White Noise seeking comfort in lieu of sleep

by Sophie Pollack-Milgate Illustrated by audrey wijono InstaGram: @audreybellie

Maybe I’m sitting at the dinner table, feeling the warmth of the tea mug and the crumbs on the tablecloth. My brother might be beside me, still eating—methodical as a surgeon. My mother is probably ribbing him for sleeping until the afternoon, and between bites, he defends himself: “It took me so long to fall asleep last night.” Or maybe it’s approaching bedtime, and there are people talking outside my room, with errant lilts sneaking in under the door. What if they aren’t quiet soon?

Insomnia is always in the background. It causes a rush in my chest, distracting me from the surrounding banter. (Soon I’ll need to brush my teeth, which feels like putting on battle armor.) The word loses meaning as I repeat it over and over in my mind. By dissolving it into nothing, maybe I can weaken the word so that sleep will dissolve me into nothing too. -

Inhabiting myself has consequences. As I prepare to go to sleep, I arrange my surroundings with care. First, I turn on the big white box fan, positioning it so the airflow is parallel to my body (its low-pitch hum masks cars-stopping-at-stopsign sounds). Then I roll earplugs between my fingers and slot them into my ears. Finally, I play white noise through noise-cancelling headphones that go over the earplugs, artfully arranging a blanket around the bulky headphones so I can sleep on my side.

But auditory control measures aren’t always beneficial. The more you block out unexpected sounds, the more sensitive you become to them, even to the unobtrusive ones. My defensive layers are the logical conclusion of an arms race with the heating-turning-on noise and the footstepsoverhead noise and the what-the-hell-is-that noise. And, when it’s naturally silent and I try to sleep without my armor, the room remains charged with the potential for sound— even if it’s just the insidious drum of my own heartbeat in my ear. This is why I like white noise: It’s beautifully predictable, full yet empty.

-

For me, sounds cause insomnia, and insomnia is selfperpetuating. Leafing through the past four years of awakewith-the-owls journal entries, I recognize this cycle. My handwriting falls off the lines in most of the pages, bearing descriptions of frustration, and the pursuit of comfort despite it. In a moment of inspiration, I search for the words “sleep” and “tired” and “insomnia” in my text history, and look through messages sent at all hours. I bore myself. Every insomnia-long night is a journey of frustration and despair and clarity; with it come roughly five changes of location, an hour of sleep here and there. And it’s always the same.

Naive text sent on September 2, 2019 (three days after freshman year move-in): “I haven’t managed to sleep past 7 yet.”

When I started at college, I journaled about how the bright New England morning light shone in too early through my window, and how the garbage trucks were all beepy and vroomy outside. Even with my small black fan drowning out common-room-laughing sounds, I was often up at night. I tried not to disturb the sleeping roommatelump as I read Plato’s Republic, my phone flashlight tucked partly under the covers to make it even dimmer.

Online questionnaire completed hastily at 4:30 a.m.: do you have problems with sleep onset, sleep maintenance, or early morning awakening?

Answer: all of the above.

During sophomore year, I thought I would sleep better in the predictability of my quarantine routine. I found “11 hours of sleep sounds” on Spotify, a playlist of two- and three-hour tracks of white noise. You can hear the gap between the tracks if you’re awake, a small but startling break. And I was awake, with a looming physics midterm, and my dorm-room-centered life providing no distraction. I did practice problems for hours—the same problems day after day, failing to remember how I’d done them before.

Midterm grade: C.

Attempting to deal with the fallout of insomniainduced irritability: “Okay so I feel like I tried to apologize during the call but then just made an excuse. So I’m sorry and will do better.”

Come summer, I was working in a lab. I wanted to use my early mornings to get ahead on experiments, but the lab building wasn’t always unlocked then. I circled its periphery, tugging on inscrutable doors in the cool quiet hours, feeling an automatic bond with anyone else I saw (you too, huh?). Later, I walked home in crushing heat. My hair was greasy from days without showering, my lab jeans were chafing, and I was utterly spent. (Dear housemate who often washed my dinner plates, thank you and I’m sorry).

A summer journal entry: “Today has much more clarity. Also, I’m so tired.”

By then I had learned to be afraid as new semesters approached, since reading on little sleep is difficult. You finally get your eyes set up so they’re aimed at the page, and then you’re Googling different species of monkeys, and getting angry that your attention span is roughly two seconds. It’s so easy to forget that it’s not always been this way.

