Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self - Hardcover

Abbs-streets, Annabel

 
9780593714157: Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593714156 ISBN 13: 9780593714157
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Why women’s brains work differently at night—and how we can harness that altered state for greater creativity, insight, and courage.

In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs-Streets experienced a series of losses: her stepfather, then father, and finally her family’s puppy. Unmoored by grief, she couldn’t sleep. But she discovered something surprising: during her wakeful nights, the darkness became a place of sanctuary, filled with creativity, reflection, and wonder. And once she stopped fighting her insomnia, Annabel tapped into something mysterious and beguiling: her Night Self.

In the tradition of books like Breath and Wintering, Sleepless combines science, historical research, and personal experience to explore the complicated relationship women have with darkness. Her night journeys range from quiet country fields to brightly lit city streets to the darkest reaches of the Arctic Circle. And from women of the past—Lee Krasner, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, and dozens more—who opened their minds on sleepless nights, to contemporary women who found a form of healing in darkness. From moth hunters to astronomers, from artists to photographers, Annabel found she wasn’t alone. Cut loose from the anxiety of insomnia, numerous women discovered strength, imagination, and inner knowledge at night. Many also learned to—finally—sleep.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annabel Abbs-Streets is the award-winning author of seven books, most recently Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (voted a Top Ten 2021 Travel book) and 52 Ways to Walk (an Amazon bestseller). Her work has been translated into thirty languages. She is a Fellow of the Brown Foundation, writes regularly for a wide variety of media, and often appears on radio, TV, and podcasts. She lives in London and Sussex with her family.

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1

The Night Self

Truly, poor Night, thou welcome art to me.

Mary Wroth, "Sonnet 15," 1621

It's Sunday, December 6, and I'm running down a narrow country lane. It's the first time I've run for months-I usually prefer the slower, more contemplative pace of walking. But on this particular day, which is to change the balance of my life forever, I am running.

The air is thin and glittering, and so cold it pinches the insides of my lungs. I feel the virtuous exhilaration that all morning runners feel and decide that my New Year's resolution will be to run more often. It doesn't occur to me that there might not be any New Year's resolutions. Or that these feelings of virtuosity and exhilaration could be the last I experience for some time.

As I approach our cottage, my phone rings. Which surprises me, because it's only 8:45 a.m. I expect to see my husband's name, Matthew, on the screen. To my surprise it's my father's wife, whom I shall call L.

"Hello," I puff, wondering if she's phoning to discuss our Christmas plans. I've invited her and my father for the traditional meal we always celebrate with them-supper on Christmas Eve. Since my parents divorced, Christmas has been a delicate navigation. For twenty-two years, my siblings and I have juggled growing families, jobs that don't stop for the holidays, elderly parents, acrimoniously divorced family members, multiple locations, diverse dietary requirements, and so on. Which is to say, all the usual complications of a family Christmas. This year, things have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning that only a certain number of family members can be together. And because of the growing death toll and the lack of a vaccine (although early batches will be made available within the next two weeks), a heightened feeling of anxiety pervades this year's festivities. My father is particularly alarmed and has gone to excessive lengths to avoid catching COVID. I'm half expecting him to cancel our supper plans.

All this bubbles into my head as I shout into the wind, "Hello?"

"Your dad . . ." says L. "The paramedics are here . . ."

I don't understand what she's saying. Why are the paramedics there?

"He's dead," she says.

She sounds so calm, so dry-eyed, I assume I've misheard her. Besides, her words make no sense. First, he can't be dead because I spoke to him two days ago-and he was fine. Second, if he's dead, what are the paramedics doing?

"A heart attack," she adds.

"I'll drive over," I say. "I'll be there as quickly as I can." I hear voices in the background, as if L. is conferring with someone. Why aren't they resuscitating him?

"They say you must drive very carefully." Her voice is still oddly calm and measured. "The police, I mean," she adds.

The police? Why is L. with the police?

I hang up, and then I start to scream. I am running and screaming and crying all the way home. Three words play over and over in my head: I'm not ready; I'm not ready; I'm not ready.

