The greatest thing I have learned is how good it is to come home again.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
When I arrived in Texas for Christmas, my Year of Fear was almost halfway over. My first night home, my dad invited the Valby family out to dinner at an Italian restaurant renowned for its pagers that lit up like spaceships to signal diners their table was ready. Mr. Valby was my dad’s tennis partner. He was a cheerful man in his late fifties who loved to hear about my life in New York. When I told him about the project over dinner, he was fascinated. As Mr. Valby asked question after question, I noticed my dad’s head going back and forth between us, looking increasingly displeased as if he were witnessing the world’s worst tennis match.
Finally Dad cleared his throat and said, “Her mother and I think it’d be better if Noelle moved back home for a while, get her head on straight. Maybe help out at my office.”
Oh God. Could it come to that? What if my Year of Fear bankrupted me and I had to move in with my parents in Sugar Land, Texas? The shame! Oh, how I’d teased Mom and Dad when I was in college and they announced they were moving from Houston to Sugar Land! “Is that next to Candy Land?” I’d asked. “How far is your house from Gum Drop Mountain? Will you have to drive or can you just take the rainbow trail to get there?”
My parents are actually lovely people. They’re supportive but incredibly practical. Having come from a long line of hardy farmers and businessmen of modest means, they had a hard time grasping that a person could make a living as a writer. For years they’d tried to steer me toward law school or a career in dentistry.
“You’d make enough money to support yourself,” my mom would say, sounding slightly dreamy. She’d been a devoted stay-at-home mom, but I’d always sensed she regretted not forging a career for herself. “A woman shouldn’t have to depend on a man for her livelihood,” she’d often told me.
After I graduated from college, they’d watched nervously as I’d toiled away at newspapers on a $25,000-a-year salary while living in a very expensive city. They’d been thrilled for me when I’d landed the high-paying blogging job. Telling my parents I’d been laid off was harder than being laid off. As I’d picked up the phone to call them with the news, they’d felt more like my children than my parents. I’d wanted to shield them from the disappointment I was about to cause.
“Well,” Mr. Valby’s jovial drawl cut through the tension, “I still think this project of yours sounds mighty interestin’. You know what you should do?” He speared a shiny chunk of steak with his fork.
“What?” I asked.
“You should climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Fourth-highest mountain in the world, you know,” he added, before depositing the steak in his mouth.
“Oh, that sounds dangerous. I don’t think it’s a good idea,” my mother said, though I was pretty sure that, like me, she knew almost nothing about Kilimanjaro.
“Doesn’t that kind of thing take years of preparation?” I asked. With only six months left on the project, I didn’t have that kind of time. “I don’t have any mountain-climbing experience.” I was picturing looming cliffs of ice, complicated rope systems, and frozen appendages that turned black and had to be self-amputated with a Swiss Army knife.
“You don’t need climbing experience for Kilimanjaro because it’s not really a climb,” he said. “The mountain is so broad you’re essentially just walking to the summit in a couple of days. Kilimanjaro requires no technical skill.”
“That’s me,” I deadpanned. “Technically no skill.”
Mountain climbing combined my two least favorite things on this planet—camping and exercise. Throw in crapping in the woods and that’s a pretty accurate description of how I imagine hell. Still, I wondered if the universe was telling me—in the guise of a middle-aged tennis enthusiast—that I needed to go mountain climbing.
When I got home from dinner, I plopped in front of my parents’ computer to find out more about Kilimanjaro, like, for instance, what continent it was on. Answer: Africa. The closest I’d been to visiting Africa was on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland.
Mr. Valby was right. Climbing Kilimanjaro didn’t necessitate prior mountaineering experience. But the level of difficulty was a matter of much debate. Reading hikers’ testimonies about climbing Kilimanjaro was like asking a group of Democrats and Republicans what they thought of the president of the United States. Half the hikers shrugged off Kilimanjaro as a long walk. A disturbing number of people had climbed it on their honeymoon. Others claimed it was the hardest thing they’d ever done, mentally and physically. More than twenty-five thousand people tried to climb Mount Kilimanjaro each year, but only 40 percent made it to the top. Fifteen thousand turned back before they reached the summit. These numbers gave me pause. That was a lot of people getting their asses kicked by a mountain. Was I just setting myself up for failure? Or something even worse?
Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research:
“At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.”
A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes?
But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My eyes were stinging from staring at the computer too long, so I shut it down.
I wandered into my little sister’s room, knowing she was away at a swim meet, to look for clues about what she’d like for Christmas. The walls had been painted bright blue since my last visit; they were full of photographs of her with friends I didn’t recognize. Jordan had been a late arrival to the family, born fifteen years after me. I was in the delivery room when she arrived and even cut the umbilical cord (my father, a squeamish man, enjoyed the proceedings behind the safety of a curtain). I’d assumed we’d be best friends because we were too far apart in age for sibling rivalry. I’d been too young to understand that this age gap essentially guaranteed we wouldn’t be close. She’d been a toddler when I’d left for college; since then she’d only seen me a few times a year during holidays.
On one wall there was an expansive cork bulletin board with her swimming medals dangling from ribbon necklaces on hooks along the bottom. They hung at least seven feet across. She was only fourteen but already ranked in the top ten nationally. Looking at that bulletin board, I felt very proud, of course, but I ached for her as well. There was something a little heartbreaking about this curtain of medals. At this point, it was more surprising when Jordan didn’t win first place. I wondered if she’d gotten to the point where the fear of losing far outweighed the joy of winning.
“Oh, you startled me!” my mom said from the doorway where she stood, hand over heart, and smelling of sunflower-based perfume. “I didn’t know you were in here. I’m just looking for the scissors. Jordan always takes them and forgets to put them back.” She bustled into the room, shaking her head in exasperation. Sure enough, when we opened a desk drawer there was a pile of scissors.
“Oh, for Lord’s sake!” Mom exclaimed, but her tone was affectionate.
Mom ran her fingers anxiously over the gold choker she always wore. “Do you think she’s okay at the swim meet?”
“Of course. Mom, this is like her millionth swim meet away from home. The coaches are with her.”
“I think I’ll call again just to make sure. Anyway, I need to remind her not to stay up too late and to eat lightly at breakfast because she could get a cramp during the race and—”
“Okay, you’ve gotta stop doing that!” I burst out.
“Doing what?” Mom looked confused.
“Worrying all the time.”
“I’m just trying to protect her.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. My mom’s entire life was about being a mom, and I was about to tell her she had been doing part of it wrong. “You think you’re helping her, but you’re really just making it harder for her in the long run. She’ll grow up not knowing how to handle setbacks and disappointment. It’s good for her to fail once in a while,” I said, talking about myself as much as my sister. “Failure is a better teacher than success.”
I took a deep breath and continued: “You have to give her freedom to fail once in a while so she can learn to give herself freedom to fail.”
My mom’s eyes filled with tears, but I had to finish this.
“And I’m not talking just about her, Mom. When you’re always expressing doubt about the things that I’m doing, it makes me feel like you don’t have confidence in my abilities. Which makes me doubt myself more.”
That did it. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she said, “I do it because I care!”
At the sight of her tears, the frustration I’d been feeling toward her in the last six months dissipated. Worry was how my mother loved, I realized.
“But you’re teaching her to equate caring with worrying,” I said gently. “She’ll grow up thinking that if you really care about your career, you should always be worrying about work. Or that if you really care about your relationship, you should worry whether your partner is cheating on you or falling out of love with you. That’s not an easy way to go through life. I know you don’t want that for her.”
“No, you’re right. I need to trust you girls more.” She looked up at the ceiling while she wiped the tears away, to avoid smearing her mascara. “I just—I just like having people to take care of, you know?”
“You could always have another baby. Jordan’s almost the age I was when you had her.”
This got a laugh. “Oh, right! Could you picture the look on your father’s face?”
“No, because I’ve never had someone stroke out right in front of me before.”
She started laughing uncontrollably, and soon I joined her. Finally, we’d mostly settled down, with just a few aftershock giggles.