(Still, I don’t want to mislead: Lots of good things can poke through a layer of fatigue. You can be really happy, a brain-dead Mona Lisa smiling and feeling incredibly grateful for the overwhelming abundance of her life.) -

Through the years, I have become a student of my insomnia. I am attuned to fine-grained distinctions between the haze of two, four, or six hours of sleep. Through observation, I have formulated rules that I wrap around myself like an extra blanket (things will improve once you just get through the morning; time can banish even seemingly immortal insomnia spells). And, staring at the fuzzy green lights inside my eyelids, I have devoted much thought to why being awake right now is unpleasant.

Maybe it’s because I’m divided within—by which I mean, often the only way to sleep is to trick myself. I will go and lie down in my friend’s room, feeling the hard floor through the poofy winter coat I’ve spread on the ground. I tell myself I’m just awake-resting: Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to fall asleep here? Then I doze off. Or, if it’s 5 a.m. and I can’t sleep, I get ready for the day. Shivering from the early morning temperature drop, I brush my teeth in the not-fully-night dimness and take clothes from my dresser, even though I can’t quite make out the colors. By the end of my morning preparations, sometimes I am emptied out of the intent to sleep, and am thereby insomnia-proof. I climb into bed, pull blankets over my day-clothes, and nap for a bit.

Amidst this outwardly invisible mental maneuvering,

I wonder, who am I? Maybe I am the one who thinks, “I’m trying not to fall asleep on this borrowed floor”; maybe I am the one who knows that’s the whole reason I knocked on the door. Maybe I am trapped in a night-watch body that won’t sleep; maybe my poor sleep-deprived body is trapped by my mind. Maybe I am the tired person who can’t always reign in her nonspecific seething; maybe I am the wellrested person who exists between bouts of insomnia.

This is who I want to be: an annotates-the-reading student who goes on runs in brisk air while the sunlight is still gentle.

And maybe there is a way to fit these pieces of myself together. Even if fatigue has material consequences, even if I keep waging my campaign against noise, maybe I can stop trying to cut my insomnia out from my being.

At the end of one of many tiring days in the lab-job summer, my family picked me up in the parking lot outside the lab building. At a table outside a restaurant, the world illuminated by the clarifying mellow light of sunset, I mentioned my sleeping problems. Looking reflective, my mother told me a story. “Once upon a time, when you were an infant, we couldn’t get you to go to sleep. We did everything we could—we carried you around the block for hours—but nothing worked until we played wave sounds on the battery-powered white-noise machine.”

Was this why I found white noise so comforting, all this time later? I could see baby-me, bundled up in a stroller in the supermarket, unable to sleep because all the shopping-cart-rolling noises were aimed at her ears. I could see her parents driving her home and refilling her head with the ocean as she drifted off, baby-drool oozing from her mouth.

The sameness of insomnia has long been frustrating; every time I thought it might be over, the saga began anew. But, the sameness can also be relieving. As I listen to white noise, even if I’m lying awake, I remember that my sleeplessness has persisted within me since my infant days, and—in a way—that is comforting.

The Perfect Going Out Top transformation through fashion

by Jeanine Kim

Illustrated by jocelyn chu

Mysterious and alluring, it is one of the rarest creatures in the world. Only spotted on the most unlikely of nights, it constantly evades capture at the last minute, coming tantalizingly close before dancing away once again. Despite its slippery nature, it entraps the world's attention as its depths hold secrets and promises about not only the natural world but also our true selves. This solitary creature, an apex predator in its own right, is none other than the most elusive animal of all: the perfect going-out top.

It's an inane concept, but one that so many of us subscribe to. The siren song of the perfect goingout top calls out to all who venture into the night, making us hope and dream for that instant fix, the panacea to all our problems. I can picture it: a daring little red thing with straps that criss-cross in mystifying patterns; or maybe a black leather piece, tight in all the right places yet classy nonetheless; or perhaps a flimsy, glittery monstrosity that incomprehensibly stays on despite all common logic. Regardless of what it looks like, I know it's there, daring me to find it.

Every weekend, as the prospect of another night out approaches, the idea of the perfect goingout top returns to haunt me. On Friday night, after the week's slew of classes is done, I come back to my humble abode, ready to shed my regular skin for my night-out persona. In a futile attempt to escape my reality, a familiar ritual of beauty potions and tiny tops begins, soundtracked by the yearning voices of Taylor Swift and Charli XCX. As they sing about unfaithful boyfriends and hopeless romances, I am transported to their world of heartbreak and drama, one that allows me to forget my own troubles. After all, vulnerability is so much sexier when it belongs to someone else.

