The World’s Lamest Superpower
Some people boast about where they’ve traveled to, the sights they’ve seen, people they’ve met, experiences they’ve had.
Lame. I boast about where I’ve slept. The nooks I’ve turned into nests. The corners I’ve curled up in. The strangers whose shoulders I’ve seized on airplanes and park benches I’ve passed out on. A lot of people, college students particularly, like to brag about their love for sleep. After all, most of us have been sleep-deprived, coffee-guzzling zombies with bags under our eyes almost as big as our backpacks ever since high school. But no matter what anyone says, my sleep record is far more impressive. I’ve copped z’s in classes, crashed on kitchen floors, drowsed sitting upright at the dinner table, slumbered while standing in lines, catnapped in the footwells of cars, bedded down in a McDonald’s booth, dozed underneath a desk, snored while sitting at stoplights, and hit the hay while having a conversation.
I take sleep very seriously.
My passionate love affair with the Sandman started five or six years ago when I found out I have narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that causes extreme exhaustion. I’ve fallen asleep in approximately twenty-eight seconds (my personal best) and within five minutes I’m already in a deep sleep. Most people can only dream of achieving these kinds of times. What can I say? I’m gifted.
There are some benefits to narcolepsy. It’s shortened agonizingly long car rides into only a couple of minutes, and really helped me maintain my introverted ways of avoiding people. For example, this past semester, my friends dragged me to a Super Bowl party, promising me I’d have fun once I got there, despite my protesting that meeting new people, watching football, and general conversation were not high on my list of hobbies. After my extroverted pals abandoned me to go talk to people they knew, I stood against the wall, shoving pretzels into my mouth and trying not to think about how I looked like the loser-kid at prom in an 80’s coming-of-age movie. After twenty minutes and my second cup of Sprite, I was tired of “socializing”.
Catching one of my friends, I leaned in to talk over the yelling and cheering of football fans. “I’m gonna go.”
“No! Why?” She looked concerned, cocking her head.
I shrugged. “I’m tired, and really not feeling up for this. I’m gonna go lie down.”
Nodding sympathetically, she squeezed my hand and told me to feel better. I stole a parting Oreo and booked it back to my room to sit in bed and watch Netflix.
Narcolepsy is a foolproof excuse to get out of awkward situations, too. Couples fighting while I’m sitting in the backseat of the car? Fall asleep. Distant relatives try to assault me with questions about my relationship status? Take a nap. Watching a horror movie that will inevitably give me nightmares for weeks, and don’t want to seem rude by leaving? Time for a siesta.
Plus, as someone who hates driving, narcolepsy has been really convenient when making plans. The conversation usually goes something like:
“Jess, you have the biggest car. Can you drive?”
“Uh… how late will we be out? I mean, I can but if it’s late someone else probably should because I’ll be pretty tired…”
When people find out you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, they’re much less likely to suggest you drive. I was on my way to school one morning while still on my driver’s permit. My mom was on her phone, not paying attention while I drifted off to sleep, and off the road. She must have glanced up to see us halfway off the shoulder, and her cry of “Jessie!” jolted me awake. I jerked the car back on the road, apologizing repeatedly. After five minutes of weaving back and forth drunkenly, Mom made me pull over and switch seats with her. I’ve since learned to turn up the radio really loud and blast the AC if I get sleepy. However, people usually don’t want to take the chance of dying in a fiery car crash just because I decided to grab some winks while going seventy-five down the interstate.
Even though I’m the queen of the Land of Nod, it’s not all silk sheets and down pillows. Heavy is the head (and eyelids) of she who wears the crowns. After all, falling asleep in seconds and getting out of social gatherings isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I really can’t pick and choose when I need to go to sleep, and most of the time I’m only a third of the way awake. When I really need to, I’ll fake being alive, smiling painfully wide and conjuring high spirits before splitting as soon as possible. (But seriously, laughing at bad jokes and being civil to people I hate is hard enough fully awake, and all the more painful when exhausted.)
My disappearing act is just as much for the people around me as it is for my own sanity: I can become a bit of a three-year-old when I miss my afternoon nap, with adult-sized mood swings and tantrums. Like a toddler I often conk out in random places, having sprawled on the floor of my bedroom, or sitting upright at a table. If I forget to take my meds or run out before I get a refill, the day is shot: I skip meals to grab naps; I’m giddier than a kid hopped up on Easter candy, only to crash just as hard a few hours later. I drink coffee like a bachelorette throws back tequila shots. Caffeine won’t keep me awake, but I’m a big believer in the placebo effect.
