Conked Out

I text my therapist everyday after work. It's just a line or two, usually sometime between 5:30 and 7:30, to let her know what I'm doing with myself. Yesterday's text read "tidying my apartment, then getting ready for a stand-up comedy show" and the day before read "took a much needed nap, but feel kinda shitty about it". I feel weird and overbearing texting her every weekday afternoon, but she insists on it and even reminds me after our weekly sessions to keep it up. She tells me she's trying to create a new pattern for me, you see, and that by having someone there who's interested in what it is I do after work, and more to the point, what it is I'm not doing [taking naps], I'll change this pattern that started sometime in my childhood.

The first time I realized why it is I'm so addicted to taking a nap, or more so, why taking a nap in the late afternoon is such a habit for me - albeit one that causes me frustration and depression - was about two months after I had starting my sessions with my therapist. It was a Thursday around 5:30. I was meant to be in her office in a couple hours for our weekly appointment, and as I laid down on my bed for "just a quick nap" as the sun began its dimming and the traffic on the Hollywood freeway outside my apartment thickened, it hit me that perhaps there was a correlation between my admitted loathing of the early evening, and the fact that I become overwhelmingly exhausted during that time of day.

I've taken naps for as long as I can remember. I'm not talking about quick "power naps" on my lunch break or a snooze in front of the t.v. after dinner...oh no. Two hours in a deep, far away sleep is my drug of choice, a thin crystal line of drool more than likely escaping from my agape mouth. I sleep better during those naps than I've ever slept at night. I dream vivid, lucid dreams and wake up in a fog, usually laying in bed for ten minutes or so after I finally wake up in order to process my surroundings.

I've always hated this about myself, to be honest. It makes me feel lazy and unproductive, and I can think of a million things I'd rather be doing with my time. I make a pact with myself every morning, knowing full well that my inability to fall asleep at night is directly related to my precious naps, that from now-on it'll be different. But I get home from work, strip out of my confining office clothes and into a cotton house dress and start to futz around the house with the best intentions, and then my bed just beckons me - my feather pillow and dark bedroom like a siren's song - and before I know it, I wake up two hours later (usually on the dot, strangely).

Anyway, when it hit me that I also, unrelatedly I thought, really hate the later afternoon/early evening that day, I shared this revaluation with my therapist. She stared at me for a beat, just long enough to make me feel like a dummy for never putting two and two together, then asked me what my later afternoons/early evenings were like when I was growing up. "Uhhhh, lonely?" I responded. "So what do you do to not have to deal with that loneliness?" she asked me bemusedly. "I'd take a nap?" I asked rhetorically. Duh.

A latch-key kid, I'd arrive home after school to an empty house due to my siblings being away at one of their regular after-school activities, or we'd just all be doing our own thing, or sometimes we wouldn't be talking to each other due to trivial sibling rivalries. I'd shut myself in my bedroom with a book, my faithful cat obsessively grooming herself at my feet with a vacant look in her eyes, and I'd curl into a fetal position and just conk out. I'd wake up as my mom would finally be arriving at home, and the house would become bustling, full of the energy of my family living our lives. It's been over ten years since I moved from my family home, but the compulsion to nap still persists.

So that's where the weekday afternoon texts come into play. I forget some days, or purposely forget other days when I don't want to admit that the lure of the bed was too strong for me. But honestly, it is nice to have someone who is so enthusiastic in my getting past the triggers that cause my depression, even though I'm paying her to do so. She responds to my texts immediately and positively. I know this will all change soon, though, as my naps are seasonal in a way. I don't like waking up from them when it's dark out, so during the winter I never feel the need for them. It's not exactly Seasonal Affective Disorder, but it isn't far from it.