Sansomnia

Sansomnia is personal, taking inspiration from Kendrea’s lived experience of mental distress. At its core, in form and content, this poem reflects the layering of anguish and reactions, such as anxiety, neurodivergent regulation strategies, and panic attacks. Sansomnia takes an intersectional approach using a second-person voice that positions the reader (you) to inhabit varying veneers of Madness. Throughout Sansomnia, you employ neurodivergent sensory strategies for self-regulation and calmness—stimming activities like listing, counting, touching, and laying on a cold floor. These initially help and are what bring you into the kitchen. But a familiar form of distress soon ruptures your peace; this dream-like state turns nightmare. Evil marches up over the hill in the form of monstrous reapers, beasts that harvest sleep and sanity. The reapers are metaphoric panic attacks that drive you to the brink of paranoia, inducing out-of-bodymind experiences. In fear of yourself and the voices in your head, you race to check your children only to find, as you do every night, that they are fine.

Sansomnia’s layers reveal two stories: that of the plot (left-justified) and that of the cutlery drawer contents (right-justified). The plot connotes actions stemming from intersectional Madness, and the cutlery drawer is symbolic of cognitive responses to self-regulation of perceived Madness. Through the poem’s form, it is easier to see the second story because you, the reader, control the order of the text being read, while simultaneously taking in the physical form of the whole page. The cutlery drawer contents are listed at the start of the poem when they are checked off using a self-regulating stimming strategy. This story is returned to later in greyed-out, bracketed text. The text fades to grey as the reapers (panic attacks) harvest your energy, attempting to reduce the effectiveness of your self-regulation techniques. But your strategies and anchors stay within your consciousness, not yet fully unavailable as your stimming objects guide you towards your children via the homemade birthday card with tiny handprints in sapphire and scarlet. The greyed-out words are a deliberate device that interrupts the reading flow, reminding readers (and listeners) that more than one thing is happening here. These two stories depict layers of mental health intersectionality through mental distress, identity, and the multiplicity of ways of being and knowing.

Sansomnia is a homegrown portmanteau, expressing a multitude of social constructions on our lives—conscious and subconscious schemata for survival through language, labels, power, traditions, practices, and expectations. These materialise as mental distress, sometimes in dreams and nightmares, awake and asleep, and/or as episodes and attacks.

“San” comes from the Latin for “health” and from the French word “sans” meaning “without”. Borrowing the “s” from somnia, “san” and “sans” alternate visually, implying a new meaning, “without health”. In Latin, somnio refers to dreams, while in French sommeil means sleep. In English “san” is the beginning of the word “sanity” and “somnia” is the end of insomnia. Through the synergy of these meanings, “Sansomnia” becomes deliberately ambiguous. It could suggest that a lack of sleep could lead to insanity, which might destroy you or that the sanity of your actions during sleeplessness (and/or Madness) will restore you. It all depends on your point of view—so many experts and people claiming to know—let’s stand confident within unknowability.