Sleepless in Los Angeles
Sleeplessness, sickness, a reading group invitation
Lately, I’ve been taking sleeping pills. They make it hard for me to wake up.
In my youth, I was always – proudly – a great sleeper. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I had long, luscious, vivid dreams that I would remember and be able to recite for years after as if they had just occurred.
In 2009, while working a miserable, exhausting, underpaid job adjunct teaching at a for-profit college, I became very depressed and went on anti-depressants for a few years. When I came off them, I didn’t dream at all for over four years. It felt like I’d lost an arm - there were whole worlds of my existence I no longer had access to.
Eventually, the dreams came back, though I have to work at it now. I have to write them down or they stop coming.
As a witch I believe vivid dreams are worth the effort.
Last night I dreamt I was with a huge crowd of people at some kind of school. I looked out the window and notice there were four huge tornadoes racing across the land like the horseman of the apocalypse, followed by a hoard of voracious dinosaurs, and then trickster monsters entered the school and I knew they had come to devour the earth. It felt like a prophecy of the present moment.
At dinner at a friends house the other night, my friend told me he’d been having crazy insomnia, a few days later, another friend told me the same thing.
What happens when we remember that our sleep is not just “ours”? Our sleep, our dreams, our anxiety, our health, our bodies, belong to the world.
Empire wants to convince us that our health is our problem.
If we can’t sleep, then we need to get more exercise, turn the phone and the tv off two hours before bed, practice meditation.
As a witch, I want to shout back at Empire: no YOU need to stop murdering people! YOU need to stop plundering the deep sea for oil, forcing people to work past exhaustion, extracting every last drop of abundance we have to feed the bloodthirsty billionaires.
YOU, Empire, are why we can’t sleep!
In Johanna Hedva’s essay, “Sick Woman Theory,” they argue that under capitalism care and support are treated as if they’re luxuries that one has to be worthy of, and which one should only ever expect temporarily.
Care and support in Western neoliberal culture are not “normal,” and if you need them, you are abnormal and “unwell.” And if you are “unwell” you are by your very nature unworthy of care.
I can’t sleep without sleep aids for hormonal reasons (IYKYK), but also because I am worried for the world. One of my friends can’t sleep because of grief. Another can’t sleep because of anxiety. None of those issues are individual.
Our grief and our need for care, our anxiety, and our ability to heal, is communal.
Our grief and anxiety are appropriate to the conditions in which we find ourselves. And if we let our selves feel them, and tend to them, in ourselves and in each other, they will lead us to a world where care is at the core of political life.
If care is important to you, and you have a body with needs, you might like to attend our reading group tomorrow night where we will be discussing Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory.”
Here are the study questions:
Do you agree with Hedva’s view that “the most capitalist protest is to care for oneself and others?” Why or why not?
How did this text change/influence your understanding of “wellness” (and sickness)?
Based on Hedva’s definition, are you a “sick woman”? Why or why not? What comes up for you around defining yourself in this way? Do you want to? Do you resist? Does it make you want to throw a brick from your sick bed?
Can’t wait to discuss this text with you!
Yours in care,
Amanda