooo, it’s the clear mascara you got me, remember?

Mom: (Exasperated, sighs). That doesn’t look clear to me. (Holds her daughter’s gaze). Where did you get the mascara?

Daughter: I used my own money! I don’t understand why you don’t let me wear it like all of my friends. It’s not even like eyeliner or something!

Mom: (Saddened). I just don’t want you to feel like you need it to look pretty! I don’t want you to feel like… you have to wear a mask.

Daughter: (Exhales sharply). Not this again! Just because your Mom forced you to wear makeup and it messed with your self-esteem doesn’t mean that the same thing will happen to me! I’m not you!

Mom: (Heated). Well, isn’t it already like that with your eyelash curler? You always complain you look ugly if your eyelashes are straight!

Daughter: (Caught with no comeback). Well…well…argghhh. (Forcefully opens the car door). You know what, I’m going to be late. Good Bye. (The door slams shut).

Mom: (Sighs). I love you.

(Lights out.)

(Lights up. It’s the dress rehearsal for Cinderella. “Cinderella” waltzes into the dressing room, wearing her costume ball gown. She smiles brightly at the makeup lady. )

Cinderella: Hi! I’m here to get my makeup done.

Makeup Lady: Hello there, it’s nice to meet the princess in person! (She motions to the chair in front of her). Please make yourself comfortable. Now, let’s make you look beautiful!

Cinderella: Great! Try to do something with my eyes so they don’t disappear when the stage lights come on–get it? Because I’m Asian! (Laughs).

Makeup lady: (Laughs uncomfortably). Oh no, honey, don’t say that, your eyes are beautiful.

Cinderella: (Shrugs). Not really, but thanks anyway. (A pause, thinking. Then her eyes light up with an idea). Could you try to do winged eyeliner? My mom never lets me wear makeup, and I’ve always wanted to try it! (The makeup lady nods and smiles. Another pause.) Oh, and try to cover up those gigantic eyebags while you’re at it. I had trouble sleeping this week.

Makeup lady: Of course. Pre-show nerves?

Cinderella: Um…not exactly, I have insomnia.

Makeup lady: Oh no… I’m sorry.

Cinderella: (Clears throat awkwardly). It’s fine. That’s why we have makeup, right? To cover up those eye bags! (Laughs hollowly).

(Makeup lady works in silence for a couple of minutes. She sighs with satisfaction.)

Makeup Lady: Alright, honey, I’m finished! You look beautiful! What do you think? (She holds up a mirror).

(Cinderella is practically bouncing with anticipation. The moment the mirror reveals her reflection, her face falls instantly. The makeup lady had smeared dark gray eyeshadow up to her eyebrows, making her look like a raccoon. She’s crestfallen, but quickly plasters on a smile).

Cinderella: Oh wow, that’s great! I love it!

(Lights out.)

Roger the Rabbit.

New York City Hotel, 2010.

“Now when Roger has fallen asleep, it is your time to sleep as well as he is doing right now. Since Roger the Rabbit can fall asleep, so can you now.”

– The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep, Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin

I knew I had a sleep problem when I first heard The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep in its entirety. My siblings and I were packed like sardines in a queen-sized bed at a hotel, giggling mischievously. After an hour of tolerating our shenanigans, my mother issued an ultimatum: fall asleep or face the consequences. No one wanted to face the consequences, but we were so riled up that we could not sleep. Our little bodies squirmed in the bed as we tossed and turned. My mom, softened by our efforts, googled a solution to our restlessness and stumbled across The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep as an audiobook.

The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep is an objectively unentertaining book, but I believe that is the point. The beginning of the book issues a warning, that listening to the story would make the reader very, very, sleepy. When I first heard this warning, I was spellbound. It was clearly a magic book. The plot (or lack thereof) centers around Roger the rabbit, a bit of an insomniac, who searches for the solution to his sleeplessness and visits various friends who give him tips on how to fall asleep. Eventually, Roger falls asleep just like the rest of his siblings. Throughout the audiobook, periodically, the Siri-sounding voice hypnotically announces, “You are getting very sleepy…now” or “You will go to sleep, now”. I suppose the author assumed that combining an uninteresting plot, monotone voice, and a little bit of hypnosis on minors would be the ultimate solution for insomniac children.

