Intervention

I think my loved ones did an intervention for me. I just don’t think they invited me to it. It’s like a big, weird, secret intervention which they decided would go over much more smoothly if they didn’t have to deal with any of ME there. (In all honesty I’d have to agree with them because I’m a troublemaker and also I can get cranky sometimes and stuff.)

And what are they interventioning? (Interventionizing? Interventioneswaaaahhh?...) About what do they believe I need an intervention? One word: sleeping.

My people are very sure that I don’t get enough sleep.

For the last forever+ a year I’ve been very sure to get 6 hours of sleep a night. Six. It is the right number of hours for me, and I know this from weeks of trial and error. I used to get eight hours of sleep, and then I always, always, seriously ALWAYS woke up exhausted. So then I got more than eight hours and woke no less exhausted (which, I’m sure you already know, was the desired result.) Then one night I got six hours of sleep. Just six – two less than the eight that everybody thinks you need to get and Eureka! I woke up less sleepy!

(important note: there is no amount of sleep that will allow me to wake up in the morning with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, unless that song was Don’t Fear the Reaper or possibly something that would go by the name of “please, kill me now…” I hate the mornings, always do, hate them bunches and bunches and avoid them when the universe lets me do it. The best I can hope for EVER is “less sleepy”, which is where we left our hero…)

Six hours and I felt pretty decent! I got six hours for days and kept waking up pretty decent for days – I made a connection right there. “six hours = works good for me!” To VERIFY my scientific discovery I got eight hours a night for a few days and lo and behold: “PLEASE kill me now!” in three-part harmony. So I went back to six hours and went back to decent and there I’ve stayed: SIX HOURS EACH NIGHT. I HAVE SPOKEN.

But there’s this thing: my friends keep arranging for me to sleep in.

If I stay at my parent’s house and I say “hey, wake me up when you get up!” they don’t. They wake up, but they don’t wake me up.

My friend stayed here over the weekend and both nights we arranged for when to do the waking up thing, always capped with “and if you wake up before that just wake me up.” But then I’d wake up and come out and she’d be all awake and reading, and yet nobody woke me up.

My sweety and I often have weekends where we talk as I’m going to sleep and he’s starting his day, and we plan for him to wake me up the next morning. Always I say “wake me up in six hours.” Always he wakes me in eight hours, and when I ask where the two hours went he tells me with great emphasis that I need more sleep than that.

I’m not a paranoid enough person, so it took me this long to figure it out, but finally I understand it: interventiony goodness. They all got together and agreed that I was not to be trusted with my own sleep schedule. I’m insane, probably from lack of sleep of course, and they are going to save me from my sleep-deprived self. “We will make for her the sleeps!” they said. “We will arrange, through sneakiness and slyness and other skills often perfected by spies and ninjas and paparazzi, for her to get many more hours of sleep, thereby lengthening her life and lowering her blood pressure and making her blond and tall and about 23 years old! We will stuff and shove two more hours of sleep into her six-hour window even if we have to drug her to do it. Because we love her.”

So, I’m feeling the love of course. My people love me, even if they believe that I’m less able to make reasonable judgments about my own health and body than a woman with a serious head trauma and a multiple personality disorder. They love me and they want me to be healthy and happy and awesome. And apparently the sleep-police have assured them that it’s not at all possible for me to be any of these things if I don’t get a full, solid eight hours of sleep. And so from me they are bound and determined to save myself.

So here’s MY plan: I’m going to go commando and get my six hours, to protect my sanity and not kill some innocent bystander at a morning bus stop due to being cranky from too much sleep. I’m going rogue. Going under the radar. Going underground. I’m going to set alarms and read in bed and find other ways to chip away at the very generous but crazy-making extra hours of sleep that my people are bound and determined to heap upon me.

Oh yes. It is on.