I am a chronic insomniac, though the condition is not acute. Each night I settle down with a question: When will I fall asleep? This question has long stopped being fraught, and now when the answer turns out to be, Not soon, I calmly choose another option. I rarely find time during the day to meditate or do breathing exercises, so those are often a choice, though truly mindful meditation is a wakeful practice. I have a number of slightly boring word games I play in my head and some sleep-inducing self-dialogs. Occasionally I will indulge in an estimation, or work on an invention I have in-progress in my mind.

There are rules, and the first is no light. I stay prone in the dark, preserving my rhodopsin and minimizing the strain on my heart. For sleeplessness due to an assault of worries, or night terrors, or swirling to-do lists, I could certainly understand why one might wish to lose oneself in a book. But I put those demons to rest years ago, and they rarely visit. My insomnia is just a little time alone with myself, soothing or even enjoyable.

Even if I fall asleep quickly, I may wake in the wee hours and not immediately return to sleep. As first-world humans have recently rediscovered, bi-modal sleep was the norm for, let’s say all of human existence, by which I mean up to the Industrial Revolution, that unsavory event that brought us anthropogenic climate change, overpopulation, unequal wealth distribution, and dissociation with the natural world, including a sleep pattern to benefit our corporate overlords. But I digress. When I lie awake between my first and second sleeps, I feel commonality with many colonial-era worthies, such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as unnamed workers and native peoples stretching back so far that thinking about them eventually makes me sleepy again. When my husband’s intersleep period coincides, wee hours become we hours.

My insomnia is not new. I rarely slept well before any first day of school (too exciting!). My father shared some of his sleepless-hour-passing techniques, making me wonder whether the predilection is heritable. Thinking about this, I realized that most situations in which I find myself have existed or been building for long periods, including living in the world of President Trump. For decades, income inequality and inequality of opportunity have grown dramatically in the US, and those of us least affected did not concern ourselves with this as we could have. So here we are.