On this particular night, it worked like a charm. Well, for everyone except me. At first, I bought in. I imagined my eyes getting heavy, just like the narrator said. I willed myself to sleep, now. My siblings slowly drifted off, the Siri hypnosis taking hold of their consciousness, leaving Roger as he journeyed through the forest to meet Uncle Yawn. Unfortunately, I was stuck on the journey, unable to exit. I felt like I had overstayed my welcome. As Roger himself was hunkering down for sleep, I realized with horror that I was still awake. I started to panic as the narrator announced that since Roger had fallen asleep, so could I. It was my last chance. I scrunched my eyes shut as tight as I could and willed with all my might to fall asleep, but to no avail. The author concluded with a “goodnight,” perhaps also going to sleep herself, leaving me staring up into the black void, with my siblings peacefully breathing beside me.

Suddenly, a man’s voice broke the silence, startling me. Did someone enter the room? Or perhaps the story was not over? Maybe Sleepy Snail had something extra to offer Roger. To my horror, I soon realized that the audiobook had restarted. Tortured with a sliver of hope that perhaps the second time would really knock me out, I retraveled with Roger through the woods, staying until he fell asleep a second time and the dreaded silence returned.

I wasn’t sure what was worse: a remedy that worked for everyone except for me, or the silence that told me I was alone in my suffering.

Hearing Voices.

Hartford, Connecticut, 1985, My Mother.

All of a sudden, Mom started hearing voices.

What broke her? She could never figure it out. Mom would always smile so brightly at their neighbors and then go inside and have a meltdown. It felt like Mom was so unpredictable because she was so unreadable. She was so concerned with achieving a perfection that she could never attain that it ate at her from the inside out.

It started at restaurants:

“Everyone is listening to me.”

“Everyone is laughing at me.”

If there’s one thing Mom couldn’t handle, it was feeling and looking out of place. She couldn’t handle feeling like she was missing out on some secret knowledge that everyone else knew about—like everyone else was against her. Soon, it escalated. One day, she stayed home from work, insisting that her boss was plotting her death. Then, the panic attacks started coming, like invisible punches in the dark. She’d wake up screaming and rush to the hospital, only to be told that nothing was wrong.

Scene 4.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2009, Me.

(Lights up on a small cafeteria filled with picnic-style tables. A preschool class sits at a lunch table, their lunchboxes perched next to them. Sounds of intermittent laughter pierce the relative quietness of eating. A little girl sits in the middle of a bench, swinging her legs. Since her father moved the family halfway into the school year, it’s her first day at a new school.)

(A bell sounds, indicating recess time. The kids nearly jump out of their seats in anticipation.)

Lunchlady: Ok, kids! Make sure to throw away your trash and then you can leave to recess!

(Like popcorn kernels, the kids jump up one by one and run toward the playground. The little girl in the middle had been taking her time eating her sandwich and mandarin orange fruit cup. By now, only around five kids remain. She looks up and notices with alarm that her classmates are leaving. She shyly addresses the boys seated across from her.)

Girl: Excuse me, can you tell me where the trash can is? I need to throw away my fruit cup.

(The boys look at each other. Then, they smirk.)

Boy 1: No, we won’t!

Boy 2: We know where it is, but you don’t!

Boy 3: Guess you’ll have to stay here forever!

(They laugh maliciously, then rush out, eager to play tag. The girl is left sitting alone in the cafeteria. She swivels around on the bench and turns her head, but can’t find the trash can. She thinks that maybe she will be there forever. Her lip quivers. Her face begins to burn. Slowly, silent tears trickle down her cheeks and drip into the empty fruit cup in front of her. After the sadness wears off, anger takes its place. She tells herself she will never again be laughed at and humiliated. Never again will she not know something that everyone else does.)

(At age six, she vows she will never cry again.)

(Lights out.)

The Glue.

Princeton, New Jersey, 2019, My Mother.

She felt like crying, but she knew she had to be strong. She would not break like her mom did. She would break her body, yes, like the time she slipped off a bench and hit her head trying to retrieve a balloon for her 5-year-old daughter, but she would not internally combust. She held her faith in front of her like a lantern, guiding her through the thickets of life’s trials.

Three kids progressed steadily along the insecure pre-teen, to selfish tween, to rebellious teen track, and a toddler who was, unfortunately, picking up the quirks of his older siblings. The toddler had been a complete surprise. Their mother discovered she was pregnant as she was single-handedly moving the family to New Jersey. As she rummaged through a cardboard box in the garage, she found an old pregnancy test and decided to take it for fun (why waste it?). She was shocked to see it was positive. She quickly drove to CVS to pick up two more tests. Then she called her husband.

