Insomnia With No Somnia

Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay

Last night, I had an insomnia. After counting a hundred sheep and lingering with the indecision of getting up or lying down, I searched for natural cures of sleeplessness online.

As a non-native speaker, I am baffled with orphaned words. One of them is insomnia, which means sleeplessness. Where is the word “somnia” that means sleep? My non-native speaker brain reasons, and my non-native speaker hands start to type a google search . It turns out somnia does exist in other languages, from which English likes to find loan words. (Actually the phrase “loan words” baffles me too since a loan is expected to be paid back, which is inapplicable for a word.) So English just absorbs insomnia and throws away “somnia”. There are other words like this too. For example, the word “invincible”. It is another orphaned word. Where is “vincible” or “vincibility” or other relatives of this word? Finally, I found it in Spanish, which has the word “vencer”, which means to beat or defeat. Also provenance seems to be an orphaned word too in English.

Other than word triviality, I thought about the bad cycle I am in, which I have only noticed recently. I find that I have always been drawing strength from my own bitterness. Actually the more bitter I am, the more energized I become. For example, I’m quite bitter about my childhood growing up among my narcissistic relatives. Actually my bitterness against them has fueled my desire to write about them, my interest in knowing more about narcissism, and my enthusiasm in finding out how other people (online or offline) respond to my revelations.

And this has formed a cycle on its own: being bitter, then writing about it, then becoming more bitter, and then writing a little bit more. After a while, I start to search my memory for bitter stories from the past, steep my mind in them to boost my writing desire, and then feel satisfied when I eventually type it all out.

There are some problems, inevitably, accompanying this cycle. The first problem is that as time goes by, the old bitterness is just not bitter enough. I have to look for something more bitter to get myself excited. The old bitterness becomes stale, overused, and exhausted. I am obliged to look for fresh pasture, which is not something I want to do. I don’t have any motivation to search for new bitterness. It has made me realize that I am probably by nature not a bitter person at all.

The second problem is that the short circuit between writing and bitterness makes a mainstay in my mind, which gives me an urge to escape as far away as possible. There is this human instinct to stay away from bitterness, writing, memory, and everything related to them. At the same time, I also have an interest in exploring them. It really creates a confusion and a conflict, a kind of like the strange desire to pet a cute tiger while simultaneously feeling the urge to flee.

The third problem comes from the previous two problems–I get tired easily and get blocked very often while writing something. Well, I am not 100% sure about this one since writing in English has never been the easiest thing for me despite my grasp of the language. Sometimes the flow of the words is thwarted for no reason and sometimes a good story idea looks horrible after being typed out. I don’t know if it is the non-native language problem, or writing problem, or other problems. They are all mixed together. It is hard to say which causes which, what contributes to what.

The fourth problem is that this cycle makes me feel sad, negative and dispirited. It is said that some kind of sadness or mental flagellation is necessary for any pursuit, but I guess it is only good to a certain extent. I mean we have all learned that adversity, difficulty, crisis, and danger are good for our growth, but on the other hand, these things can severely damage our growth too. Probably everybody should keep her own scores and measure her own strength–how much is good for growth and how much is poisonous? The question is what combination of happiness and sadness, positive and negative, excitement and languor can keep one’s spirit up. How much of a hustle and bustle in life is a good ratio to make one feel energized while not stressed out? How sad is a good sadness that is enough to make one feel alive but not enough to make one feel dejected?