Borrowed Sleep
Sometimes, I need to hibernate. My sleeping pattern hasn’t been normal since 2017, the same year I started drinking coffee regularly. Back then, it felt harmless, even necessary. Coffee became a tool to survive long days, tight deadlines, and the constant need to be present, productive, and dependable. One cup turned into a habit, and the habit quietly rewired my sense of rest. Since then, nights have lost their boundaries. Sleep comes late, leaves early, or arrives in broken pieces. There are moments when my mind is exhausted but refuses to shut down, and mornings when my body wakes up tired, as if rest never fully happened. I learned how to function on less sleep, how to push through, how to convince myself that being tired was normal. But the body remembers everything. So there are days, sometimes weeks, when I crash. When I sleep longer than expected, withdraw from conversations, and feel the urge to disappear into silence. It looks like hibernation, and maybe that’s exactly wh...