“It wasn’t even that funny,” I said. For some reason, this made us explode all over again.
The next morning as I was checking my e-mail, the phone rang. When I picked it up, Jessica started in without saying hello, a gesture that should have been rude but always gave me a sort of heartwarming thrill.
“So apparently,” Jessica reported, “when I was stumbling home from our office holiday party last night, I bought a Christmas tree.”
“Why do you say ‘apparently’?” I asked.
“Because I’m staring at a fully decorated tree in the middle of my living room with no recollection of how it got there.”
“You decorated while under the influence?” I asked. “Impressive. Did you also convert from Judaism to Christianity?” Jessica was Jewish.
“As drunk as I was, anything’s possible.”
I propped my feet on the edge of the desk and leaned back in my chair. Happily, it was one of those spinning chairs you’d find in an office.
“And what’s the latest from Texas?” Jessica asked.
“I’m reading about Mount Kilimanjaro, actually. A friend of my dad’s suggested it for my Year of Fear, and I thought it could be a good idea until I learned about the many ways one can meet his or her untimely death while mountain climbing.”
“Kilimanjaro? That’s a great idea,” Jessica said, with much more enthusiasm than I’d expected. She’d completely ignored the part about the potential for dying. “It’s supposed to be a life-changing experience. Did you know you can see the curve of the earth up there? I’ve heard the sunrise is like nothing you’ve ever seen!”
“Seriously?” I’d been absently twisting my chair back and forth, but this made me stop and sit up. “I’ve never pictured you as the roughing-it kind.”
“I know, but lately I just feel so stuck in my life in New York that I want to do something that’s completely the opposite experience of living here. I’d do it myself, actually, if it weren’t so expensive.”
Uh-oh. Already I was more than halfway through my savings. Money was becoming an increasingly important factor in what I chose to do. “How much does it cost?”
“Thousands.”
My heart sank. “Is that with or without airfare and hiking equipment?”
“Without.”
“Well, there goes that idea.” I pushed off the desk with one foot to make the chair spin around a few times. “No way I’ll be able to afford that and have enough money to finish the project.” As I twirled I saw something large blur by. I put my feet on the floor. “Oh! Hi, Dad. Jess, let me call you back.”
He was wearing his long monogrammed flannel robe and slippers. My dad would never walk around the house in boxer shorts or with pajama pants and an undershirt. Everything in his manner—from the way he ate, spoke, and dressed—carried a certain dignity. In fact, I couldn’t recall him ever wearing a shirt without a collar, or blue jeans. When he was in his robe and slippers, it was the only time he appeared vulnerable to me.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just thought I’d ask if you wanted to go shopping for your mother’s and sister’s Christmas presents together tonight.” He paused awkwardly, then added: “Maybe we could even grab a bite to eat while we’re out, just you and me?” A peace offering after last night.
I smiled. “That sounds great.”
Four days later, on Christmas morning, Jordan and I were sitting on the living room floor, a battlefield strewn with torn and brutalized wrapping paper. She had just opened my present, a necklace with a silver square pendant. Carved into the pendant was an outline of someone swimming through the ocean, head turned in profile, as if taking a breath.
When she flipped it over, her expression turned quizzical. On the back I had engraved a quote. It wasn’t an Eleanor line, or even a Dr. Bob original. I’d come across it once while researching fear and had always liked it: Fear is just excitement without the breath.
It was an abstract concept for someone her age to grasp—the idea of breath as an antidote to fear. Even I’d been surprised to learn that fear and excitement are biologically nearly identical (think pounding heartbeat, sweating, muscle tension) but that fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing into it fully.
“Holding your breath when you’re scared is a way of closing yourself off from fear, trying to reject it,” Dr. Bob told me once. “But as we know, ignoring fear never works. Instead, inhale and invite fear in eagerly. When you breathe deeply, your anxiety levels lower and feelings of excitement take over.”
“I’ll explain it later,” I said with a wink, and this seemed to satisfy Jordan.
“Thank you!” She ducked her head in that sweetly awkward way characteristic of fourteen-year-old girls.
