Living With the Background Noise

I don’t remember a time when sleep came easily.

Insomnia wasn’t dramatic in the beginning. It came in spurts. Long stretches of lying awake, then weeks where it settled. By my early twenties, it felt almost functional. Theatre at night. Home late. Adrenaline still circulating. I told myself it made sense that my brain wouldn’t switch off.

But it wasn’t just stimulation.

It was analysis.

Every performance was replayed. Did I hit the mark? Did that line land? Did I look uncertain? Did I overdo it? I would run the entire day back like footage in an editing suite, adjusting tone and timing in my head as if that could alter what had already happened.

At the time, I thought it was professionalism.

I thought this is what serious people do. They evaluate.

What I didn’t see was that it never stopped.

To this day, I replay conversations.

Phone calls. Messages. Social interactions. Writing I’ve just sent. Something I said online. Something someone else said.

It all goes under review.

I dissect tone. Word choice. Facial expression. Timing. I try to calculate whether I came across as capable, kind, too much, not enough. I construct alternative versions in my head. Cleaner responses. Better phrasing. Stronger boundaries.

Eventually, my brain reaches a verdict:

That was rational. You handled that well enough.

But it’s rarely a faithful reconstruction of what actually happened. It’s reassurance engineering. An attempt to prove to myself that I showed up properly. That I tried hard enough. That I was a good human being in the exchange.

Even when I land on a conclusion, the relief is temporary.

There’s still a sense of something unresolved.

This started in my teens and early twenties and threaded through everything.

It didn’t look destructive from the outside. I was committed. If I said yes to something, I was all in. I believed in the courage of my convictions. I wanted to bring skill to the table. To solve problems. To lift the standard. To make things better.

But when outcomes didn’t match the expectation in my head, frustration surfaced quickly.

I could become sharp. Sarcastic. Demanding. Aiming higher than the room was prepared for.

At the time, I framed it as standards.

Looking back, it was anxiety.

Frustration was the surface layer. Underneath it was the fear of not being enough, not being taken seriously, not delivering at the level I believed I should.

The background noise isn’t loud.

It’s persistent.

A mental commentary running parallel to life. An internal audit that never quite closes the file.

Sleep is difficult because the review process doesn’t clock off. Even now, lying in the dark, my brain scrolls through the day as if something critical might be hiding in the details.

Most people see the performance. They don’t see the edit suite afterwards.

And for years, I thought this was just discipline.

It took me a long time to understand that it was something else.