And so the process begins: my desk turns from a repository of learning and scholarly pursuits to an assembly line of various tools and products, producing yet another clone with perfect hair and immaculate makeup. My hair, already damaged and dry, is attacked with an inferno of weapons, every strand meticulously brushed and put into place as I attempt the paradoxical "casual blowout." Only once it's finished, when the impossible has been achieved, can I move on to the next phase in my metamorphosis. The array of bottles and creams stare me down with all the pressure of a chess game; it’s a tactical minefield where one wrong move can spell cosmetic disaster. The baby pink blush I pat onto my cheeks, a stroke of painterly deception, is only a faint echo of the flush of true excitement—a wild adventure with friends or a kiss from a beautiful lover.

Every application, every brushstroke of different paints and potions, is an attempt to bring these dreams to life, to recreate the thrill of what can only be described as a "good time." Despite the obvious farce, the intent, the fantasy of realization, rings true. I can't help but wonder if maybe this night will be different, if I can live out previous expectations of what going out in college would actually be like, the kind of experience the movies had promised me.

But, of course, all dreams must come to an end, and so I stand naked in front of my mirror, staring at the blank canvas that can only be my body. Why does it look like that? Why aren't they symmetrical? Is that normal? The only solution is the perfect top, one that will hide all the weird bulges and shapes that must be mine, even if they seem like a stranger's. Perhaps the right shirt—sexy but not too sexy, flirty but not too flirty—will hide them, will let me exist without constantly thinking about the body hiding underneath.

And so I dig through my closet, filled with countless dainty little shirts, all of them specifically purchased for this purpose. The innumerable dollars and the endless hours I have spent shopping have come down to this pivotal moment where all my excess may come to fruition. Maybe this one, with its clever cutout could do the job, or this other one, boned and fitted, would work for tonight. But no, they don't fit right. None of them ever look right.

The top I'm searching for, the one that I'm convinced is in my closet, hiding somewhere behind my colorful collection of halter tops and my impulse-purchase corset, doesn't exist. It can't exist. Despite all my calculations, my formula for the perfect top—one that factors in the right amount of cleavage, a tasteful level of tightness, and a length that isn't too cropped but still shows off the right bits—is wrong. Even when I find a piece that hits all the right buttons, there's something missing, and when I look back at the girl in my mirror, it's still just me.

After all, the perfect going-out top is not merely cute; it is completely transformative. The girl with the perfect going-out top is not a mere woman. I see her moving on a crowded dance floor, easily waltzing between friends and strangers as she slinks through conversations without pause. Her outfit, casual yet so right for the occasion, is the exact combination of effortless and flawless, as if she mindlessly threw on whatever was lying on top of her bed without a care in the world. And she's beautiful—so beautiful that when I see her, the only thought in my head is that I would give anything in the world to be like her.

She doesn't only look the part, she is. She can party all night and still wake up at seven in the morning the next day, ready to run an easy mile at the Nelson. Her grades are perfect, even as she takes the most notorious of pre-med classes, easily completing a double concentration. When asked what she does in her free time, she rattles off the longest list of extracurriculars, and only when pressed does she reveal she's the editor-in-chief of my favorite publication.

And of course she's not alone. She's the kind of girl who has the perfect group of friends, all of whom are just as gorgeous. Every weekend night, they convene to get ready to go out. My silly rituals are transformed in their hands, and the act of putting on makeup is consecrated. When they do their eyeliner, their blush, their lipstick, they are not painting their face in an attempt to look more beautiful—it is an exercise in womanhood and friendship. As they share different outfit options, the shirts that pass between their hands are holy garments, immortalizing their friendship as more than a mere relationship between friends. What is farcical in the solitude of my room is made holy in the presence of this group, as they elevate the simple routines of womanhood into the sacrament.

Despite what people may say, a going-out top is not just a simple article of clothing. It's the armor that will protect me from the night that lies ahead. Every face-pinching shot of vodka, every dignityconsuming frat party I go to, every grating song that always gets played—none of that matters when I have the right top on. The allure of the going-out top is not in how it makes my boobs look bigger or my waist look more snatched—it's in its ability to transform me into someone I'm not, someone I can't even recognize, someone who is capable of taking on all the challenges and dangers of the night. And in the light of day, when I take off my top and don my regular uniform, even if I wasn't changed, at least I looked the part.

So this weekend, when I get ready to go out again, I will look at my empty room, my drawer full of makeup, and my closet full of tops, with the knowledge that I won't find what I'm searching for, but that I'll try nonetheless.