I went back to plowing through my stocking. My hands touched something flat and crisp, and I pulled out a blank white envelope. Inside was a check made out to me from my dad. I stared at it saucer-eyed for a few moments. My dad was watching from his wingback chair across the room, but when I looked over, he immediately busied himself with his own stocking.
“Your mother and I thought that if you’re going to keep on with this . . . thang you’re doin’, you might need some help paying for that mountain of yours,” he said, affecting a tone of grudging acceptance. “And we have enough airline miles that you could fly back and forth to Africa for free. We lose the miles if we don’t use them so it’s only practical . . .”
We all knew full well that there was nothing practical about what I’d been doing for the past half year. And I knew they didn’t understand it. And yet, the most practical man I knew was flying me to another continent so I could attempt to climb a mountain, just to see if I could do it. In this instant, I loved my parents so dearly that I was almost in physical pain.
Before I could respond, my mother said, “Can I just say one thing and I swear I won’t say another word about it?” She’d been arranging everyone’s presents so they’d be opened in an order of escalating delight. But now she came over and put her hand on my arm.
“Just promise me you’ll watch out for terrorists,” she said. “They’d love to kidnap you and hold you for ransom.”
Back in New York, Matt and I decided to spend New Year’s with his parents at their beach house. It was there that, at exactly 12:45 A.M., I discovered my bottle of sleeping pills was missing from my tote bag.
“But I know I packed them!” I told Matt. “I remember putting them in the bag.” I turned the tote upside down in the middle of the carpet. Quarters and lip balm careened across the floor, but otherwise: nothing. Matt paused his flossing to watch me rifle through my suitcase, approaching something close to hysteria.
“Maybe this is a good thing,” he offered. “It worries me that you take those pills every night, honey.”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy strategizing how to get my hands on some sleep meds. Could I make a run to a local pharmacy or drugstore? No, they wouldn’t be open on New Year’s Eve.
I lay awake for hours, roiling under the covers. Poor Matt suffered in silence next to me although I was sure he wanted to shake me. The plan had been to stay the whole weekend, but I was already plotting which bus I’d take back to the city—and to my prescription sleeping pills—the next afternoon. No way I was enduring another night of this. Then at 4:00 A.M.—as I was contemplating a highly inappropriate raid of his parents’ medicine cabinet for a bottle of Nyquil—I sat bolt upright. I knew where they were! I grabbed the keys off the counter, flew out the front door, and had the car trunk flung open in a matter of seconds. Sure enough, the bottle had tumbled out of my purse during the drive. When I made my victorious return to the guest room, Matt had turned on a lamp and was sitting up in bed. I danced the perimeter of the room, shaking the pills around like a maraca. He rubbed his eyes wearily.
“This has become a serious problem, Noelle. You’re a drug addict.”
I took a sip of water, tipped my head back, and gratefully swallowed a few tablets. “Well, that’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”
“Extreme? When we were in Aruba, you kept your sleeping pills in the hotel safe with your passport and pearl necklace!”
“You told me to put my valuables in it!”
Matt rolled his eyes and fluffed his pillow a few times before lying down facing away from me. I climbed into bed beside him.
“It’s not like I’m getting high,” I told his back. No response. “I’m just trying to get to sleep—a basic human function necessary for survival.”
“You’re taking the easy way out,” he said without rolling over. “You need to try harder.”
“I need to try harder to lose consciousness?”
“You know what I mean.”
“But I have to go to sleep. It just takes me longer than everyone else to get there. Imagine if you had a three-hour commute to work, then someone came up with a way to transport you there almost immediately?”
“I’d take the safer option.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone says. But I don’t see anyone driving a horse and buggy.”
“Aren’t you worried about what those pills could be doing to your internal organs?” he asked quietly.
In lieu of a response, I turned out the light. The answer was yes, of course, and I’d tried to cut back before. But you’d be amazed and appalled at how easily you’d sell out your liver after a few sleepless nights. I was about to tell him this when I heard his breath deepen. He was fast asleep.
