Can't sleep again...

I'll be miserable at work tomorrow, because I can't sleep tonight. The trick has become to allow myself to get so tired by the time I lay down, that I fall asleep immediately. Strangely enough, my depression has helped with this because I am always tired now. I walk around exhausted, by the effort to interact with my co-workers and function "normally". Barely able to make it through the day. My 9-5 job remains intense and unrelenting. By the time I return home in the evenings, I am so stressed out that I could fall asleep immediately. And some evenings I do. Walk in, take off my clothes, climb into bed and pull the covers over my head until the next morning.

The problem arises whenever I happen, inevitably, to awaken in the middle of the night. The telephone rings late. There is a noise outside, or I have to go to the bathroom. Then I return to bed, knowing that I must fall asleep immediately or I will start to think. Once I start to think, it's all over and there is no more escape. Which is why I am awake now. Because there is only one thing I can think about...and that is the one thing I don't want to think about.

I was half hoping that, as time began to pass, the pain would become less acute. But whenever there is a sliver of unoccupied time or thought, my mind returns to what I am trying to avoid. And all of those painful feelings and memories are right where I left them. Waiting for me.

Ironically, as an artist, I am my own worst enemy in this situation. I simply cannot develop any distance from the loss that causes me such pain. Decades of theater training and acting have reinforced a natural empathy that is a part of my personality inherited directly from my mother.

In addition, I've had years to develop acute "sense memory" that allows me return not just to the thoughts I don't want to have, but also directly to the feelings I wish to avoid. And not just my own, but Lionel's as well. All of the terror, the misery, helplessness, anguish and agony that he suffered during those months in the ICU...I felt too...because I identify so closely with him.

And all those emotions -- both his and mine -- are just as fresh and raw as when first experienced. Time has done absolutely nothing to dull or dim any of it. All I have to do is stop allowing myself to be distracted -- and I am suffused and demolished by the sequence of events all over again. As vividly as when they first occurred.

As long as I can keep busy and stay present, "in the moment" with tasks at hand, I can function. But another aspect of my artistic life, that part as a writer and director, has me constantly functioning as observer. Outside the situation, looking on and analyzing. There isn't a millisecond since the moment Lionel went into the hospital for the last time that my mind doesn't try to examine and re-examine. That my heart doesn't hone right back in on, to feel acutely, all over again.

And so I end up right back where I started, unable to ignore or get past the emotional elephant that remains planted stubbornly in the center of my consciousness. The more I think about it, the more I think about it... and that whirlpool pulls me right back down into the depths of a despair I seem incapable of escaping.