“Babe…I have news”.

Her parenting tactic with her fourth was survival. She spent hours training her older children to develop a taste for vegetables while her youngest lived off of mac and cheese. The family joked that he was a “banana,” yellow on the outside, and white on the inside. While the older children would perform the little Einsteins theme song to her and her husband, she found her toddler, just forming words, sitting in the corner muttering “Panini” by Lil Nas X to himself.

“Hey-nini, why you be meeanie.”

In order to maintain sanity, she had a constant habit of rehearsing everyone’s schedule in her mind, making it a participatory ordeal.

“So I’m going to drive Josh to tennis at 7 and then I’ll go straight to pick up Joelle from camp and bring Evan to the doctor and then…[NAME removed for R2 Submission], what’s your schedule again?”

“I’m seeing my friend at 10! Remember? I have to get to the mall by 9:45.”

“Ok… So I’ll drive Josh and then pick up Joelle, and you can watch Evan until I can get back home and pick you up and drop you off and then I’ll bring Evan to the doctor, and then I’ll make lunch.” (Which she never really ate much of) and so on and so on for the rest of the day.

When the kids weren’t there to be her active maintenance rehearsal, she relied on her ratty paper calendar that looked like it had been resurrected from the 1600s. She knew she was notorious for forgetting things (like the time she lost her phone under her car and didn’t discover it until she had run it over), but she refused to go digital because she “needed to see it in front of her.” She only ever used the monthly spread on the calendar because the day-by-day didn’t give her enough foresight into the future. Different events for different people were written in whatever writing instrument was near her at the time. The conglomeration of everyone’s schedules appeared as a bit of a catastrophe. The chicken scratch blended the days together, sometimes written in with a pencil so blunt it became questionable whether it was English or not. Her family saw it as her secret code; no one knew why or how it worked, and sometimes even she wouldn’t be able to decipher what she wrote, in which case, the day began to descend into a slow burn. Without her, the family fell apart. She knew she was the glue and would do whatever she needed to maintain it, ratty calendar and all.

The Funeral.

Chinatown, New York, 2019, My Grandmother.

The day her mom died, the family fell apart.

Her brothers’ long-held resentment towards the “favorite” used to be contained in darkened glances and backhanded comments. Now, on the day of the funeral, with their mother’s body lying limp in the open casket, they wore their contempt openly on their faces.

The funeral proceeded through a blurry lens, tears cascading down her cheeks. She watched, as if through a plastic film, her daughter leading her granddaughters by the hand, marching up to the casket. The last time she’d seen her daughter walk down an aisle in this way was at her wedding, nearly 20 years ago. Now, her daughter walked up, fearlessly, to the mahogany coffin. She knew her daughter dealt with death daily during her hospital shifts, but she had only confronted it once.

As her daughter stood right in front of the coffin, she saw Kim whisper something to her eldest granddaughter, Karis, who was shaking silently. Karis obediently shut her eyes tightly. In contrast, Karis’ sister stepped forward and widened her eyes in fascination. Kim’s grip on her children’s hands tightened, and she pulled them away from the dead body.

It was her turn. She walked shakily toward her mother, keeping her composure as people politely averted their eyes as she passed by. She was greeted by the pungent smell of formaldehyde and the sight of her mother’s face. Something snapped, and she began to wail a gut-wrenching, hair-raising cry.

“媽媽!” “My mother!” she shrieked, kissing her mother’s cold cheeks and throwing herself on her small, rigid frame.

Her daughter, Kim, quickly ran to her side and gently pulled her out of the coffin, holding her as she shook violently.

“I know Mom, I know,” she whispered, stroking her back.

Kim’s children stood in the corner, holding each other’s hands and staring at her open-mouthed. When all her tears had soaked into the pink dress she’d picked for her mother to wear, she let herself be numbly led from the building to the burial ground. She felt as if her agency had left, her purpose drained and wrung out from her body. Who was she without her mother? Without a constant reminder of how she was failing the Chinese standard, how could she access it on her own?

After they lowered her mother underground, she realized with horror that her eyelids hadn’t been fully closed. It was as if her mother had been awake this whole time and would stay that way throughout her eternal sleep. An eternal insomnia.

This is What Insomnia Feels like.

Spending the night with insomnia closely resembles the first four stages of grief.

1. Denial

“This is not insomnia. Look, I’m so tired! I just need to breathe deeply, and it will go away.”

