Bed
Content Warning: Brief mention of self-harm and suicidal ideation. Also, flaky lunches. Also, sleep stats.
Nothing’s more boring than other people’s sleep stats. But throw in a few dream recaps and one of the top reasons for being in a relationship is celebrating your sleep performance. That, and having someone to help you take your windows in and out to wash them. And help you put the duvet back in its cover. And drive you to Ontario to attend funerals and other high-pressure family functions. And of course, the groundbreaking sex.
But failing that, what a joy to wake up to daily praise, simply because you managed to sleep. “You cracked 5 a.m. again? Honey, you nailed it. Wow. I’m so proud of you!”
In my beautiful miracle apartment (no longer with us), I would often awaken on my squishy mattress at 1:23 or 2:39 or 3:55 a.m. Hard to say if the culprit was the crack-level espresso pot I consumed every morning. Or my flaky lunches of grapes and chocolate-covered almonds, inhaled on the sidewalks between back-to-back cleaning gigs. Or my nightmares about scrubbing endless dirty white tiles. In any case, I was not a talented sleeper.
One August, in a valiant attempt to rejuvenate my adrenals and enjoy life, I arranged to take a rare staycation.
The Staycation Dream
During my week off, I’d have time to finish my memoirs, read eleven novels, rework my Deep Clean Your Life self-help book (99 Ways to Stay Smug and On Top of Life), get laid at least twice, and perhaps prepare a handful of soups for the fall.
On Day One of my staycation, I floated on a luxurious cloud of possibility. Cracked the Handmaid’s Tale for the second time. Got the wax vacuumed out of my ears by a cheerful, government-funded nurse. I was ready to chisel away at my low-grade literary masterpiece, 100K words of epistles I had written to my therapist who I matched with on Bumble and yet who never took me out for a sandwich.
On Day Two, I treated myself to a fancy $6 latte, doubling my regular caffeine regime. Staring down my mess of letters to my therapist, I crapped out and left the café angsty and hungry. Then I went to a float tank since I figured that’s what the chill-type-of-people-who-go-with-the-flow do on their staycations. The float tank looked like an egg-shaped coffin that was ready to hit up outer space. As my naked, gleaming cells lay in the salty water, I travelled deep into my unconscious, where I connected with a part of myself that sits amidst my pelvis bones and/or somewhere around my internal organs. The part said, hey remember when you thought you should off yourself? That wasn’t such a bad idea. Barring that, what about a few hard wacks in the face?
When my time in the coffin was up, I emerged, my body soft and buoyant. I sat in the spa lobby and twitched as a serene 20-something new meditation convert stared at a tank of oversized goldfish, their eyes goggling at his ruler-straight spine. Outside, the world was way too bright and way too loud. I have a saying that goes, it’s always the day after I’m almost happy that everything starts to unravel.
Living the staycation dream
On Day Three, I awoke at 4:37 a.m., all my literary aspirations a wash. During those years, whenever I verged on inconsolable and/or suicidal, my go-to self-soothing technique was to clean my apartment like a maniac, and haul bags of extraneous t-shirts and mugs and books to the free box.
But my three-and-a-half wine crates and shelves already held much less than the 33 books that Marie Kondo recommends. Every time I brought home a thrift store blouse mini skirt from a clothing swap, I would rid my closets and cupboards of at least three possessions. An unloved Mason Jar. You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Haye. Aspirational spandex. I was running out of shit to turf.
Clear Your Clutter, by Karen Kingston
A darling bestie had recommended the book, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston. Karen is like the Marie Kondo of the 90s. She might even be more ruthless. For example, she doesn’t believe in door hooks or leaving your hair elastics on doorknobs since they block the free flow of energy between your abode’s thresholds. According to Karen and the other Feng Shui people, your bed’s placement is the most important decision of your house layout. Your bed represents you, so if it’s in line with the toilet or sitting on dusty Rubbermaids full of relics from a toxic college relationship, you’re in trouble.
My mattress was definitely in line with the toilet. It sat on the floor, on top of a mildewed foam box spring, and it was unbearably squishy. If my mattress was a symbol for me, then I was without foundation. You could stick your elbows into me and I would give way immediately, taking a palpable pause before bouncing back to my original shape. Clearly this spineless, inferior bed was the cause of my dis-ease. That and my extensive door paraphernalia.
I cleared all my doorknobs and took a wrench to yank out a row of highly useful towel hooks that a past tenant had nailed to the antique door. My handiwork left gaping holes.
