In one dream, I am pacing up and down the aisles of a never-ending parking lot.

I cannot find my car, though I have been searching for hours.

In another, I can’t locate the classroom where I’m supposed to be teaching.

In another, my keys are missing.

In another, my flight gate—the way out—eludes me.

I am running and stumbling; crying, and trying my hardest,

but I can never quite get to where I need to be.

No one is helping me in the dream. Though I see the occasional human standing off to the side, they are each more useless than the next, all shrugging shoulders and sleepy heads. I am the only one noticing me. I am, then, it would seem, the only one who can save me.

 I never knew, until about five years ago, that some people do not wake up gasping for breath. We are sitting on my couch when Kayla tells me. Not with words, at first, but with one of those scrunched-up-friend-faces betraying how alien my experience is from her own. She is horrified on my behalf as a person who prefers a more leisurely start to her mornings. I have never thought much about it—chalked it up to a natural break-of-day-adrenaline-spike. If anything, I’ve felt thankful for an internal buzzing that keeps me from oversleeping during the week or sleeping in on weekends while work awaits.

 We’ve had many conversations on this topic, Kayla and I.  

When does your brain rest? She wonders. I tell her matter-of -fact-ly that

“the brain is not for resting.” She obliges this response once or twice in the beginning, but lately, she corrects me.

“I don’t like it when you say that.”

“Ok,” I tell her.

 But I don’t really understand. I am not playing dumb. I legitimately do not know what she means by this question.

Brains are for thinking,

and thinking,

and thinking, some more.

Brains are for planning and strategizing, self-loathing and correcting,

pondering, and pep talks,

for parsing words spoken and heard.

 Brains are for saving oneself.

 

A few years back, I received a small promotion at work. Because I deemed it relatively unremarkable, I had no expectation of being acknowledged in any way by anyone, which is rare for me. For context, I am an adult who celebrates a birthday week. Also, I have a blog. I am not ashamed to demand attention as I have not had the luxury of assuming that the world will take notice if I ask or offer quietly. But, on this particular occasion, it had not crossed my mind that a celebration might be merited. So, when I walked into my house on the afternoon of the promotion to find Kayla and Aleigh smiling in front of balloons, a banner, and some tasty Texas treats, I felt a feeling inside me that was warm and also foreign. It was surprise.

I wondered for days how this all had happened without my orchestration. It isn’t simply that I hadn’t done the planning, or the picking-up, or the presentation of the festivities. It’s that I had not even done the hoping and the hinting typically required of me in order to get what I want or need. The world was tilted differently all of a sudden and it had me off-kilter as well.

 Later that week, Aleigh and I went down to the river for a walk. I noticed how far in the distance my eyes and mind situated themselves; I took note of the people, the terrain, the vehicles crossing the bridge a mile ahead, and mindlessly made plans for each potential peril. I’d walk us quickly past the people and gingerly around the crags and stop short of the bridge, avoiding any careening cars. I wasn’t scared of these things, just aware, just prepared. I’d make sure that we’d pause at the water and notice any flowers or birds or children who were out and about too. We wouldn’t miss a thing. Because of me, we would be ok.

 And just as I went to pat myself on the back for these imaginary crises averted and opportunities embraced, I remembered the balloons, and the banner, and the Chuys Poblano Ranch, and it occurred to me that maybe I was not the only person paying attention to the world. This was the moment I realized I had an alter ego. I named her immediately.

  Hypervigilante!

“HV” for short.

She is the one who runs out ahead of me, scouting and calculating all day and then again all through the night. She is not a villain exactly, but she isn’t the superhero I once understood her to be, either. She is interesting. She is charming. She is spectacular. But that does not make her good. Hypervigilante is an antihero.

A thing that I believe in my brain but not quite yet in my body is that the tools we wielded to protect ourselves as children might do more harm than good as we grow old and (hopefully) up. And, in fact, some of the tools that we understood to be shields were actually swords turned inward this whole damn time. I won’t suggest that Hypervigilate has never saved my life. I believe her efforts have come to my rescue on many occasions in my youth. I also suspect that she has a not-so-distant relationship with hysteria, hypertension, and heart disease and these connections seem counterproductive to my life goals if I’m honest.

I think a lot about my ancestors, living as property, always alert, never at rest. I think of one woman, in particular, the slave girl who was my grandmother’s great-grandmother, whose baby was given to two white women to raise, who is unnamed and unknown to those of us who came after her. I call her Eve, as she is our mistreated, misunderstood, mother. I know that we share blood and history, that she remains—resides— in my cells where I carry her hopes and fears along with my own each day. For many years I presumed hers was the voice I heard screaming from within

 “Go!”

 “Run!”

“Don’t stop! “

“Don’t you dare, girl.” 

But that doesn’t sound like the voice of a woman who knows what it means to be held captive.  

It sounds more like the voice of a master—

whose blood and being I also carry around inside of me.

 I have been slow to claim rest as resistance because I want to do right by my ancestors and by myself; and also, because I know the general tendency is to embrace a one-size-fits-all mentality about any and all things. I don’t actually think it’s a great or brave idea for all of us to lie down and go to sleep. “Rest” can be overdone. In the wrong hands, “rest” becomes ignorance, complicity, cruelty…

 And yet.

 I have to believe that maybe Eve’s is the fainter voice inside.

“Slow down.”

“Be still.”

“Breathe, baby, breathe.”

 I never used to believe people who said they slept through their alarm—as though alarm exists outside of oneself. It did seem like others were slow to rouse, though. They couldn’t or wouldn’t see the road ahead as clearly as I did. They were all looking down or back or away. They were taking their time, saving work and worry for another day, too busy with “self-care” to discern the communal need. But that has never been the whole truth about the world. Not in all of human history.

To rest is to trust in some god or somebody, to believe that help is both on the way and ever-present. Many of us have good reason to doubt this. I know I do. But I am a believer. In my nightmares, I am Hypervigilante, worried and wild with no one and nothing but myself to count on. Some nights though,  even as I lie there alone and in the dark, I remember that this is not the real world, and she is not the real me. I slow down. I stop wandering. I wake up. And then, I lie back down.