This was me yesterday. Sunday. Horizontal on the couch at 11am, Kindle face down, completely unscheduled, catching up on sleep I'd been quietly owing myself all week.
Fully booked out. Blocked out.
Not because I'd been travelling. Not because I had an unusually packed calendar or some big deadline that kept me up. (I mean I did but that’s nothing outside the usual). Just two, maybe three nights last week where the sleep was either too little or too broken, and by Friday I could feel it. That particular kind of tired that isn't about the body as much as it is about everything feeling slightly harder than it should.
I grew up in a house where sleeping in was never a problem. My desi parents are very much of the opinion that rest is not laziness, and as I have learnt now, a lot of other Indian parents weren’t — and they let me sleep. And I mean, sleep a lot.
Weekend mornings were slow. Afternoons had naps. Nobody was performing productivity at home. And at the time I just took it for granted, the way you take most things for granted when you're young and you don't yet know that not everyone grew up like that. It took me embarrassingly long as an adult to connect the dots. That the version of me running on bad sleep is not a slower version of the same me. She's a different person.
Slightly grey around the edges. A little short. Making decisions from a place of mild depletion rather than actual clarity. Sitting in meetings and going through the motions rather than actually being present in them. Technically functioning. Not really there.
I've stopped calling it burnout because it isn't burnout. Burnout is a slow collapse with a complicated origin story. This is simpler and more specific than that. This is just me ignoring the one variable I actually can't negotiate with. Not the hours. Not the travel. Not the difficult client or the non-existent brief.
Sleep. That's my non-negotiable. My kryptonite and my superpower in the same breath.
Take it away and I'm running at 60%; protect it and I'm sharp, patient, decisive, actually creative rather than just technically capable.
Most people spend years trying to optimise everything. The morning routine, the inbox, the calendar, the diet. And look, fine. I tried too. But I'd argue the more useful exercise is figuring out your one thing. The thing that, when it's off, makes everything else harder. And when it's right, makes everything else manageable. Mine is sleep. Yours might be something else entirely.
Yesterday the couch got me back to sanity. Today feels like me again. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for never making me feel guilty about sleeping in. Turns out you knew something :)
M.
PS: Know someone who needs permission to actually sleep? Send them this.
xx
Manuja
Not for everyone. Never was.