Then I posted my mattress on the MTL Trade Hole, a Facebook group where you can offer just about anything from dying plants to Blundstones. On your post, you can include an In Search Of list, which tends to be seventeen years long—fresh herbs, SAQ wine, fair trade coffee, vintage t-shirts, a quilt, obscure batteries, tofu—whether the item for trade is a pair of Gucci sunglasses or a melted chip clip.
Within five minutes, a Facebook friend leaped at the free mattress opportunity. Secret sources told me this friend’s old-crooked bed made a hell of noise. Now she was in a new relationship, and I cannot resist mentioning, she had also just joined a low-grade pyramid scheme selling two-step lipstick that held its own throughout everyone’s favourite bed activities. Sounded like these days she had tons of opportunities to test out her lipstick and I was, of course, thrilled for her.
New Relationship, New Mattress
Karen Kingston a saying that goes, “New relationship, new mattress.” If you can’t pull off a new mattress, you can beat up your old one with a baseball bat to get all the residual karma out. I’d been single for years, but maybe it was the confused, fraught energy from erratic deadbeats of the month that had led me to hate my mattress so much. But mostly I did all my fucking on the couch. And my modest possessions did not include a baseball bat.
Bed Thwacking, by Karen Kingston
So instead of a stint with a baseball bat, I helped my Lipstick Pyramid Scheme Pal load up my squishy mattress into her hatchback. That night, I wrapped a plum fitted sheet around a folded duvet and evicted myself to the floor. There I curled up with a top sheet and a bright red sleeping bag. I was following in the footsteps of my Darling Bestie Caroline. In search of a cure to neck pain, Caroline had flipped her bed on its side and taken up floor sleeping.
“I just love it,” she says. “It’s so cozy!” Caroline is someone I’d call a talented sleeper. The kind of person who sleeps through alarms and regularly lies down fully clothed at 8:45 p.m., “just for this one last video on natural orthodontics” and wakes deep into the middle of the night or even the next morning, wondering what happened.
That first night on the floor, I woke up at 4:33, wide awake. I felt quite fit and invigorated, though I would not say well rested.
“What kind of mattress do you have?” I asked anyone and everyone I met in the weeks that followed. It alarmed me that people could commit to such a permanent fixture. What purpose did a mattress have except collect ecosystems of bacteria you could not tangibly clean up. Also, beds took up all the space in a room, what a waste. Floors were for lovingly mopping and rolling around and connecting with your chakras and getting exercise. A bed, I felt, was a serious mismanagement of real estate.
Sleeping in Captivity
Caroline and I had read about the benefits of floor sleeping from “nutritious movement” guru Katy Bowman. Author, teacher, and ally for everyone’s pelvis, Katy’s main thesis is that the modern world has led human bodies to adapt to a life in captivity. According to Katy, the ubiquitous conveniences of the modern world—chairs, cars, couches, elevators, strollers, sidewalks, shopping carts, electronic devices, shoes, and beds—have created our personalized human cages.
The radiant Katy Bowman (Image found here). (Once when I was being the Exuberant Bodhisattva in Halifax, I had the joy of meeting Katy Bowman in person and I wrote this blog post.)
I will do my best to articulate Katy’s take on sleeping on the floor which is more scientific than I am used to. But here we go. On a regular, cushy mattress you get at Sleep Country or from the Casper people, you’re so comfortable that you probably just curl up and saw off until the morning, when you find yourself in the exact same position you tucked yourself into. That’s eight hours of relative inactivity. Add to that the eight-plus hours most of us spend at a desk, on a screen, and it’s the sitting-is-the-new-smoking situation everyone is fretting about.
But when you sleep closer to the floor, you have some built-in rolling around as your body resists the wood digging at certain angles of your cells. Katy Bowman calls this rolling “pressure deforming movement,” which she equates to a stint with the foam roller, a device people press their bodies into at the gym to break down their screaming connective tissues and offset their desk jobs and/or X-fit classes. If you do this while you’re sleeping, you don’t have to worry about squeezing foam rolling in with all the aspirational butt exercises and exfoliation and facial yoga we are supposed to serve our aging bodies.
On the floor, I was hard-pressed to sleep past 4:39 a.m., so incidentally I had lots of time.
As for Caroline, talented sleeper she is, I am not sure how much rolling around on the floor she ended up doing. But within a few months of sleeping on the floor, she was even more radiant than usual, her posture impeccable, and her neck didn’t hurt.
Within about ten days of sleeping on the floor, I become one of those tiresome self-obsessed insomniacs who could not refrain from sharing infinite details of my sleepless plight with cleaning clients, co-workers, and any poor soul whose gaze I could catch in the grocery store lineup.
“Hi, my name is Erica. I’m having a hell of a time sleeping,” I loved to recount. “Guess why?”
