Tegan,
Do you remember how rested we both felt after the world locked down in 2020? After decades of survival sleep, it was easy to forget how euphoric being unfatigued could feel. I’m not talking about being a little sleepy either. I mean a profound fundamental exhaustion. Almost like a perma-concussion, where you can’t be left unattended or you’ll die. Forced to sit upright, until the injury clears up, you nod off, only to be abruptly woken up. That is what the last twenty years felt like.
It’s easy to blame an aggressive touring schedule, but if I’m being honest, it’s also aging. And, okay, fine, I could always stand to reduce my anxiety a little more. Sleep does not always mean that I wake feeling rested, and resting does not always require me to sleep. But, during the early days of the pandemic, I slept and felt more rested than I had in decades. That it took a global shut down to justify that rest says something profound about how vastly under-appreciated sleeping had become in my life.
It wasn’t always this way. As a teenager, I slept as if adolescence itself was a chronic illness. Selfish, nurturing sleep that was indifferent to weather, homework, environment, or social obligations. Rest that felt like total surrender. That Mom was a gluttonous sleeper herself made visiting Dad’s house on the weekend more jarring. The knocking on our shared bedroom door would start around 9 AM and wouldn’t let up until one of us finally landed, yawning, on the couch in the living room. Back at Mom’s house a few hours later, we’d return to our beds like sleepwalkers.
As a young adult, I’d linger guilt free in bed, past noon. These were the vampire years. As M. set off to work at one of her two jobs, I’d wave an arm from under the covers. It hurt to get out of bed. I came alive in the evening, and stayed up late making music, and playing video games. Being an owl was ideal for performing our sets on tour, the earliest of which began at 11 PM. To describe myself then is to detail the life of a total stranger. Because now, I am a lark.
It was after we turned 30 that I began to wake up with my hands clenched into fists at 7 AM. I bargained for more hours of sleep with the hard-nosed boss, whose demands for productivity —creative and administrative — seemed infinite. (That I was the hard-nosed boss mattered not!) In those early morning hours, I was highly productive, and my stubborn refusal to enjoy the transition from night owl to lark, was only reversed when I discovered the drug I'd spent my life avoiding. Coffee. The ritual of making and drinking it became the singular reason I would spring from bed at an ungodly hour. (Still do).
The tour bus, which early in our career seemed like a remedy for exhaustion, became a place where I could never sleep deeply. In recent years, things have gotten far worse. There are people who can do it — I think you’d argue you sleep quite well on our tour bus — but I can only drift in and out of waking dreams when the wheels are turning. There are ways to mitigate the noise of the engine (I find sleeping on my side, with a pillow over my head, more comfortable than wearing ear plugs) but the total blackness of the bunk unnerves me.
Falling asleep in the bunk can feel like losing your balance at the top of a dark staircase. Open the curtain and the glow of lighting in the hallway is a shadowy reminder of childhood night-lights. There is the woosh of the interior doors opening and closing as fellow sleepers travel to the bathroom, and the stuttering of rumble strips under the tires on the highway. It is only when the bus stops at a fueling station, that I can finally disappear into the dark void of REM sleep.
In hotels on days off, sleep feels more like resting during illness. There is no magic number of banked hours that can reverse the drought. After years of international travel, my internal clock is so accurate that I don’t require an alarm. At home, the recovery is short lived, because there is always another tour, or my life, to catch up on. When there is no work on the horizon, I wake early, to begin dreaming about what comes next.
Here in Calgary, I’m sleeping well. It’s an easy re-entry from pandemic isolation. The hallway outside my apartment is a ghost ship, and I don’t have neighbours. Perched dozens of stories above the street, there is only the faintest sound of traffic. It’s not quite a panic room but has many of the conditions I require to sleep deeply. I don’t often associate rest with work, so this feels like aspirational balance. Is it possible to achieve this on tour? No. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Sara
Sleepwalkers