Insomnia

a tale of a young Chineme.

It’s been a minute since I gisted yall. Like half of my posts are just me yapping. But I’m boring, I mind my business a little too well and I have a crappy memory, all of which do not bode well for being able to dish out quality gist.

Like legit, my friends used to ask if I lived under a rock when they made a reference to a two month old gist I knew nothing about. They would groan while someone would be nice enough to download the entire thing for me.

Y’know those memes of class, cafeteria, hostel then class again? That was me irl. A very boring fella until you get me in a conversation and I just start to yap.

I just remembered the day I was being goofy with my friend in public and one of my course mates said he had always seen me as someone serious and he didn’t know I was really playful. I killed my mysterious aura to him that day.

I feel like that’s how half my course mates saw me though. I legit always had my head buried in an ebook—even in the middle of classes. I would love to know what other people though of me. If I was badass or mysterious.

Wait, why did I start this again.

Oh, I just remembered.

But before I get there, I am very boring, so much that my family knows. I remember asking my mum to buy me a particular pair of boots and her rebuttal was, and I quote, “where would you wear them to?”

She gagged me that day ngl. I had no response, cause deep down I knew only church will possibly see those boots.

Anyway back to the topic at hand.

I saw a post on TikTok about insomnia and for some reason that post was the key to the sleeper agent in my brain holding the key to my memories of insomnia—despite the fact that I had seen many of these type of posts and never remembered that I had suffered genuine insomnia before (genuinely don’t know how I forgot about this).

So when I was around 8/9 years old, I suffered from very intense insomnia.

People always think insomnia is just staying up. It is not. It is the inability to sleep no matter how much you try.

And I tried.

So hard.

I remember hearing our house clock chime 2am, staring into darkness while listening to my siblings steady breaths beside me. Mind you bedtime was 10pm. I would have been gisting with my siblings till 11pm then they got sleepy and turned to sleep.

I don’t remember how it started. Or even how it ended. I just remember crying multiple times in the middle of the night at my lack of ability to fall asleep.

My sister didn’t understand it on the nights I woke her up to be awake with me.

“Just close your eyes”, she would say then.

We would both do so but she would fall back asleep and I would be awake alone again not wanting to disturb her.

Some nights I would make her promise to be awake until I slept.

I would wake up in the morning with no recollection of how I fell asleep. No way to recreate it.

Clear your mind? Well one tab in my mind’s file explorer was playing music and wondering why the tab won’t close was automatically opening another file.

I turned to penning my mother tear-filled letters in the middle of the night for her to see as she was going to work.

But as this wasn’t a consecutive event. It didn’t seem alarming to her. Until the letters became frequent.

Then she would come to me right before bedtime, when my siblings were still playing, a few minutes before the gen would go off and try to help me fall asleep.

She would be there, answering as I randomly called her name to make sure she was still with me. She would be there until I fell asleep

I just started tearing up typing this cause I was transported to that time in my life, the feeling of fear that used to consume me then— I used to see moving shapes in inanimate objects— and how once she noted it was a real problem she would take her time to come and comfort me till I fell asleep.

At some point, I relearned how to fall asleep.

That’s the end of the gist for today.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to thank and appreciate my mother for something she might not even remember because I just remembered it myself.

Always appreciate your mothers (if they’re good mothers)

Toodaloo.