Sleepless- Hemmings

o n e

People tell me I’m sleep deprived. I guess they aren’t lying. You can see the truth from the dark bags under my eyes and my sluggish movements. It takes me a while to register words that people say, and when I blink my eyelids stay closed for a moment too long.

I don’t try to hide it anymore. I’m not proud of the lack of sleep I get, but I’ve accepted that it’s basically impossible for me to get anymore sleep then I have now.

I live on a few hours of sleep, 3 or 4 on a good day. It’s always been a struggle for me to sleep, ever since I was a child. I never enjoyed sleeping as much as the average person would.

I find sleeping a waste of time, I mean I guess that it’s pretty important, but I feel like being unconscious for a good quarter of your day is such a waste of time that you could be alive and awake.

It’s just so boring to be sleeping when you can have your eyes open and be doing something that you will remember.

It’s kind of sad that people I’ve never talked to before come up to me and tell me I look tired. I am tired, but that’s okay.

The world doesn’t stop turning because I don’t sleep. There’s not really a significant difference in anyone’s life because I’m tired.

I’ve been sent to ISS because of falling asleep in class before. Now I try my best to keep awake, or I sleep in ISS if I get sent there. I end up sleeping more during useless time, like school.

My parents pretend I’m normal. They pretend that the bags under my eyes don’t exist and that they don’t hear my car pull out of the driveway at 2am.

Great parenting right?

They don’t ask where I go in the early hours of the morning, and they pretend I wasn’t gone most of the night when I come down for breakfast.

I know they care about me though, they still ask me how schools going, and if I have enough money to pay for gas and if I’m generally okay.

And I am okay. I am simply tired but that’s okay too.

School gets out at the same time every day. As soon as 3:25 hits kids will be pouring out of the school and rushing to their car or bus, thankful that the day is finally over.

We all carry backpacks heavy from teachers giving way too much homework and we all complain about how awful school was today.

The routine is the same every day, causing us to move like robots programmed to memorise our schedules and what to do and where to go each day.

That’s one reason I hate school. I want to be an artist, I don’t need to learn rational numbers or the periodic table of elements. Another reason is that they don’t let us express creativity anyway.

We are humans just like everyone else, but teachers treat us as if we’re way lower than them and that we don’t know anything because we’re young.

Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you can’t amount to something. My motto is ‘Do whatever the fuck makes you happy. It’s you that’s living your life and if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing change it.’

I honestly don’t believe you’re ever too young to stand up for what you believe in.

One time someone was telling me a story where an 11 year old apparently ‘flipped shit’ because someone was saying gay people are bad people and they believed differently.

I’m pretty proud of kids like that. They stand up for what they believe in and when someone says something homophobic they know it’s not okay.

It kind of gives me hope in the upcoming generation to be better than the one this is turning out to be.