After a couple months on Accutane, my skin eventually got a little better, but by the time I was fifteen, my insomnia was getting worse due to a myriad of maladaptive behaviors. I drank diet soda pretty much all day long like an idiot, began to severely restrict calories, and my perfectionism over schoolwork started possessing my brain. One thing I thought was odd about my house as a teenager was that our medicine cabinet always had way more stuff in it than our refrigerator. I deduced from this that Band-Aids, metaphorical and actual, were a better solution than preventive action. Don’t eat, just take vitamins. Don’t support your immune system, just take a Sudafed when your immune system collapses. You get it. Anyway, I’m not sure when I discovered NyQuil, but this revelation was like finally meeting my knight in shining armor: drug-induced sleep.
From what I can gather, the problem with taking these drugs to sleep is that they don’t provide REM and delta wave sleep, so you’re not getting the deep rest your brain actually needs; you’re just in a short-term chemically induced coma. Also, from what we all gather, I am not a doctor, but doctors have told me this so it must be at least half true. Anyway, I was sleeping more, but my headaches were more awake than ever. They began screaming the moment I woke up instead of around the predictable noon start time. Even if I was still sleep deprived and sluggish all day, at least my headaches were up early, starting their workday with renewed vigor. I didn’t think to stop taking them or address the wounds that caused insomnia, I just figured I needed better sleeping pills.
Once I was in college, I moved on to real sleepy drugs like Ambien and Sonata. After all, I was a grown-up now; it was time I waited in line and overpaid for my pills.
To put it bluntly, Ambien and I do not have good chemistry. I have great chemistry with men who are addicted to Ambien, but the pill itself and I are mortal enemies. On Ambien, I’ve done some very stupid things. Like, even for me in my twenties, they were stupid. Once on Ambien I e-mailed a lawyer and fired him even though he was not my lawyer.
One time in an Ambien stupor I walked to a 7-Eleven in Philadelphia at three A.M and bought an apple. This was already out of character for me because I had maxed out on apples when I was fifteen and experimenting with the most low-calorie foods I could find, subsequently losing my taste for them completely. Ambien apparently erased that trauma and I found myself buying myself a beautiful giant red apple from 7-Eleven. This apple was so good that I ate it voraciously before I even got out of the store. The next morning, I woke up thinking about this beautiful apple, so I went back to 7-Eleven to get another one for breakfast. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and saw that all the apples were wrapped tightly in thick Saran Wrap.
“Are these apples always in Saran Wrap?” I asked the cashier.
“Yes.”
“Like, if there was an apple here at three A.M. last night, would it have been wrapped in Saran Wrap?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
Shortly thereafter I went to the doctor to renew my prescription, I joked that I had eaten about ten square inches of plastic wrap in the middle of the night. He looked as concerned as I had ever seen a doctor look, probably more about getting sued than my actual health. He suggested I stop taking Ambien and take something else called Sonata. This works in time-release increments of three hours, so I could take it to fall asleep and then ease into some natural sleep myself. I knew this healthy upgrade would never work for my manic brain, so I just figured I’d wake up every three hours and pop another one. (And people say women are bad at math.)
I took Sonata for a while with equally embarrassing results. One time I was on a flight to England for a job and I was flying first class for the first time. It was so fancy—the seats turned into beds, and they gave you a bag with socks, pajamas, and a duty-free catalogue of things to buy like perfume, booze, overpriced corny hooker necklaces, and already outdated electronic gadgets designed to save you thirty seconds. It was basically all I’ve ever asked for in life: free drinks, ample legroom, and products I couldn’t afford.
It was such a long flight that they turned the lights off so everyone could sleep. Given that I couldn’t sleep alone in my own bed, the prospect of sleeping with a bunch of strangers in the sky felt particularly challenging. I took my Sonata and got down to business. To the shock of my entire body, I fell asleep almost instantly. I woke up seven hours later in yummy British Airways pajamas to English flight attendants making announcements. I was thrilled that I finally got seven hours of uninterrupted deep sleep until I looked down and realized I had no recollection of dressing myself in the pajamas that were on my body. I looked to my right and saw my other clothes perfectly folded next to me.
Uh-oh.
Oh no.
The flight attendant slowly and timidly approached me, panic in her eyes. Clearly we had had a very intense night together I didn’t know much about. I looked around and noticed a couple passengers also looking at me with both fear and disgust. I found out that during my “sleep” I had disrobed in front of everyone on the flight and changed into my pj’s. As if that weren’t mortifying enough, on my way off the plane I was presented with three bags of tiny stuffed airplanes, which apparently I had ordered in a Sonata stupor from the duty-free catalogue.
When I tried to go off Sonata, my migraines got even worse, I’m sure exacerbated by sleep deprivation and chemical withdrawal. Luckily, Lunesta came along, which was sort of positioned as the “healthy” sleeping pill, maybe because it was a mature blue color, maybe because the name sounded like a majestic white horse. Lunesta became the American Spirit cigarettes of sleeping pills, still horrible for you, but somehow cool and accepted by health-conscious people who go to Spin class and eat acai berries but can’t seem to get to sleep. Probably because they’re so hungry from Spinning and eating acai berries.
Don’t be jealous, but by my mid-twenties, I started dating people who struggled with addiction, which was a catalyst for my having some awareness about my own addictive behavior. I went to an AA meeting with a guy I was dating and heard people talking about how their chemical dependencies started with sleeping pills, and how they panicked if they were low on pills or temporarily misplaced the bottle. To my surprise and chagrin, I related to what they were saying. I started to gain a comprehension of my own addictive DNA and realized that my pill popping could very easily evolve into something very ugly and US Weekly-y.