The Night Shift

I was never a good sleeper, even before any of this. Putting my head on the pillow and simply drifting off was never one of my talents. I was an anxious sleeper from the start.

Then I lost my hearing, and Miss T arrived, and sleep stopped being difficult and became a nightly battle with fixed rules.

The rules go like this. You turn off the lights. You silence the world. And in doing so, you remove the only thing that was competing with the sound in your head. So the exact moment you lie down to rest is the exact moment Miss T reaches full volume, with nothing left to drown her. Every night. Like clockwork.

For the first years, I fought her. I would lie there, furious, as the sound climbed. And here is the cruel feedback loop: the anger made it worse. Fury feeds the mechanical squeak, the shade I hate most, and the squeak feeds the fury, and round and round it went while the hours passed and sleep did not come. I would wake up, after whatever broken sleep I managed, feeling like I had not slept at all. Brutal mornings, a brain like mashed chewing gum, before the day had even started.

I want to be honest about how long this lasted, because I think people need to hear the real number. Not weeks. Not months. Years. Years of nights like that. If you are in your sleepless second year right now, reading this at 3am, I am not going to pretend to you that it passes quickly. It did not for me.

But I also will not leave you there, because that is not where the story ends.

The sleep did get better. Not because the sound got quieter, it never has, but because I learned something that changed the whole relationship between me and the night. It came from the least likely place, from a near-stranger, and it took me months to actually do. It is the single most useful thing I have learned in eleven years, and it is what I am going to write about next.

For now, if you are lying awake tonight bracing against a sound that will not stop, I want you to know two things. The first is that the brutal nights are real, and wanting to scream into the dark does not make you weak. The second is that there is a way through them that I did not have for years, and I am going to hand it to you, so you do not have to wait as long as I did.

It does not get easier. But it does get better. The nights are where I learned that was true.

This is where I write it all down. What life is really like with one ear and a sound only I can hear. The hard parts, the absurd ones (the wrong ear, the wrong reply, the phone that rings from everywhere and nowhere), and the parts that, against all odds, got better. Not easier. But better. If this is your life too, or you love someone living it, you’re welcome here.