It started at Yale. I learned a lot in college, but the lesson that had stuck with me the longest was how not to be tired. My classmates had graduated from tweedy private schools full of teachers like Eleanor’s Madame Souvestre. They arrived at college primed for the rigors of an Ivy League education. They knew how to skim a three-hundred-word book in an hour and retain the information. They cranked out twenty-page research papers in an afternoon and still had time for a game of Ultimate Frisbee before dinner. I, on the other hand, had gone to a high school where only 13 percent of graduates continued their education. The average SAT score had been 876 out of 1600. I’d been as ready for college as Cap’n Crunch was ready to commandeer an actual battleship.
Freshman year, I managed. But the following year my workload increased after I changed my major and had to take extra classes. I was studying until three A.M. just to break even. Over time, I simply trained my body not to recognize tiredness. This was great for studying, but less great when I needed to go to sleep. Sleeping pills were out of the question since I could only afford four or five hours of sleep a night instead of the requisite eight. Besides, the department of undergraduate health wouldn’t prescribe sleeping pills to students. I always found this amusing since they handed out free condoms at every turn. If you wanted to sleep with someone, they’d supply the provisions, but if you simply wanted to get to sleep, you were on your own.
When my roommate suggested a relaxing glass of red wine before bedtime, I secured a bottle of merlot from the local liquor store that didn’t check IDs. Later that night I poured the wine into a plastic tumbler I’d stolen from the dining hall. I took a few sips and made a face. Vile. I hated wine. I walked over to our fireplace mantel where we displayed our liquor, the bottles lined up like trophies. I pulled down a handle of Jack Daniel’s and poured myself a shot. Better to get it over with as soon as possible, I reasoned as I tossed it back. Within minutes I felt the booze slip seductively into my veins, my heart rate slowed, and I lapsed into a dreamless sleep. Soon I was having a shot of Jack every night before bed. When one shot stopped getting the job done, I added a second shot. By senior year, my nightcap had progressed to two shots of Everclear, a grain alcohol. At 190 proof, it was more than twice the strength of a shot of whiskey. Yes, it was so strong that it sometimes left me with a sore throat the next day, but having two shots of Everclear before bed made me feel less like a character in a Eugene O’Neill play than drinking four shots of whiskey.
After graduating from college, I moved to New York, where there were plenty of doctors willing to prescribe sleeping pills. I stopped drinking before bed and had many appointments at a center for sleep disorders. They ruled out restless legs and sleep apnea. Physically, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to sleep. My body eventually built up a tolerance to the pills, just as it had to the nightcaps. Even after taking a sleeping pill, I’d wake up as many as ten times a night. So I added half of a pill. When my body stopped responding to that, I added another half and another . . .
Seven years later, I was up to five pills a night and even Jessica was concerned. “Do all of those pills turn you into a princess or something?” she once asked. “Because otherwise I can’t find a logical justification to swallow that much crap. Even a blow job makes more sense.”
“It’s not like I’m in danger of overdosing,” I said defensively. “It takes over forty pills to OD.”
When people found out I worked in gossip journalism, they’d sometimes joke, “How do you sleep at night?” “Pills,” I’d deadpan. But that was only part of it. Doctors could legally prescribe only thirty sleeping pills a month (because, apparently, they’re addictive!), and I’d blow through that prescription in about a week. So I started stepping out on my doctor. At one point I was working two different brands of sleep aids, three different pharmacies, and four different doctors just to get a night’s rest. Doctor shopping is illegal, of course, and it was also expensive. It hadn’t been as bad when I’d had cushy corporate health insurance benefits, but once I was laid off I’d gotten a cheap plan with a freelancers’ union whose coverage policy loosely translated to “Yeah, right!”
The following weekend, Matt spent the night at my apartment. When I came out of the bathroom after washing my face, he was peering at my sleeping pill bottle with suspicion.
“This is a different bottle from last week, isn’t it?” he said accusingly.
My guilty expression was all the answer he needed. “I knew it! The pharmacy logo was different. How many of these are you taking a night?”
I couldn’t lie to him, so instead I admitted, “Enough that if I keep this up, I won’t have enough money to fund the rest of my Year of Fear.”
