Page 5 of Alarm Fatigue

As usual, I sit down with the best intentions before I begin to watch previews, one after the other. I always think, okay, Rachel, just three or four previews and then you can pick something. You are a grown, professional woman. You have got this. Every once in a while, I am actually able to do it. I just catch a preview or two and start a movie or show. However, most of the time this is not how the night plays out.

This is my dirty little secret. The thing is, I think I know what I want to watch when I sit down. It will be a romcom or a very G-rated mystery show. However, in reality, I cannot actually select anything, because I don't want to commit. Sometimes I watch previews for hours and hours before I give up and rewatch a series or a movie that I have already seen from the beginning. This is the other part of my secret TV life. The thing that no one, not even Amalie, knows. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time I do not watch anything I have not seen before. And of those things I do watch, I almost never finish them.

So, in addition to not being able to commit to any new movies or TV shows, I also do not like endings. I rarely finish a show or even a movie that I have started. It used to make Eli smile and shake his head at me. He knew all my secrets, even this one. Back then, however, I would just procrastinate about finishing a thing. It is not like now where I will actually not finish it at all. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of series and movies I have seen to the end in the last nine years.

These days, I full-on never watch the last one or two episodes of a series. I just turn a movie off when the last ten minutes are imminent. I know why I do it. I just want to control when and if there will be an end to something. Having never had control or choice in many of the endings in my personal life, it feels like a small, if superficial, victory against the universe. When I can have a choice, the one I will make is that a story will not end. This is why I have watched ninety percent of some of the best television shows out there and have probably only seen a handful of season finales. I have learned to accept this side of me, as Eli did, rather than make myself do something I find unbearable.

Not surprisingly, I also love what is predictable. British period crime dramas, as long as they are not too noir, are usually a good bet. They tend to have some sprinkling of romance involving a curmudgeonly detective, in addition to a fantastical murder in a village that seems to have more murders than people. My favorite things on television, however, are the safe and cozy romances. The kind with complimentary lighting so that even the middle-aged characters look desirable. A fictitious place where anyone is entitled to a happy ending, or at least their pain is justified by their own actions. No one is abused there, except maybe by the predictability of the plot.

These stories take place in a world where there are no abusive parents. Since there are no abusive parents, there will never be a script about that time where one parent abuses the other until the abused spouse is the one is killed in a drunk driving accident. Nope, they are not filming that story on the channels I frequent.

Also not happening in this kind of world building is a beloved spouse who becomes an incredible physician only to die of something absurd like bowel infarction at a ridiculously young age. I cannot describe how much I enjoy sensing the scripted happy endings, how I love the comfort of not having to figure anything out. In the meantime, I pretend I am braver than this and watch preview after preview, for movies and shows that it seems everyone has seen but me. I continue adding movies and shows to my to-be-watched list on each streaming service. Occasionally, I actually pass the time like this over the course of an entire night.

As I am musing on my peculiar coping strategies, Gavi, my eldest daughter, sends me a text.

Gavi: how was the date?

Me: I survived

Gavi: yikes. I am proud of you

for going out tho -- Love you

Mom

Me: Night honey. Love u2

I turn off my phone and zone out for another hour before the tea and cookies get to me, and I fall asleep on the couch.

Chapter 4

I wake with a start, and sit bolt upright, with my heart thudding in my chest, my breath heaving in and out as if I had just run a mile. As I slowly regain consciousness a rush of embarrassment and something unfamiliar is flooding me. That man. Somehow, he is now invading my subconscious and subsequently my dreams. Wondering how I will ever look him in the eye again at work, I look over at the clock, only to remember that I cannot see, and grab my glasses.

3:03 am glows back at me.

Wonderful, I think and then I sigh.

Admittedly, it is very typical of me to wake up around 3:00 in the morning, although I hardly ever wake up in this state. My brain has simply been trained to stay fairly innocent of desires such as what I suspect have just been playing out in my subconscious. I cannot remember the dream already—it is drifting away from me like a morning mist. Two things are clear however. Mark Levy was in it and we were definitely doing something arousing.

The reason why I regularly wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning is that my internal system is in a chronic jumble from my years of working nights. This is the time of day that I usually take my overnight meal and therefore my body is just perpetually confused. It is not just working the night shift that altered my circadian rhythms. Part of it was the visceral reaction I had to becoming a mother. When my girls were babies I would often wake at night or early in the morning just to watch them sleep and confirm that they were safe.

Safe. There is that word again. And Mark Levy made me feel many things, apparently, but safe is definitely not one of them.

I get up and make an herbal tea and pop a melatonin. After thinking about it for a moment, I go ahead and take and second melatonin. Currently, my heart is still racing although I am hoping, likely in vain, that I will be able to go back to sleep momentarily.

With that thought, I do my best to try to shove whatever dirty dream I have been having further into my subconscious, and quickly too, before I have a chance to dwell on the fact that Mark was clearly in it. Despite my intentions, snippets of the dream start to bubble up to the surface of my mind of their own accord: his shoulders, his forearms, not to mention his hands; that brooding look he sends my way whenever we make eye contact, and that other look I cannot quite figure out that I have caught on his face out of the corner of my eye at work.

Shut it down, Rachel, shut it down.

I light some candles rather than turn on the lights, in a vain attempt to set the mood for returning to sleep rather than getting up for the day. This is one of my tricks for trying to manage living in a daytime world as a chronic night shift worker. When my heart starts to slow down, finally, I can tell that I am far too alert to go back to bed anytime soon.

Hoping that the melatonin will eventually start to kick in, I sip my tea by candle light. My mind naturally turns to remembering how Eli always tried to help me feel calm and protected. He was such a gentle soul that he naturally was adept at making the most anxious patients feel at ease. I smile to myself, reflecting that I was no exception to his charms.

My God, I was rough around the edges when Eli and I first met. I had pulled myself together somewhat by then, enough so that I could at least give the appearance of having my shit together. The reality, however, was that just below the surface I was a messy collection of frazzled nerves. Eli could see that in me and yet he held no judgement about the state I was in. He helped me normalize my anxiety so that I could face it and walk through it rather than try to suppress it, which invariably would make it worse. Overall, I have been so fortunate, that Eli and I connected the way we did. My life could have been similar to my mother’s if I had fallen into a relationship with someone who was not as kind or patient as Eli was.

Being with him was a balm for all of those rough edges that were too raw and fragile to survive the real world. Closing my eyes, I can still recall how just the feel of the palm of one of his hands on my back could still my brain and subdue the constant self-criticisms and insecurities that filled my head. It was just a bandage but it was enough for me to get a small break from myself. He put me at ease in a way I had not really known before. How could I? Once my mother had died when I was barely a teenager, there was no one in my home that was consistently nurturing or calming.

It was not until a few months after Eli was gone that I realized, however, how much I had depended on him to do the work of being a functional grown-up for me. All of the sudden I was left alone in the world and I had to start detangling the emotional mess I was for the sake of my three young daughters. Honestly, I do not think I could have done that work before then. Eli helped form a bridge between me and the world but in the moment that I accepted he was truly gone, I did have to acknowledge that the reason why our dynamic worked so well for me was because whatever I needed to survive in the world was actually within me this whole time.

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