I haven’t been sleeping properly since the 15th of August. At first I thought it would last a few nights. I was going through an extremely difficult period, my head was full of thoughts, and it made sense that sleep had become difficult. But then one night became two, then three, then four, and eventually I stopped counting.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from not sleeping for several nights in a row. During the day my body would eventually surrender. Sometimes in the early afternoon I would suddenly start falling asleep without even realising it was happening. My head would literally begin to drop because I could no longer keep my eyes open. I was exhausted. I desperately wanted to sleep. And yet nighttime would arrive and something completely different would happen. I would lie down and my mind would switch on. Thoughts, questions, memories, conversations, possibilities. One after another. My body was begging for sleep while my brain seemed determined to keep watch.

There is another strange thing that has happened during this period: since the 15th of August, I haven’t really been able to sleep in my bed. I try. I go upstairs, get into bed and tell myself that tonight will be different. But usually, by one o’clock in the morning at the latest, I give up, go downstairs and move to the sofa. Somehow the sofa has become my second bed. I don’t completely understand why, but I feel safer there. There is something about curling up on that sofa that makes my body feel slightly more protected, so night after night I have ended up there.

Of course, being me, initially I tried to solve the problem. I searched for videos about insomnia. I watched videos about calming the nervous system because it felt as though mine had forgotten how to come out of high alert. I tried meditation. Music. Breathing. Avoiding screens before bed. Different routines. Different techniques. I kept trying to find the thing that would finally make my brain understand: we are safe enough to sleep now.

But nothing seemed to work.

And then at some point I realised that I had created another problem on top of the insomnia: I had become anxious about sleeping. Every night had become a test. I need to sleep tonight. I have to get eight hours. What if I can’t sleep again? Tomorrow I’ll be exhausted. Why am I still awake? How many hours are left before morning? I wasn’t only awake anymore. I was awake and worried about being awake.

So eventually I stopped fighting quite so hard.

I thought: Okay. Let’s leave it alone for a while. My body is doing whatever it needs to do right now.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly started enjoying insomnia. Absolutely fucking not. I would love to sleep. I fantasise about getting into bed, closing my eyes and waking up eight hours later wondering what year it is. But I started trying to remove the battle from the night. If I couldn’t sleep, perhaps I didn’t have to spend those hours lying there desperately trying to force myself into unconsciousness.

So sometimes I read. Sometimes I watch something that helps me understand what I am experiencing. Sometimes I sit on my sofa and try to make something artistic. Sometimes I simply allow myself to be awake. The night is still the night, even if I am not sleeping through it. And somehow turning those hours into time I can inhabit rather than time I am failing to sleep through has made them a little less frightening.

I still don’t sleep well. I don’t want to pretend this has become one of those beautiful stories where I stopped trying and magically slept for nine hours the following night. It hasn’t. I still move from my bed to the sofa. I still wake up. I still have nights when my thoughts refuse to leave me alone.

But over the last couple of days, I think I have noticed tiny improvements.

Tiny.

And right now, tiny is enough to make me happy.

I think one of the things this period is teaching me is to stop dismissing small improvements simply because they aren’t the final result I want. If I sleep a little longer, that’s something. If my mind is quiet for half an hour, that’s something. If one night feels slightly easier than the night before, that’s something. I don’t need to wait until everything is fixed before I allow myself to recognise that something is getting better.

Of course I want a full night’s sleep. God, I want one.

But until it comes, I’m trying to be a little gentler with the nights that don’t go according to plan. I’m trying to stop treating sleep as another thing I have to succeed at. And in a period when so much has felt enormous, I’m learning to be genuinely grateful for the smallest signs that perhaps my body and my mind are slowly beginning to find their way back to rest.