This is where it starts. And later, much later, I think how strange it was that something so decisively ending was also something that was so clearly beginning.


Matthew drives while I call my sister and then my brother. My sister drops the phone, and I hear her screaming and screaming. My brother is very calm. Later I realize that I was too blunt with my sister and too vague with my brother. I know this because, after an hour, my brother calls back and asks how the paramedics are getting on. And I have to tell him that our father has been dead for nearly twelve hours, that there was never any chance of resuscitation.

Then my brother says the very thing that had struck me when L. called: "He can't be dead because I spoke to him last night." And I know he's thinking exactly as I am-that this is too soon, too fast. That we need more time. That we have not had time to say goodbye or I love you.

The flat is full of uniformed men writing reports, talking into phones, drinking tea. Their presence-with its intimation of order and certitude-is immediately calming.

L. asks me if I want to see Dad, and I cannot answer, so I nod. Because I do and I don't. And I'm working excessively hard to regulate my emotions, to stay calm. Like L., who is calmer than I've ever seen her.

Dad is sitting in his red chair. He looks asleep. Peaceful. We comment on this, and for the next few months we repeat it over and over . . . How peaceful he looked. I touch his hand. It's as cold as glass.

The coldness of him stayed with me for months to come. But it was the silence of him I remembered most of all. A silence that was lost at first, lost in all the people milling around. Until I caught a snatch of it: no hiss of breath escaping his lips; no creak of bone or joint; no grind or gnash of teeth; no twitch of cloth; no words. Without life inside us, we are soundless.

For the first time I saw death close up-and it was silent. And I wondered if this was the reason we so often fear silence. For in its folds and creases, silence carries unavoidable indications of our own mortality.


A week before my father died, I had helped my mother bury her partner of twenty years. Douglas and my mother weren’t married, but I’ll call him my stepfather, because that is how I thought of him. My mother was mourning him. We were all mourning him. His drawn-out death in a nursing home he loathed-where, thanks to COVID, we could not even visit him, let alone hold his hand-had left a vinegary taste in our mouths and a tight feeling in our ribs; like thousands of others, he hadn’t been accorded the comfort and dignity in death that he deserved.

This tightness in my chest may have been the reason I was running on the day my father died. Perhaps I hoped to outrun its viselike grip, to breathe so fully I'd shake off the vestiges of anger and sadness still swilling around.

Instead, the grip tightened.


I stayed at my father’s house that night, sleeping in his study on a camp bed with orange sheets and an orange duvet, my head squeezed up against his desk. His books were all around me. His pen was just as he had left it, mid-sentence on his notebook. His cardigan lay slung over the back of his chair. My father had always attached great meaning to particular objects-stones, feathers, shells, small sculptures. These objects were all around me, placed with great care on particular surfaces and shelves where he might see them as he wrote. The room was heavy with his smell, his presence, his hopes.

That first night, I had no expectation of sleep. No desire to sleep. Instead, I chose a few of his books and settled in for a teary night of emotional but wide-awake intimacy. But to my surprise, the night passed in a thick blanket of dreamless sleep. I awoke, shocked and ashamed: instead of crying all night, I'd had one of the best nights of sleep I could remember. How could I sleep so well after the most upsetting experience of my life? What did this say about me? I read later that a response like mine wasn't uncommon, that the brain shuts down when it needs to-an evolutionary mechanism designed to preserve us, to ensure our survival.

It was not to last.


For the next ten days I lived at my father’s house and busied myself organizing the funeral; seeing to the postmortem and the death certificate; informing friends and family; writing tens of obituaries; decorating his (cardboard) coffin; shopping and cooking for L.; and performing all the other chores and errands that accompany a sudden death. L. was a ghost of herself, and I sometimes wondered where exactly she was-later I learned that she was in shock, a state of mind that protects us from extreme pain. I would come to think of Shock as a place, a cross between a...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593714156
ISBN 13 
9780593714157
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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