2. Anger

“Why does this always happen to me? It’s not fair!”

3. Bargaining

“If only I didn’t eat that piece of chocolate 3 hours ago…I bet the sugar is keeping me up.”

4. Depression

“Nothing helps. I give up. I guess I have to resign myself to the fact that I’ll never sleep again. I will be highlighted on the news as ‘Teenage girl dies from sleep deprivation.’”

There are a few times in your life when you have to accept that you are utterly helpless. Sleep, and the ability to sleep, is one of those times. It’s a point in time where comedy and tragedy converge. When you’ve cried and prayed and screamed, and finally you go quiet and lie there as still as a corpse. Suddenly, you start to laugh. It’s not funny, not in the slightest, but there’s nothing else you can do, so you laugh. You laugh at the pathetic reality: a baby sleeps in a few seconds, and you, you’ve been tossing and turning for hours. You, with your productive little life and big dreams, can’t even go to bed. Your brain is sick; why stop it? You let the merry-go-round of your mind turn endlessly.

Not Even Melatonin?

Princeton, New Jersey, 2020, My Mother.

A random woman’s wrong turn in the parking lot left her seriously concussed. Her baby in the backseat, miraculously unscathed, had only bitten his tongue. Relieved that further damage hadn’t been done to her child, she drove back home with a dull headache.

What she hadn’t anticipated was the constant brain fog and nine relentless months of insomnia. Nine months. She’d carried and birthed four children, but none of them had caused this much psychological pain. The daytime was brutal: she couldn’t think clearly, she couldn’t read, and at times she couldn’t find words to form coherent sentences. It felt like she was processing in slow motion, but the world continued on at 2x speed. Her baby constantly cried, her teenage daughter was sneaking a boyfriend, her son was recovering from a leg injury, her youngest daughter needed rides to extracurriculars, and her husband was at work. Everything that she’d previously done simultaneously loomed large as she tried to perform with the same perfection she had before.

If the daytime was brutal, the nighttime was unbearable. Her brain, rattled by the crash, refused to settle at night. Like static on the TV, it refused to shut off, instead emitting insufferable noise. She prayed fervently, listened to podcasts, and lay there. Nothing helped.

One night, she felt a familiar pull on her bladder and got up to go to the bathroom. Two minutes after lying down again, she felt an urgent stab again. Confused, she got up again to use the bathroom. This time, she barely made it back to the bed before she felt another jab in her bladder. It refused to stop. Her daughter walked in on her sitting on the toilet seat, exhausted and crying as her bladder desperately tried to wring itself dry; her twenty-seventh time in the past hour. Her daughter, unable to cope with her mother’s suffering, left to go back to bed. Just because her daughter quit didn’t mean that her bladder did. Throughout the night, she got up to use the bathroom over one hundred times, her body desperately trying to release everything.

Sleeplessness induces a desperation similar to starvation. Just as one needs sustenance, so does one need sleep. At first, she tried the “natural” route. Consulting homeopathic doctors, she started to take magnesium daily. Slowly, her enthusiasm fizzled out as the metal did nothing to calm down her ever-active brain. She found herself at the mercy of a baffled medical professional, begging them to do the impossible. The urologist and somnologist had no clue what was going on, so they did what every medical professional does best: run tests and give drugs. At this point, she was simply doling out cash to get poked and prodded. Reaching the point of desperation, she tried Ambien, a medication that claimed to slow down the brain and allow one to sleep. She was scared about potential side effects, but weighed it out in her mind: nausea and headache or another night of no sleep. When nighttime came, she swallowed the pill only to find it had absolutely no effect. Left with no other choice, she cautiously turned to Belsomra, an addictive pill. It helped a little, enough to allow her to fall asleep at 5 a.m., only to wake up at 7 to get the kids off to school.

Scene 5:

(Lights up. It’s musical rehearsal again. Cinderella faces her snarling stepmother with a pleading look.)

Cinderella: Kindness! You must try it! (Smiling brightly) What a beautiful hairstyle you have!

Director: Stop! Ok, that was great, Cinderella, perfect! (Turns to another actor) But Prince! You weren’t paying attention to her while she was talking. From the top! After that, Act 1, Scene 8!

(Cinderella sighs.) (Lights fade out.)

(Lights up.)

(It’s the end of rehearsal. “Cinderella” is about to walk out when the director stops her. )

Director: Hey, can I talk to you real quick?

