Why I should Sleep Regularly and Often
When something I want to write about happens, I add it to the queue. It's like I have a sheet of papers, one on top of the other, waiting to be written up online. The stack gets taller and taller, until I forget the relevance of the bottom pieces, and couldn't bear to go through the whole thing when I finally have time to sit at the computer and type. So I take the most recent sheet and go for it, and let the rest slide. But I can't do that this time, cause I went and promised (right here) that I'd write about my English class crying experience. I have stuff to tell you, but it's just gotta wait.
It's hard to write about the less than recent happenings, because how I felt already feels distant. I started crying in my English class about the oral history assignment. Saying that lacks the force that really was. I can give you every detail of the event, what happened, how every word was said, the web of intricacies in a freshman English course, and it wouldn't have that feeling of the day.
Right, yes. I wrote that late at night, and can't remember what I meant by it.
I have a week of fall break, and so right before it was a crunch of work. Two fridays before break saw more work due than I'd had all semester, and I didn't start it half as soon as I should have. I was still sleeping a reasonable amount of time each night, but I was more exhausted than ever. The friday afternoon, when every paper and test had been handed in, I bought orange juice and cheese and crackers to feast on in celebration of the end of the major work. I expected to instantly feel relieved, but I only felt tired.
The week before break, I let myself slip nearer and nearer to the brink. I knew that if I didn't have break coming up, I never would have let myself go so far, but it was still pretty stupid. I slept less and less, did little work, and just didn't take very good care of myself. I had fun - the nights I didn't sleep until 2:30 meant playing with the girls on the hall - but I really was a wreck.
I've been itching to say that it's not really an English class. It was my College Seminar course. I'm not going to be anal about that though, since it just confuses people and it's not that important. But we've been studying ethnography, and various anthropologists. I really love this stuff, because I'm curious about the ways we learn about other people. What's the truest way of learning about someone, and then writing about them? This is fascinating, because I've never been good at it. Self knowledge, well, I can do that well enough. But knowing other people? The thought of that is foreign and strange me, and really shouldn't be.
We were assigned an oral history project. To interview someone over fall break.
I tried putting the assignment out of my head, because every time it was in my head, I spun in nervousness. I was sure that an actual interview would be easy to pull off. But a subject for the interview had me scared witless. I realized that I know so few people at home. And the relationships that I did have with older people are dreadfully one sided. I very few barriers of privacy, if I talk to you I tell you everything. I don't expect this from other people. I always either felt that it was established that my friends' private lives were just that - private - or that I myself am incapable of dealing with other people's stories.
I didn't really realize that these were all the reasons the assignment was driving me batty - I just knew that it was in fact driving me batty. In the class, we each had to speak about how our oral history project was going - who we were interviewing, sample questions, etc. When we got to me, I felt like I was talking in slow motion. I explained slowly and deliberately, and gradually more frantically, that I was horribly anxious.
When I said "I'm going to have an ulcer worrying about this," I realized that my eyes were welled with tears. The professor was concerned, and said "No assignment in this class should give you an ulcer!" and people chimed in trying to comfort - they said that maybe not knowing who I would interview may be a good thing. I never sobbed, and I felt always so helpless. I couldn't help the tears. My face was soaked.
"If you're too shaken up to continue, you can step outside for a moment," said the professor, so I left the classroom with a friend. We went to a bathroom which had, no lie, carpeted walls. She consoled me wonderfully, saying that it was probably a good thing that I was capable of crying. That it would probably keep me from getting seriously depressed, that it was just a sign that the transition to college was painful, that it's going to be okay. I kept stammering, over and over, "I'm tired."
"I'm tired," is one of those things I say when I have nothing else to say, when I'm bored or lonely or distracted. I kept saying it, whimpering almost, "I'm tired." "I'm so exhausted," I trembled, and wiped off my very wet face with brown tissues. I look at the above written, and it seems so small, but I was exhausted, and it felt monumental. I felt like I was just going to jitter to pieces, fragment and shatter.
I had a meeting with my professor because of the crying in class. Before the meeting I danced, I showered, I ate some soup and napped slightly, and met her with a smile. We got to business, and the smile faded. She said she noticed that the assignment was making me feel inadequate about my relationships at home, and said she didn't want that. We changed the assignment to an observational project. I still do feel somewhat inadequate, but I'm glad I have a new assignment.
So, that's what happened when I broke down in my English class. I will never, oh never, promise to tell a story again. It's far too hard to fill in the More Later promises, because by the time it's Later I've forgotten why the story was so important to begin with.
2000-10-17, Why I should Sleep Regularly and Often
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