Insomnia identity
When I was young and would have trouble sleeping, my mother would come to my room and try to coax me out of insomnia by telling me that sleep didn't really matter. If I just lay in bed and close my eyes, I would be getting the important rest my body needed and it would be as if I had slept, for all intents and purposes. Who needs dreams?
My mother's approach was a bit like the causality-inverting idea that forcing yourself to smile makes you happier. You can express a feeling in order to then feel it. Emily Dickinson apparently had it backward: Before great pain, a formal feeling comes. You just have to put your body through the motions, and the rest of your brain will be tricked into following along.
Usually, after my mother dispensed this advice and left, I would lie still, trying to reason out how "rest" was different from "sleep," until I slipped into a hypnagogic state and my thoughts stopped being directed but became scenes that seemed to unfold of their own accord. Pretending to sleep actually worked.
I think my mother's no-nonsense attitude toward sleep helped me to avoid developing what cognitive behaviorist Kenneth Lichstein calls "insomnia identity," the belief that one is the sort of person who has trouble sleeping. The BPS Research Digest summarizes Lichstein's paper this way:
individuals with an insomnia identity may have acquired unrealistic expectations, seeing a 15-minute period of wakefulness before dropping off as aberrant. Temperaments drawn to hypochondria, or liable to catastrophic thinking (believed to contribute to some chronic pain conditions) may symptomise minor events or exaggerate their implications. If symptoms are in remission, insomniacs may be hypervigilant for even a single night’s poor sleep as evidence that “it’s back”.
Those with "insomnia identity" often get as much sleep as non-insomniacs, but telling them this "could produce perverse incentives for hypervigilance among those with an insomnia identity and a resolute sense that their problem is real and severe."
This makes me wonder if all identity is insomnia identity — whether every form of "authenticity" is also a form of hypochondria, an insistence on a private pain that distinguishes us and makes us worthy of attention. The idea that we are too attached to our flaws is the logic behind cognitive behavioral therapy in general: According to CBT, the spontaneous "automatic thoughts" one has that seem to reflect their "true feelings" are often just negative thoughts that need to be discarded. If I stop trying to "be myself," I can stop being trapped in the set of preoccupying anxieties through which I know myself.
I am tempted to close the loop here and claim that it was my worrying about "who I really am" that kept me awake at night — "identity insomnia" — but I don't really remember why I couldn't sleep as a kid. Part of it was because I always felt like there was more to do. It upset me that TV shows would still be airing even though I couldn't stay up to watch them. It offended me that the world kept going without me.
I tried to address this by sleeping with a tiny transistor radio quietly playing under my pillow, though this solution had an inherent problem: If I succeeded in hiding the radio from my parents, the batteries would quickly go dead from it being on all night. But still, I liked the sound of muffled voices repeating the weather report and sports scores (the AM news station was the only signal strong enough to reach my little radio) as I tried to sleep. It made me feel like I knew what I was missing.
One specific thing that kept me up at night as a child was this album cover, for the Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord. Alone in the dark with a radio with dead batteries, I would have this unsettling image pop into my head: the skull, the baby in the womb, the melting sun with six arms. I was introduced to this horror when I was seven or eight, and my parents would take me with them for their pinochle night to another couple's house. I would be remanded with my brother to the bedroom of that couple's teenage son, Alan, to play with slot cars and listen to records. I still remember the records he liked but virtually nothing else about him. It was, I realize now, a pretty eclectic mix, though I grew up believing his was just "normal" taste and that all the older kids were into Steppenwolf's Monster, Deep Purple's Come Taste the Band, Led Zeppelin III, and a bunch of Moody Blues albums.
I would beg Alan not to play In Search of the Lost Chord — given how much the album cover troubled me, I couldn't even begin to fathom how nightmarish the actual music would be — I may have even broken into tears about it. He told me the cover was supposed to represent what acid felt like, which is likely why I have never done acid.
Later in life, I was surprised when I found out how gentle and accessible the album was — orchestral proto-prog with tasteful Mellotron backdrops and hippified lyrics about self-discovery, Timothy Leary, and how "thinking is the best way to travel." Whenever I listen to it I inevitably think of Alan, but it's a closed little tautological loop: Pretty much all I know about Alan is that he had this album, and the album reminds me of how that is all I know.
My favorite track on In Search of the Lost Chord is "Voices in the Sky." The "voices in the sky" are just birdsong, but the middle-eight takes on an emotional urgency disproportionate to what the singer is ostensibly describing, and it seems to open on to a different vista: "Just what is happening to me? I lie awake with the sound of the sea, calling to me!" Does he want to throw himself in? I hope that isn't what the birds are trying to tell him.
When I would be lying awake, half fighting sleep and half wanting it to come, listening to the radio voices drift in and out of reception, I never had a feeling that they were calling to me specifically. What was reassuring about them was their indifference.
I don't know what ever happened to Alan; at a certain point the pinochle games stopped, and maybe by that time he had left home for one reason or another. Sometimes I think about seeking him out on social media, but then I don't. I feel like I owe this weird favor of indifference to the people I've intermittently forgotten about. I'm not sure if I am violating that here.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review claimed that the hardest thing about precarious employment in the "gig economy" is that strips people of a "cohesive sense of self": "those engaged in multiple jobs may find themselves plagued with issues of authenticity: who am 'I' really, if I’m all these things at once?" To combat this, the authors recommend that you "embrace yourself as being composed of multiple (sometimes distinct) identities" and to embrace "authentication is a dynamic process."
I was sad to see this evidence of how fluid identity, an idea once seemingly rich with radical potential, has become a neoliberal coping strategy. But I've argued before how "becoming yourself" has become a lousy job we feel coerced into performing, by social media especially. They encourage that "hypervigilance" the cognitive behavioral therapists warn about, an acute awareness of one's own supposed significance. And if we are insufficiently vigilant, they can "hijack our minds" with metrics, variable rewards, and compulsive feedback loops. These all help reinforce a sense of self-importance, that everything we do has some calculable significance as long as we share it within social media networks.
Envisioning authenticity as an ongoing process of authentication, as the HBR authors advise, rather than a kind of revelation of some inner truth about oneself seems well-suited to the world of total surveillance and "social credit" systems, where nearly everything we do is tracked and made to contribute to a reputation score that governs our life possibilities. Keep working on that score! Level up!
It seems futile to argue that reputation is negotiated on different terms in different circumstances among different sorts of people; the monopolizing and homogenizing tendencies of the social media giants demands that all behavior be understood as commensurate data. One's "authentic identity" is less a process than a processing.
I used to have the radio under my pillow and no one knew what I was listening to. I used to think the voices in the sky would always be talking over me, and I was all right with that; I built an idea of comfort and security out of that feeling, alone in my room and up past my bedtime. But it is becoming harder to sustain. I feel like I spend all day eavesdropping on people through social media channels, and that in turn they are eavesdropping on me, whether I intend to share anything or not. I know so much of what I do is tracked and being fed to me in opaque, obscure ways that it has warped my sense of what I see and what I do. I'm in a cloud of my own identity that follows me around like Pigpen's dust cloud, and I can't see beyond it. I don't think a transistor radio would help me forget that it was there anymore.