Why Teenagers Don't Want To Wake Up In The Morning

I would be fine alone.
And I was.
Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed. There was a leaden feeling. It was the same leaden feeling with which I woke on mornings after John and I had fought. Had we had a fight? What about, how had it started, how could we fix it if I could not remember how it started?
Then I remembered.
For several weeks that would be the way I woke to the day.
-The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I love sleeping more than practically anything else in the world. Maybe it's because I'm going through a staying-up-late-sleep-deprived phase that puts me in a constant state of tiredness, making sleep a precious commodity that I crave more of, always. Forget parties or concerts or running around the city at all hours of the night, acting twice my age- I’d much rather go home and take a nap, any day. This makes me sound incredibly lazy, but that’s really not what it’s about. Sleep lets me run away in my thoughts or from my thoughts. When I'm up at 4AM for the 5th time that week, completing a project that should have been done months ago, or waiting to see a TV show late at night, what keeps me going is the wonderful thought of how I will, eventually, be able to lay down my head, slip under the blankets, curl up into a ball, and fall fast asleep. The covers are always soft and safe and every line in my brain or heart is blurred and smudged. I’m in my own little unconscious world, unaware of anything happening around me or inside of me. It's this peaceful, carefree sensation that beats every feeling in the universe.
I can't be touched.

Until I wake up.
And the covers get pulled back.
And my mind slowly sharpens.
And everything comes crashing down.

Like Joan Didion-- when her husband dies and every morning she wakes up and that hard truth dawns on her once again. Every morning the covers are pulled back and her mind sharpens and she digs through her brain to remember everything that breaks routine, everything unnatural, everything that her unconscious, carefree self would never fathom- like John dying.

And the feeling that comes every time that that happens is unbearable-- the forgetting and remembering of the things that hurt the most. Because it's said that everything heals with time, all pain lessens as the hours and days and weeks pass. But how will anything heal if every morning is a fresh realization? How will the pain ever fade if you are hit each day with the initial shock of the very first time that it happened?

That's what I found most heartbreaking about this book- the way Joan would momentarily forget whether it was from falling asleep or just time starting to wear away the truth. Then she would wake up or see something that jolted her memory and it would all come rushing back in a second and she would have to face it all over again. It was as if each time this happened to her, every ounce of progress she had made was erased or forgotten and it was "back to the drawing board". Throughout the book, I was terrified for a character that I'd come to love so dearly because it seemed like she would never be OK, she would never feel OK when it was always "one step forward and two steps back".

Recent events of my life and just the fact that I'm fourteen has left a distance between my mother and I. It's hit like a meteor, practically over night, splitting the earth in half, leaving me on one side, and her on the other. What I laughed at and couldn't seem to understand as a little girl, what I swore would never happen, has happened. My mom and I have lost our relationship. I can’t handle her and she can’t handle me and neither of us know how to say that. Maybe it’s a phase, or maybe it’s forever. But, whatever it is, it’s here. The other day, when I could hear her steady breath and low snores from the next room over- when I was sure that she was sound asleep, I crept into her room to say goodnight. I used to do that every night. I used to kiss her cheek and she would pull me down for a hug and say something along the lines of "goodnight" and "I love you, beautiful girl" and "I'll see you in the morning". But I haven't kissed her cheek in weeks and I can't even remember the last time we've hugged.

I tiptoed to her side of the bed and leaned down and whispered goodnight and when she stirred, I expected tears or emotional ranting or a confused stare- all that seems to define our strange relationship lately- something I'd bite my lip at and awkwardly stalk off, not knowing quite what to say or do. But she looked up at me with the ocean blue eyes that stood out when she wore grey, the eyes that I’ve always envied, and they were tight and squinted like someone who had been staring at the sun for too long- slightly confused, but at the same time like she’d been expecting me. A slight smile played across her face- only one corner of her mouth turned up, sending ripples across that cheek. Then she closed her eyes again but kept the smile, and for a moment I thought she’d fallen back asleep.

Then I heard a whisper come of “goodnight” and “I love you” and “my beautiful girl”, in the same, ordinary way that it always used to. And for that moment, it felt like we were one of those pairs of mother and daughter who had a relationship again. Like what were before, like things had never changed. Like the days from years ago of sleeping curled beside her and cuddling and my imaginary rule of being safe from anything as long as she was there had never ended. Like we'd fixed it all or maybe just rewound.