However, the perils of getting some jittery juice are great. Standing in line for the elixir of life always puts me in range of my greatest enemies: the “night owls”, the “I-just-forgot-the-time” people, the fools who “accidentally” stay up until two in the morning. I have very little patience for those who so frivolously burn their midnight oil watching movies and screwing around, and then have the gall to complain that they’re so tired the next morning. You chose this life, now suffer the consequences. In the meantime, get out of line and save the coffee for the cursed among us.
What really burns my toast is when people tell me I look tired. Oh, I do? Really? Huh, I can’t imagine why. Maybe because it feels like it’s three am to me, and I’m sacrificing precious sleeping time to stand here and listen to you make inane observations. In high school, a particularly infuriating girl once told me, “You need to get more sleep. You’re starting to look sick.”
I informed her I was just grateful I didn’t look like her.
If I could get more sleep, I would. But narcolepsy isn’t just falling asleep randomly, it’s feeling tired constantly. It’s like being a broken rechargeable battery: I can sleep all day, but within an hour the energy’s gone and it’s time for another recharge.
The most frustrating moments are when I’m having fun, and suddenly I get bowled over by a wave of sleepiness. Nothing kills the mood like the words, “I need to go lie down.” Don’t get me wrong, my friends are pretty understanding, offering up their beds and shoulders willingly, but it’s still disappointing to put a pause on our gallivanting so that I can rest up. There are plans and adventures I want to look forward to, but start to dread because, if I miss my medicine or can’t catch a nap, I’ll pull a Mr. Hyde and turn into a raving monster until I get some shuteye. I remember calling my mom in tears before going away on a weekend retreat that I had been excited about a couple of weeks before.
“I’m just not going to feel good and I’m not going to be fun to be around.” I sniffled into my phone, punching in the code to my empty dorm room before flopping onto my bed.
“You can sleep on the drive up, and I’m sure there’ll be some downtime when you can take a nap,” she said.
“I don’t want to have to take a nap. I want to have fun with my friends and not just sleep,” I whined. I sounded like a child and I knew it, but I didn’t care. It’d been a long week, and no matter what I did I couldn’t shake the heavy cloud of exhaustion that followed me around like Joe Btfsplk. I was pretty sure Snow White’s evil mining-midgets had taken up residency inside my head and were pounding away at my skull, and my bloodshot eyes were reminiscent of a drunk driver’s mugshot. I felt as pitiful as I looked.
“I hate being tired, Mom,” I said, rubbing at my teary eyes.
She was quiet for a second. “I know. I’m sorry, babe.”
“This was supposed to be fun, but I don’t even want to go now.”
“You should still go. You’ll regret not going,” she told me. “They’ll understand if you need to take a quick nap, and even if you’re tired, it’ll still be fun. I’ll be praying for you to feel good.”
After we finished talking, I fell asleep, setting an alarm to remind myself to wake up in time to leave. The weekend was still good, but I did have to sleep through half of it and got some extreme FOMO as a result.
It’s things like napping while my friends play and feeling constantly fatigued that make narcolepsy so hard. Those are the times I cry to my mom, or my friends, or God, and tell them that I’m tired of being tired; I want to feel awake and alive.
It’s like I’m on a hike with a really lazy kid. I’m telling her to look around and see the beautiful views and enjoy the sunlight and feel the wind and hear the birds. She’s dragging her feet and complaining she wants to rest, or better yet turn around and go home. But I grab her hand and force her along anyway, yanking her behind me as we go. And every once in a while she’ll look up and feel the warmth of the sun and get a whiff of the fresh air and woodsiness of the trees, and I won’t have to pull her so hard.
Those are the good moments, the times I forget how tired I feel. It happened while I was laughing at my best friend as she danced around to Queen with a towel wrapped around her head (because that’s just who she is). I walked up to get the mail and didn’t put any shoes on and felt the cool grass between my toes. I went to Walmart with my friends, and we smelled all the awful perfumes and colognes and sprayed each other with them until an employee started glaring at us. My mom and I ate black raspberry ice cream at the Wall Drug Store in South Dakota. My family was hiking in the desert of Sedona with the heat heavy on my shoulders, and I paused for a drink and realized I wasn’t tired. It doesn’t last very long but I make a point of noticing and telling myself, “This is what being awake must feel like.”
Tiredness and I go together like Garfield goes with Mondays, like dinosaurs go with floods, like Harry Potter goes with Umbridge, and like feet go with Legos. I’ll always hate being tired, but those times my head isn’t filled with fog? When the blurriness leaves my eyes, and moving doesn’t take so much effort? The times that bratty kid finally picks up her feet? Yeah, I’m extra thankful for those times.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go take a nap.
