As I write this, it’s a week earlier and I’m still days away from flying to New York for NYCC 2025. Nonetheless, it’s happened; the same thing that happens every year around this time: my body decides that sleep is for the weak.
I think what actually is happening is that I’m beginning to get stressed enough about the trip — or, really, the workload that’s waiting for me during the trip; the travel itself is neither here nor there, given how little of New York I’ll get to see that isn’t my hotel or the convention center — that I’m tense enough that something in me can’t last more than six hours a night before waking up. It’s been every night for the last week — I make it about six hours of sleep, no matter when I fall asleep, and then I’m awake. Maybe I’ll get six and a half if I’m really tired, but that’s it. It’s time to wake up.
What happens when I wake up is that I make small, ridiculous deals with myself: I won’t actually do anything about being awake before 5am, because then I’m at least trying to go back to sleep, as unsuccessful as it may be. (It’ll be unsuccessful.) I can read in bed, but anything else would be giving in to the fact that I’m awake, so I hold off. (That said, I’m writing this at 5:30.) I refuse to actually get up until 7am. All of these little things to fight the fact that, for a week or so, sleep is an even more temporary than usual refuge from everything that’s going on around me.
It’ll get worse during the trip, because my sleep always suffers during convention trips. There was one Seattle trip — Seattle! No time zone weirdness at all! — where I didn’t sleep past 4am for the entire thing, and then just had to push through based on sheer will and stubborness, just because I was on the entire time, workwise. If I’m lucky, I might be so tired because of this current bout of sleeplessness that I’ll collapse the first night, absolutely exhausted and reset the whole thing.
Yes, my definition of “luck” shifts when I’m on a work trip, why do you ask?