Then I snapped out of my thoughts and looked down at her and remembered that she was half asleep- that she was having a barely-conscious moment. The kind where you wake up and for a minute, you forget what has happened- what life-changing thing has happened, or you forget that you’re supposed to be upset about something or angry at someone. And so, for a moment, you act like it’s not there, because for that second, it isn’t, not for you. And suddenly, I knew that she’d wake up the next morning and never remember this at all. And that things would go back to how they were- emotional and teary and frustrating- free of half smiles and squinting eyes. It would be like it had never happened.

I realized that just like Joan Didion, she would wake up the next morning and forget everything that has come between us over the past few months. She'd forget because the non-existant bond that we now have is completely irrational- it's something that no one could fabricate or imagine in a perfect state of sleeping. So, she'd forget, even if only for a split second and maybe start to call me in for an opinion or just to ask the time, before she remembered the unspoken rule telling her that she couldn't do that. It would come crashing down- the truth- and standing over my mom, looking at her ignorant-seeming blissful face was like staring into the sweet eyes of a small child that I knew would be hurt and I couldn't do anything about it, I couldn't even warn them-- I could only stand and watch it happen. And that was almost more painful than being the "Joan Didion", being the one to have the realization all over again time and time again, the one who has to pull back the covers and sharpen their mind, the one whose pain seems like it will drag on forever. Because watching pain can be harder than feeling it and on the outside looking in is an impossible position.

How We Deal With Grief

The last few weeks of my reading life have been an absolute dream as I started and finished two of my now favorite books of all time- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. My month has been a marathon of beautiful writing. Although these two books are very different from one another in terms of genre, character-type and writing style, they do share one common and dominant theme- grief. Oskar experiences grief when his father is killed in 9/11, and Joan when her husband of 40 years dies of heart failure.

What struck me so immediately about the character of Oskar Schell was his matter-of-fact attitude and way about everything. Even his fathers death. And watching a nine year old boy not only lose his dad, but address it in the same way that he would address the weather report was almost more painful than if he had sobbed nonstop throughout the story. Because that was his way of dealing with grief- keeping it inside, not dealing with it. Oskar makes sure that everything is clean and tidy on the outside for people to see by not letting out the messy inside thoughts and words and actions and feelings which, I know from experience, is so much more painful. And you have to think about it- was Oskar making this concious decision? Was he choosing to keep it in for the sake of, say, his mom or grandma? No- he's nine years old, his dad just died- he doesn't know what to do or think or who to turn to. He's polite and smart and just not the kind of person who can lash out or break down or show people what he's really going through. He doesn't keep his father's last voicemail's a secret to spare his mother any more pain, he does it because he's terrified and confused and guilty. Because so much responsibility and so much agony has been placed on his tiny shoulders and he's only nine and the only way he knows to deal with grief is what automatically happens- and that's nothing. Because nothing happens if we don't make it happen, and Oskar, not knowing what to make happen, does nothing.

And so it stays inside.

And that's how he deals with grief.

And he's only nine.

And that breaks my heart.

Then there's Joan Didion, whose story is equally heartbreaking in a completely different way. Before I read this book, my theory was that grief was easier as you got older, as you came to expect and anticipate the deaths of friends and spouses who were, like you, nearing the ends of their lives. But this isn't true at all because as Joan says, when you're so in love, you don't see yourself as growing older,

"For Forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger".

She had spent two thirds of her life with this man, and just because he had to die, didn't make him actually dying any easier. When you come to depend on someone for everything, when you come to realize them as a literal part of you, when not a single day goes by that you don't see this person, talk to this person, touch this person, hug this person in 40 years, how big is the hole they leave behind? And how impossible is it to fill?

But what stands out the most, to me, about her book is that it's a book. That she relived and re-experienced every moment of this event and every feeling that followed for years to make this book. That she published it, releasing to the world her innermost thoughts in the most raw, personal, heartbreaking and beautiful way possible. That this is her way of dealing with grief- the only way she knows- writing.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden, to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind"

"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

"Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant"

-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

And Joan Didion is so right.

Because no one expects death or grief- not how it really turns out to be, at least. And no one knows how to handle it when it does come.

Not even the seemingly most clever and scholarly nine year old boy that ever lived.

Not even the 70 year old woman who's intelligent and experienced and put together.

No one.

Because our minds use logic to make an image of what we think something will be like or feel like or look like, and there is nothing logical about grief. Because as much as we may plan or organize or try to control how our lives will play out, what happens happens. And when faced with crisis, it's hard to stick to your plans.