I LOVE SLEEP DEPRIVATION!

Hello internet readers (mainly just my mom – thanks for refreshing this page to trick me into thinking that more than one person reads this floating mass of brain vomit).

I’m going to stop making a thing about how long it has been since I last posted on this now dust covered blog. There is probably a cobweb or two hanging about; that’s how long it has been, spiders have moved in, had their little (and disgusting - seriously, why must they have 8 legs and 8000000000 eyes? I get that they are important in our ecosystem and stuff but do they really have to look like that?) sorry, I got distracted, so they've had their little (and disgusting – seriously..) focus, Natalie. So, they have their little families (URG), they've watched their children grow up, they've gotten emotional when the children go to university, to study law and possibly neuroscience. The spider parents eventually grow old and die (finally). And now all that is left is their cobwebs. That’s how untouched this blog has been.

But, here we find ourselves. “Why now?” you ask (or don’t but I’ll answer anyway), because of my burning passion for the written word and my desire to have a voice! Or the fact that I can’t sleep and my lecturer encouraged me to start writing again. You decide!

Let’s revisit this whole “can’t sleep” situation. Wow, it’s not a great one, don’t you think? You quickly become delirious, one minute you are crying over nothing and the next you are laughing hysterically at another nothing. Then there is also the feeling of having replaced your eyeballs with sandpaper. Delightful.

When the internationally recognised Time of Sleep (aka night) descends upon Cape Town I, like most people, get into bed intending on getting an early night and then I, like most people, end up scrolling through Instagram and playing the dangerous game of going 53 weeks deep into someone’s profile with caution and extreme thumb control. The next step in my sleep routine is to switch the light off, stare at the ceiling and regret everything that I said and did that day, sometimes this regret even extends to previous days, sometimes even to when I was 13 and said that dumbass thing to the person that I had a big fat crush on for most of my young life. I then softly scream into my pillow, like a baby who wants to permanently damage their tiny, under-developed vocal chords.

You know when you are young and get a pet hamsters? On the first day you gather your peers and then stand on a podium to proclaim, “look at my new hamster, fellow grade 3s! He’s the best and he’s going to sleep RIGHT next to my bed fOrEvER”. Fast forward three days and you’ve realised that that thing is hecking nocturnal and has a passion for exercise. Best believe he’ll be training all night on his little wheel for the next Iron Hamster. It is not long before the small hamster creature is banished to live atop the washing machine and then somewhere else because that’s hella cruel, guys, don’t put your hamster on top of a washing machine, completely traumatising. Also, talking about cruelty, can we address the pressing and highly stressful issue of children interacting with hamsters and animals in general? Children continuously put the lives of small animals in their sticky hands even though they can’t even hold a knife and fork. They will then proceed to squeeze the hamster way too tightly, leaving the rodent no choice but to flap its paws around and hope death comes quickly.

We then grow older and most of us face a moral dilemma when we realise that keeping animals in tiny cages is weird. And that is the end of the hamster owning era. Turns out it was just a phase after all. However! The hecking nocturnal thing that frantically sprints around a never ending wheel (on which safe footing is not guaranteed) does not leave us. It lives on! In your brain. Some may call it anxiety, others will call it, “don’t-drink-coffee-after-3pm-and-definitely-not-at-7pm-what-are-you-doing-??” but I like to call it: “Ahhhhhhhhhhh”. I think that is actually the official medical term. I should know, I did science until grade 9. Sometimes the “ahhhhh” kicks in straight away and you can kiss goodbye any hope of falling asleep. This isn’t pleasant but, in my opinion, there is something far worse. This is a truly awful fate: when you fall asleep only to wake up three and a half hours later and have your brain switch on like your bedside light (but 100% brighter). You have innocently woken up, stumbled to the toilet, stumbled back to bed with no intention of being awake in three minutes time. Your brain hamster, however, has other plans for you.

You left your car lights on, didn’t you? I’m pretty sure you left your car lights on. Excellent, now your battery is going to be flat and you will miss your first class and that is the beginning of your downward spiral. In 5 years you would have failed university 17 times (somehow) and now you have no choice but to sell your eyeballs on the black market. You shake off that thought and try and get back to sleep. Now you have the national anthem stuck in your head and it very loud... surely you should be able to control the volume of your own thoughts?

You now are feeling a bit nauseous… and you felt nauseous yesterday morning... it nothing to do with that thing you ate that expired in 2016 and everything to do with the fact that you are obviously PREGNANT. “No,” you think to yourself, “you are literally on your period right now so it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fiiine that you’ve missed the pill three times this month and oh my god it’s like you’re asking to get pregnant". What if it’s like that MTV show where women don’t know that they’re pregnant and then, one day they just go to the toilet and... BABY. There was a woman who developed a baby in her bladder, or something, so she still got her period and everything.

"I’m not ready to be a mother. I don’t even like children. How will I afford to raise it? I’ll have to drop out of university another 17 times. What do I do if it likes Two and a Half Men? And do I expose it to several religions when it is young and then let it make a choice when it is old enough? Or just keep it away from religion all together because that definitely messed me up. What if it wants a hamster? Oh god, I absolutely can’t witness that. There go all my hopes and dreams for the future because I was dumb. Now I will have to tell my child that it came out of my bladder. It will be psychologically damaged but I will have no qualifications and therefore I will not have the means to send it to therapy. And then it will become a heroin addict and stab me in my sleep”. This is all very logical at 3am.

“But it can’t be,” you say to yourself. “I can’t be pregnant unless it is a result of divine intervention".

I am certainly not emotionally or mentally stable enough to have a child let alone the child of God. But I have to be pregnant because that is the only possible explanation for my sudden craving for tomatoes, whole tomato. I want to eat them like apples.

It must be done.

Give me two minutes, I need to go and get one.

I’m back! I have a tomato in hand and satisfaction in my body and soul. This is strange because this is something I remember harshly judging in primary school. I have a vivid memory of my young self returning home from a long day of phonics and seeing Jane run. I was in a state of absolute distress.

“Mother!” I shrieked before collapsing onto the kitchen counter, “Mother, today I saw Katey L* eating a tomato, a big tomato, all at once, LIKE AN APPLE”

Never before had I witnessed such depraved behaviour but my mother seemed rather unphased by the whole affair. I was livid. Why was she was not acknowledging the gravity of this situation? A tomato. Like an apple. Katey L. All at once. This was like eating mayonnaise from the jar with a spatula.

And yet, all these years later I find myself doing the same thing. Maybe Katey L was just ahead of her time. She probably also began drinking coffee and doing her taxes when she was 12.

I wish I wasn’t awake right now. I now feel like the squeezed hamster who is hoping for death or sleep to come quickly. Either one will do, I’m not too fussy at this point.

Thanks for reading (Mom)!

There is a mailing list that you can sign up to if you want. But maybe you don’t want to? That’s okay. I’m not hurt. Live your best life, no pressure. I hope you have a (sort of) good day.

* Katey L is a fake name, I don't want to out the actual tomato eating vigilante.