I love advice columns and have always wanted to write one. In the other half of the month when I’m not sending you notes on ekphrasis, I thought I would try my hand at creating an advice column of sorts out here. My hope isn’t to dole out top-down suggestions but rather to approach these questions as points of conversation, an opportunity to discuss something with you, my readers, in a more intimate fashion. If you have a question (life advice! book recommendation suggestions! just a bit of gossip!) which you’d like to ask anonymously, you can do so here through this anonymous suggestion box. Without further ado, here’s a question I got last week:
—
Q: How do I balance overwhelming ambition with the unquenchable urge to sleep?
Dear friend,
Back in 2021, when the pandemic was in full swing and Japan had mostly closed borders, my mother and I made the decision to go home anyway, despite a government mandated 14 day quarantine. Because we couldn’t take a train or rent a car directly after the flight, we had to find a house to stay in that was close to Narita airport. Anyone who has traveled to Japan knows that Haneda Airport is close to the city—like LaGuardia to New York—but Narita is nearly two hours away by train, much more a Newark. Unlike Newark, though, it’s way out in the middle of nowhere.
All this to say, we ended up having to rent a little house in Narita, where quarantining wasn’t such big deal, because there was nothing to do. The most exciting thing around was the grocery store. Rice fields spread every which way. Our Air BnB host lived in the home next door and left baskets of vegetables from her garden on the porch; leafy Chinese greens we’d never tried before, green onions , lean and tough with dirt.
I had a lot of designs on how I was going to beat boredom while quarantining. I had a book to write, exercise bands to use, at the very least a Japanese television full of channels brimming with the language I was starved of. But, by day 6 or 7, my Google doc wasn’t cutting it. I was bored. And because I was bored, I began to sleep.
I’ve never been a napper. I can remember being six and being ordered to my room to take a nap before a late night event, seething with resentment. For so much of my life, I took pride in how much sleep I could carve away, thinking it made me extra productive and impressive. I was adamant to be a morning person, constantly awake. I never saw the value of sleep.
While quarantining in Narita, I saw the errors of my ways. Sleep is amazing. Sleep makes you feel better, makes your skin glow, clears your mind. It is good for your health and makes time fly by. Sleep is also zero dollars Later that autumn, when I contracted COVID, I slept the sickness away. In early pregnancy, when my body was trying to make another body, the only way through my nausea was to lose consciousness. At one point, my elderly neighbor saw me gagging on the front stoop and told me “Sleep is the great healer.” He was right. Sleep is a miracle.
What I’m trying to say is: friend, I don’t necessarily think sleep is in opposition to your ambition. To follow dreams, we must first encounter them, which is to say the sparkling, transcendent energy that drives us toward our desires and goals can only exist when we also give ourselves deep rest without judgement. I am curious about how tired you feel. What is the texture of your fatigue? How does it taste? Where does it live? I am curious if it is not your drive to sleep that is impeding your ambition, but rather your own exhaustion at the many small (and large) injustices in this world. Perhaps an unquenchable desire to sleep is a perfectly natural response to what feels like a never ending assault on the senses. What happens if you take the urge to sleep and consider it a prelude to your ambition, a necessary partner?
Of course, there are times when we overindulge, times of depression, jetlag, avoidance and anxiety, when we wake up from hours of unconsciousness feeling nauseous and dehydrated. That Japan trip I talked about up top? When I had to return to the States, I was so depressed by the isolated, car-heavy, American life I’d come back to that I spent days in bed, sleeping the daylight away. This was not amazing. It was not life giving. It did not clear my mind. Maybe what you are saying is how do I avoid that. I’m obviously not a medical professional who can give advice on neurochemistry or sleep cycles, but from a place of experience I can say that I still think that sleep was, in a way, necessary. The depression sleep was a coping mechanism for me to give myself time away from the world. I beat myself up a lot for how unproductive, sluggish and lazy I thought I was. I cried at night, when I was the only one awake, berating myself for not being Good enough to adjust to the waking American world. I wish I hadn’t done those things.
I wish I could have seen my sleep, as excessive as it was, as something I was employing to give myself a bubble within which I could recuperate. If I had been curious, compassionate about my sleepiness—if I’d taken it seriously and committed to the bit, pulled out my favorite pajamas and hung up black out curtains—if I’d shown up for myself without skepticism, if I’d let the soft animal of my body slumber, how much sooner would I have felt ready to join the waking? And isn’t that, ultimately, what we mean by ambition? To be awake and alive, making beautiful things, leaping to join hands with the people we love?
Friend, whatever comes next, I hope your sleep is a good one, restive and lush. And then when you wake up, I hope you feel refreshed, eager, ready to take on that dazzling ambition.
Love,
N.