Lessons From Sleepless Nights

It’s the end of my freshman year, and I’m stuck in a sleepless night. My body hit the bed a lifetime ago, and since then, I’ve been tossing and turning endlessly in a disquieted rhythm; whichever pillow I use or inhuman position into which I contrast myself, I can’t seem to fall asleep. After hours of this fruitless struggle, I resign myself to staying awake until the sun frees me from my idleness. However, the mind is never fully at rest, and I wonder why I can’t sleep. After all, I’m tired, school has just ended, and I should be looking forward to the serenity of summer. Slowly, I begin to reflect on the successes and failures of my last year. I recall the wishful plans a more excited self had made; I had promised myself that I would shed my laziness and push my limits. Then, as a seemingly indelible regret and a sense of deficiency wash over me, the source of my insomnia becomes unbearably apparent: I’ve fallen short of my expectations. As the year rolled by, my resolve quietly crumbled. I seldom took the difficult path and avoided challenging myself at all costs. When a teacher handed out an assignment, I scraped by with little effort and found clever ways to avoid work. At every turn, I took the path of least resistance.

Early dawn creeps in; I see the light. I envision the life of a lazy man, one who never overcomes resistance and is consumed by regret. This man spends his days vegetating, allowing his life to slip away like water through loose hands. I then picture the life of a man who faces discomfort head-on. He recognizes that working tirelessly is hard but uses adversity to develop as a person. He doesn’t live with regrets or stay restless at night since he’s too tired from maximizing his life to ruminate on days gone by. In an inexplicable moment of realization, I see with sobering clarity the vices from which I need to break free. Almost as if struck with a mad fever, I’m impelled out of bed and open my computer. I’m blinded by its light and mistype my password twice. Then, in a frenzy, I dump these realizations into a blank text file. Half of the words are underlined in a squiggly red line, but I press on, writing maniacally — I’m terrified that if I don’t act now, my sharpness will blur, and my realizations will become a hazy memory. Once I’m satisfied with my barely intelligible notes, I head to bed, catching the last few hours of the morning, and drift off into a dream I never remembered. When I wake up in the early afternoon and open my computer, I see the message I left for myself and am spurred to surmount the pain of action. When I notice my drive diminishing, I’ll look back at the ideals my younger self wrote. I’ll reignite my desire to live without regrets.

Skip ahead to the middle of Junior year, and I find myself again praying to cruel Morpheus. At least now, I’m intimately aware of the reason for my wakefulness, and it’s not an unresolved regret. This time, the uneasy burden of responsibility weighs on my conscience. For the better part of a year, I had been running an organization and had recruited a team. The first few months were akin to a honeymoon period. We were striving towards our goals, and everyone was passionate, giving it their all. However, as the project matured and we had more to manage, we couldn’t focus as much on growth, and consequently, our high spirits began to subside. Work is piling up. I have to do something, but I don’t know where to start. I’ve never worked on a team for so long, so this problem is particularly elusive; this is unfamiliar terrain, and naturally, I don’t relish my predicament. Initially, I cast off my free time and do everything myself. This doesn’t work. It leaves me burned out and resenting my friends, who ultimately have done nothing wrong. Every night, I continue to wallow in my bed sheets — believing the more I move, the closer I will come to an answer. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I fall asleep at some point because I remember waking up numb and hungry. Every night, for weeks, my indecisiveness comes to haunt me. I think of how I could climb out of this precarious situation. As the thoughts of my hapless inaction fester, they come to plague more of my day.

I convoke the team and give a realistic assessment of the situation. I tell them: if something doesn’t change, we’ll plateau and most likely have to shutter our doors. I say we are at a standstill and desperately need to escape. I see a slight uptick in everyone’s motivation. However, the lifeline arrives in the form of two out of our team of ten, who become the steadfast partners with whom I share my burdens. We start chipping away at the mountainous backlog and return to a rate of steady progress.

What tormented me for weeks only required a touch of honesty and decisiveness. I was liberated from the guilt as soon as I took action. When I opened my laptop to write what I had learned, I was not the same frantic freshman, and I journaled in complete tranquility. When others place their trust in me or something needs to be done, I can’t shirk responsibility and ignore an issue. Instead, I must act, especially when it’s difficult.

Every restful night is alike, but all sleepless nights are enlightening in their own way.