What I used to like about falling asleep is that feeling you'd get while you're lying there in the dark.

Not the feeling you get right away, but that strange state that descends after 5 or 10 minutes of waiting there with your eyelids closed when your breathing slows and you stop thinking about the events of the day and you feel a slow expanding and relaxing your mind at the same time, when unexpected images appear and your consciousness accepts everything as fine and in fact your consciousness isn't dictating terms anymore: You are no longer directing your thoughts or experiences as the descent toward sleep deepens, and this continues until your brain gets bored or merely tired of the creation of these things and the images and strange connections stop, the thoughts disappear entirely, and what you feel instead is a strange sense of peace and hovering and all that is left are your senses. The whooshing of the the sound machine, the hum of background traffic, the pressure of your head against the pillow and the warmth of being under the covers.

This blankness of consciousness, this undirected state, is, I think, the closest I will ever get to feeling like a safe little snug animal with no torturous self-awareness and inner dialogue which causes all of us so much unnecessary work and pain. 

But like I said that's what I used to like.  That rarely happens to me anymore. Since being an adult, this state is rarely reached. I have been on the treadmill for 27 years and during most of that period, sleep has become an entirely different thing, like it's shape-shifted from its normal function which is recovery to like some kind of bare bones necessity, like a drink that I chug here and there to get me through the next set of obligations.

There are no more luxuries. There is no more cozy snugness. Instead there is something inside gnawing endlessly away at whatever makes up the gooey center that we tend to call our soul or our identity and I can't quite identify what that something that is doing the gnawing really is, and on top of that, I don't want to do the work to figure it out because I think the answer would disgust me, but it has something to do with feeling like I have no choice but to allow it to continue to gnaw, because the pain of the gnawing is what keeps me moving and I have a sense that I always must keep moving, because if I am not moving, I must be a failure, and failures are, according to some deep rooted belief system that I have unconsciously acquired from childhood and society, an indication that I am two steps away from being dead. This is best avoided, we must keep moving, we must overcome our failures and fix things, buy things, create shit at work, submit reports, respond to chat threads, be visble and available and productive always. The gnawing keeps me moving but the gnawing is also killing me inside. According to my internals, I am damned if I do and damned if I don't, an equation whose result produces zero peace or satisfaction.

I wrote the above yesterday right after taking a nap where I reached that beautiful state of rest for a while, not sleeping but neither awake.

Just existing.

When it was over, once I had forced myself awake because my alarm went off, forced myself to get out of bed and drink coffee and consider my next set of obligations that I felt I had to take care of, I had, parallel in my head to the normal stream of thoughts that were telling me what to do (examples: I better choose the right paint color for the shed rehab project and What can I do at work to be slightly visible while not overcommitting myself and finding myself trapped at my desk for hours trying to complete something substantive and I really need to call my dentist office to schedule a pickup of my new night guard) there was a new thread which was attempting to dictate some updated terms about how the space in my head is filled and it said something very different.

I could use a lot more rest. Just existing. It would be good if I stopped always churning over things that I have to do, enumerating forcibly through obligations and tasks and, when they are finally complete, creating new tasks to fill the space. Existing should be enough.

And damn, I need the rest. I feel like I could rest for a month and still feel unrested.

I just don't know how to exist quietly any longer within the framework of the life that I inhabit.

I'm not sure anyone I know does.