Cinderella: Sure, what’s up?

Director: I know Act 1, Scene 8 has been bothering you for a while now, so I was trying to figure out how I could best help you. I actually noticed something, but it’s a bit more personal.

Cinderella: (furrows brows). Ok…

Director: I noticed that you use laughing as a coping mechanism when you’re sad. Did you know that? All of the “pretty kind princess” parts are easy for you because that’s what you’re like in real life. Your growth as an actor is only going to come when you can confront the parts of yourself that you don’t like, the parts that aren’t pretty. Just think about it.

(Cinderella nods, pensive.)

Donald Trump.

January 20, 2017, New Jersey, My Grandmother.

The night Trump was elected marked the start of her insomnia journey. Her daughter blamed it on her constant diet of CNN and Diet Coke, but she knew it was simply the stress of the election. She was 66.

She had never had trouble sleeping before, only that she slept too much. Whenever the voices came, inside or outside her head, she retreated to her bed. She would sleep for days straight.

Now, suddenly, she could no longer sleep at night. Saving the world had become her sole responsibility. Her stomach turned with the awareness of injustice. It was an uncomfortably familiar feeling. It took her back to the time she felt suffocated in Hartford, Connecticut, when she was left with two little girls under her care and only questions.

In Chinatown, she struggled to reconcile the two parts of her identity, which seemed as different as day and night: the well-educated, successful American girl and the traditional, subservient daughter. She felt like both sides taunted her: she was always either too American or too Chinese, but never enough of one to fit in anywhere. However, in Connecticut, there wasn’t another Asian in sight for miles. Disconnected from half of her roots that she’d never fully make peace with, she felt lost.

If being a Chinese daughter left her with responsibilities that felt too heavy to shoulder, being a Chinese mother tripled the burden in a way she wasn’t expecting. Her mother had always been so grounded in her ways, mainly because her ways were not her own. Her mother had taken the Chinese ways and inflexibly applied them to any circumstance, ignorant of how these rules dissipated once they left the walls of the apartment. Like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, the Chinese village’s way of life was not interchangeable with a Manhattan one.

Growing up, she had figured out the “American” part of her identity: smile constantly, be polite, and work hard. But the Chinese side had always been forced upon her, not discovered. Even if she didn’t personalize it, it was internalized, deep within her bones. When she looked at her daughters’ black hair, she knew they needed to know that part of themselves, too, but she lacked the connection with her culture that her mother possessed. She could not be her mother.

Whenever she picked up her daughters from school, she swallowed a wave of anxiety. As she greeted the other moms, those with blond, bouncy curls, she felt that she was the sole ambassador, the responsibility of the Chinese people resting on her shoulders.“I’m the only Chinese woman they’ve ever met,” she thought to herself, “I have to make a good impression.” She’d absorb racist comments, ignoring the churning in her stomach. She’d stand up straighter and widen her smile. Picture perfect.

Slowly but surely, she felt her picture cracking. There was nowhere for her to turn, no one to understand her. The questions were too loud, the anxiety too strong. She shattered.

Decades later, the same questions remain. Her performance, sustained for so many years, had become tiring. She spends time with her grandchildren until she gets too tired, the smile on her face too heavy, and she leaves. She sleeps for hours during the day and lies awake at night.

Curtain Call

The lights begin to dim, and the cast stays frozen in position. Only I, Cinderella, move off the stage, leaving reality behind. Once the curtains close, everyone around me will take off their costumes and return to their selves. However, my costume was one of two things that permitted me to show more of myself. Everyone else will lie in bed and go to sleep, but I’ll slip back into the world of the night, the world of wide-eyed sleeplessness: insomnia’s domain.

Here, I act no more.

Here, I am left with me and only myself.

Here, I am tortured by the weightiness of the present.

Here, I stop smiling.

Am I more of myself when I lie awake at night?

I think insomnia comes to the ones who try to hold it together the most. As if to say, “Your picture-perfect ends here. No more hiding.

Look at your thoughts.

Look at your helplessness.

Look at your humanity.”

If this is true, is insomnia an enemy or a friend? Does it force upon us a viewing of ourselves that we aren’t brave enough to see in the bright sunlight but can tolerate glimpses of in the murky moonlight?

They say we only see in the light, but we feel in the dark.

It is in the clutches of insomnia that three generations of Asian American women lie as they wrestle with their masks. Three women whose restless breathing disrupts the early birds’ songs.

(Blackout).