Tops Spinning in My Head

"Tops spinning in my head. 
If I threw a rock at them
would they stop?"

I wrote this in the top right hand corner of my class notes yesterday.  My head swam with ideas, beliefs, concepts, strategies, pictures, music, light, dark.  It does that sometimes.  I scream at God to give me peace, and cast these thoughts into the fiery pits of hell.  Because they make me tired.

I don't sleep very well - this is for a multitude of reasons.  I am a light sleeper - if a fly brushes the cool dark lamp in my room, I sit upright with a bolt of adrenaline.  God give me peace I scream at the night.  But the night never listens. 

The task of falling asleep is where I truly obtain my deprivation.  I have to exhaust my body so that my mind doesn't take over.  If I am thinking too much, it is time to go for a walk - or it's time to recite my key signatures in my mind.  Minor if I am particularly alert. 

So I am tired - and that is when my mind takes over control.  All reason has sunk into the crevices of my mind where my multiplication tables once sat.  I don't need those things anymore - the abstract nature of my  mind takes control, and I do not rest.  I think of one thousand things at a time.  Soon, those ideas begin to blend and bleed together.  Soon, those ideas no longer seem irrational.  If I were to hydrate enough, eat a substantial amount of carbohydrates, and take a gulp of helium, I could fly.  I could.

Once my mind has decided to take over, I trick it.  I am not longer Danielle - I am no longer my  mind.  I am a hiker in the Andes, resting in a tent at night.  The angry wildcat outside of my tent won't eat me if I lie still.  So I lie still. I stop becoming restless. I sleep.

I was four when I began to imagine I was someone else.  I would disappear for hours or days at a time.  At this age, it was nothing - it was child's-play.  But when the child's play continues on fifteen years later, is it concerning? When the imaginations are no longer a tactic to sleep, but a tactic to get by during the lit hours of the day, is it concerning?

We all have our coping mechanisms.  Mine is my imagination.  I have conversations with people who aren't there - in my defense, they are usually real people.  In order to fall asleep at night, the cold wall that my back is to is no longer a wall, but a person, gently stroking my hair.  I know I may sound insane - and I honestly cannot argue with that. 

But let me tell you the beauty of all this: the tops stop spinning.  When I become someone else - when I convince myself that my circumstances have stopped becoming my own - I am free.  Those tops that are spinning in my head, bumping against each other, have had a giant rock thrown in the middle of them.  It becomes my conscious decision to start up the tops again, spinning them with my real fingers.  But only on my time - only when I choose to do so.  I used to believe the rock to be self-destructive. But I scream at God to give me peace, and He gives me my imagination. I scream at God to stop the tops from spinning, and He hands me a rock.