“It’s that expensive?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Also, I can’t take sleeping pills on Kilimanjaro.”
As soon as we’d finished opening presents on Christmas Day, I’d gone straight to the Internet to read up on the logistics of climbing Kilimanjaro. I’d come across the info about sleeping pills while reading testimonials of hikers who’d conquered the mountain. I’d been heartbroken to learn that taking sleeping pills would be downright dangerous. They suppress your breathing and it’s already so suppressed from the lack of oxygen that you could die in your sleep.
It was an impossible situation. I couldn’t imagine being that far away from home, in that strenuous an environment, without my pills. What if I didn’t get any sleep the entire time? I would never make it to the top, let alone back down again. Yet I couldn’t imagine telling my parents I wasn’t going. What would I say? That I’d chosen sleeping pills over their generous gift? I couldn’t do that, especially not after I’d had that talk with my mom about how she needed to have more faith in me and my sister. If I told her about the pills, she’d have reason to worry about me for the rest of her life.
“You should make facing your addiction part of the project,” Matt suggested. “Wean yourself off before you leave for Africa. Is there anything scarier than going off sleeping pills?”
“If there is, I don’t want to know about it,” I said grimly.
A few days later in Dr. Bob’s office, he reminded me, “Research has shown that cognitive therapy is more effective in treating insomnia than sleeping pills.”
“I always thought you just said that because you can’t prescribe!” Dr. Bob was a PhD, not an MD. “Like the guy with the tiny penis who says, ‘Size doesn’t matter!’ ”
He gave me a warning look.
“Sorry.”
“Most insomnia is due to excessive mental activity—namely worrying,” he said. “Tell me, what do you think about now when you’re trying to fall asleep?”
“Lots of stuff. What if I can’t make rent? What am I going to do for a living when this year is over? Is Matt ‘The One’? Is that Ben Affleck’s real hair?” I paused, realizing Dr. Bob might not know who Ben Affleck was, but he was already jumping in.
“First understand that we’re hardwired to toss and turn all night,” he explained. “Anxiety helped our ancestors survive in a primitive environment. In circumstances where animal attacks could happen at any moment, where strangers could kill you, where your survival could depend on whether your tribe liked having you around, those who weren’t anxious enough didn’t survive.”
“But why am I worrying now? We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.”
“Precisely. Modern civilization is eliminating most of these threats far too rapidly for our evolutionary biology to catch up,” he said. “In fact, rates of anxiety have increased dramatically during the last fifty years. The average child today exhibits the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”
“And these are the people who are going to be running the country in forty years?” I said. “That’s reassuring.”
But he had a faraway look in his eye. “Now most of our worry is unproductive worry. We worry about past mistakes, obsess about what other people think of us, create terrifying future scenarios out of nothing. Our mind chatters away even when we wish to sleep or relax or simply do nothing.”
I was reminded of an Eleanor quote I’d come across a few weeks before but hadn’t understood: “Most of us, I suppose, are ridden by at least some imaginary fears. But I think it is as important to deal with these as it is with the fears based on a reasonable foundation. They often do us more harm.” Now it made sense to me.
Dr. Bob snapped out of his reverie. “The good news is, by working to overcome your anxiety, you’ve taken the first step toward overcoming insomnia,” he said. “Now it’s time to go all in.”
“All in?” I asked nervously.
“You have to make a choice,” he said. “Are you going to continue on this path or change direction? What happens when you start taking three pills a night? Four?”
It seemed unwise to tell him I was already taking five.
He continued: “Sleeping pills artificially alter your circadian rhythms. In order to beat your insomnia, you’re going to have to get off the pills.”
A surge of panic coursed through me. Insomnia made me feel like a prisoner of my mind. Lying in the dark, I had nothing to do for hours but think. I was trapped with my worries. Pills were my only escape from that prison, a way to escape myself. Wasn’t I already facing enough fears this year without taking on this as well? Now I had to face fears at night as well as during the day? There was no way I could do it. Not now. Maybe next year, when my project was over and I’d found another job and I settled back into some semblance of a normal life, then I could focus on tackling this issue. But now? Was he serious?