I watch her head hit the pillow and surrender to sleep like someone diving into warm water, effortless and immediate. Within minutes she’s breathing deeply while I lie awake calculating how many hours of sleep remain if I fall asleep right now, creating elaborate mental negotiations with consciousness that consciousness never agrees to.
The jealousy is profound because easy sleepers possess what seems like a superpower: the ability to turn off awareness on command, to transition from the complexity of waking life to the peace of unconsciousness without struggle or ceremony. They make sleep look natural when for me it feels like an impossible magic trick I can never learn to perform.
Easy sleepers don’t lie awake reviewing the day’s failures, planning tomorrow’s anxieties, or listening to their heartbeat like it’s broadcasting urgent news. They don’t need elaborate rituals or perfect conditions. They simply decide to sleep and sleep happens, like flipping a switch that works reliably every time.
The jealousy reveals the exhaustion of effortful sleep—the nightly battle with consciousness that consciousness usually wins, the frustration of wanting something that becomes more elusive the more desperately you want it. Sleep for the insomniac is like trying to catch your own shadow, pursue your own reflection, grasp something that exists only when you’re not reaching for it.
Maybe easy sleepers understand something the rest of us have forgotten: that sleep is not something you do but something you allow, not an achievement but a surrender, not a problem to solve but a natural process to trust.
