Once again, it’s late and I can’t sleep. This keeps happening. It’s currently 12:47am as I’m starting this. It’s frustrating and upsetting. I don’t understand. I get to 9pm and I’m tired, go to bed at 10:30, sit for a bit, feel tired, go on my phone (duh) and then put my head down and sleep just doesn’t come. It’s been happening for a few years on and off, but I never used to be like this. It makes me worry that something is unsettled in my unconscious, that there’s something ‘wrong’. There’s always something wrong, of course. The world is in a mess. But I don’t have more anxiety than I’m used to, and certainly not as much as many people. I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge, some money and meaningful work, a lot of love in my life.

I lie there trying to remember what it was like to find it easy to sleep. To just put my head down, close my eyes and feel myself drifting off. I have always slept really well, and I don’t understand why, over the last five years or so, it’s been so hard.

Last night, it was 2:30 or so when I fell asleep. The last few nights before that, it’s been 5am (hello, New Years Eve), 2:30am, 3am… Late. My alarm went off this morning at 8:30 and I dragged myself out of bed, excited at the prospect of being tired tonight after running on six hours all day. But here I am again, tired but awake, wanting to sleep but being unable to. And then, like it does, the mind starts up… Thinking. About life, about all the stuff I am actually quite anxious about, about the fact that I still haven’t launched the podcast that has become a ball and chain, thinking about how I struggle to show up on LinkedIn and whether I have anything of interest to say, thinking about my family and their struggles, and about the child I’m helping to raise. About my work, and how nervous and frustrated I feel about the ways in which I feel I’m not doing enough and perhaps simply am not enough. And on and on it goes.

Interspersed are the practices, the sensing instead of thinking, the breathing, the resting of my eyes knowing that at least having them closed is some form of nourishment. But I can hear myself breathing, my body keeps jolting with little electric shocks, I can’t get comfortable. I think about my mum, and whether she sleeps in her bed, and whether it’s as bad as I dread for her right now. And then I get up and I come through and I sit for a bit and I open my laptop and begin to do one of the only things I know how to do, even though I’m out of practice and I can’t do it very well these days because I censor myself so much, worry so much that someone will read this and will see and understand things about me and my life and my loved ones that are very personal and very private. I write. And when I write, I can’t not publish it, so I press publish without a title so that anyone landing on the homepage can see a blank mark with a date, but they have to be pretty committed to get in and read it. I need to write. I have always needed to write. I have just so often neglected that need.

Is insomnia common in midlife? Google says apparently so. I wonder if it’s perimenopause kicking in, or an accumulation of unhelpful habits, or a combination of all the things I’ve listed above. I think to myself that I should work on my book, but I doubt anything I do at 1:15am will be worth sending off to my editor in ten days.

One thing I do know is that I will sleep tonight, at some point. It may not be until 3am, but sleep always comes. I just have to sit this out and wait for its arrival, and then try to get going in my day tomorrow even though, of course, all I’m going to want to do then is sleep.