I have narcolepsy. This means that my brain, without warning and without my permission, decides that it is time to sleep. In a meeting. During a film I was enjoying. Once, memorably, mid-sentence while explaining a financial model to a room full of C Suite Executive people.
For years I treated this as a personal failing. I drank more coffee. I became hyper focused on coffee once (twelve times?), and began roasting beans in my kitchen. My lunch break was almost always used for a car nap. Car naps are exact what they sound like. You sit in your car. You close your car door. If needed, you open the window or turn the car on for heat. You set an alarm for exactly 18 minutes because I read somewhere that was the optimal duration for a nap. Fall asleep within 90 seconds. Dream vividly. Then when the alarm goes off, you immediately chug a warm energy drink that might have been sitting open in your car for two days, fix your lipstick and go back inside of the office. I became a master. I performed wakefulness like it was a job requirement, because surprise! It is!
Here is what I know now: the body is not a productivity tool. It is a body. It has requirements. Some of those requirements are inconvenient to capitalism, and that is capitalism’s problem, not the body’s. Except that as a human who lives in a capitalistic society, it is also my problem, and my body’s problem. My body was not designed for capitalism, and neither is my brain. For years, I forced them both to conform to cultural norms. I did the college thing (backwards) and did the job thing, and the car/house/spouse/kids thing. At times, I even really enjoyed it. At other times, I desperately wanted nothing more than to close the door to my fancy corner office and curl up under my big L shaped executive desk for a nap. But after years of that, my body revolted in the worst way possible, and my boob decided to try to kill me. It’s been almost three years since I finished my cancer treatments. It’s been 18 months since the mental decline associated with the poison cost me my job at a company that I’d been with for a decade. It’s been 10 months since I moved on to another corporate USA job. The burnout was nearly instant, and four months ago I lost that role, too. The impact of being told that, all of a sudden, you suck too much to do the job that you went to college for is devastating. Being ill but looking vibrantly sexy af does not gain sympathy. It gains Performance Improvement Plans and severance discussions.
I nap now without apology. I schedule my days around my energy, not the other way around. I have stopped pretending that 9am is a reasonable time to expect a human brain to perform complex analysis.
This is not laziness. This is (one of) the most radical thing I have ever done for myself. I have no idea how I’ll keep my mortgage paid as a capitalism reject yet, but my health, sanity and overall well being are more important.