One night, I just couldn’t take five more minutes of my shiny floors deforming my ribs and IT bands with their pressure. Desperate for slumber, I dragged my sleeping bag to the living room and crashed on the couch. The next morning, when I got up, it felt like a broom handle was jabbed between my sacrum and pelvis bones. And in my hip. And intermittently up my spine.
The pain stayed for weeks, whether I opted for the couch or my floor-sleeping nest. I had all the cash I needed for a new bed, and yet I resisted. I would not give into the mortal need for a mattress. It felt like too permanent a commitment. Plus, it was so environmentally unfriendly, doomed to decay in a graveyard of washing machines and the Styrofoam takeout containers Ms. Strotman warned us never to throw away back in kindergarten, 1989.
How to Exist—Codependence and the 17-Mattress Tour
On the 67th day of back pain, I hauled my weary ass to the fancy futon store on St. Denis. Picked out a queen-sized roll-up Japanese futon. It cost $400 and every morning, you could roll it up with your duvet and erase all signs that you used a bed.
Compared to the floor, my new two-inch bed quarters felt like a 10-star hotel. Four days in a row, I slept in until 7:24, 6:05, 6:35 and 5:48. This was excellent for my emotional volatility, if risky for my Mammoth Complex. At the time, I associated a lack of frantic depletion with obesity.
Regardless, I luxuriated in my new bed for just over a month. I even got the chance to experience what making out close to the floor was like. Then a week later, my house burned down.
The Japanese futon is that rolled up blue thing with the purple sheet on it in the corner. It didn’t do so well!
After the fire, legend has it I slept on 17 different mattresses as I nomaded through Ontario and Mexico and back to Montreal, just in time for lockdown.
On the 202nd day of frantic if cheerful depletion, I finally unrolled my new Japanese futon I’d bought with my credit card insurance money. My new apartment, the Magical Treehouse Palace, was charming but small, just a double room, a hallway, a bathroom, and a kitchen. A regular bed would overpower the space, or that was the theory. I’d keep tripping over it on my way to get snacks. Plus mattresses, with their springs and thick hollow uncleanable parts are gross, right?
“They’re gross,” Caroline confirms. Following her neighbours’ bed bug scare, she’s switched to a hammock which cradles her spine and rocks her to sleep every night. Due to COVID times, she hasn’t had a chance to test out how eligible suitors fare crawling into a double hammock. But whoever gets to crawl in first is clearly in for a treat.
My mother’s house is full of beds, each cushy mattress reinforced with a bonus layer of luxurious feathers.
“I love my bed,” she calls out to the world every night. “If dying is just like sleeping, I can’t wait.” At my mother’s house, I tend to sleep through her turning on the lights and pacing the kitchen at 1:23 or 2:39 or 3:55 a.m. When I wake up, I’ve barely moved, and my hands and shoulders have gone numb.
Part of the appeal of sleeping on the floor was it meant that you didn’t really need anything, or anyone. I wonder what’s so scary about needing. And why some people get to need marble kitchen islands and villas in Hawaii while a bunch of us still feel guilty if we wind up using more than one compost bag in a week.
Or what’s so special or desirable about being the kind of person who doesn’t take up space. Seems like a solid recipe for codependence, one-sided love stories, and never having anything to wear.
And though insomnia’s not always your fault, there’s a similar smugness and martyrdom that goes along with not sleeping.
“Yah, my body woke me up at 4:17 this morning. Just couldn’t sleep anymore. So, I meditated, finished the seventh draft of my novel, did some kettlebells, stretched, exfoliated, made a smoothie, read a New Yorker article, and that was the start to my day.”
Such people never seem to mention melting down at 11 a.m. or hitting up the chocolate section at the bulk food store in lieu of lunch. I am so thrilled for them.
Back on the floor post-fire and pandemic mattress tour, sleeping became an athletic endeavour. On the mini futon, I often woke up sideways, my feet grazing my wine crate-turned bookshelf whose seven books included “Attached” and my pal Sherwin’s poetry tomb, “The World Is a Heartbreaker.” But within a few months, I was having some of the best sleep stats of my life. My big secret—I switched to decaf espresso and committed to eating lunch that contains more than two food groups, and one of those food groups can’t be sugar. Also, life’s kind of cozy close to the ground.
Where Paradise unfolds
Even so, when we die, I hope it’s like going to sleep on a bed that is at least 30% more comfortable than the one I’m on now. Until then, the best part about being single and alive is you get to pick your own bedtime. You can sleep wherever and however you want and when you wake up, there’s nothing to do but celebrate.
“Honey, you’ve nailed it. 7 a.m.? Wow. I’m so proud of you.”
