Lindy Kato (Writer)

My watch has started giving me advice about sleeping. Even when I have my best sleep ever! I thought this was a fabulous sleep (comparatively it is).

I don’t need a watch to tell me what I already know, sleeping isn’t my star turn. I have read everything about it (well not absolutely everything, I wouldn’t live long enough). The watch always gave the phone a graph (they chat behind my back you see), it has only recently begun offering advice.

Stan says the bed is his happy place. I watch him. His head hits the pillow and within minutes I can hear his soft rhythmic breathing. I lay awake for what seems like hours, replaying the day on fast forward. When I eventually drift off, I am flying, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and somersaulting up and down stairs. Sometimes I engage in wheelchair gymnastics where I have lost the use of my legs. Then come the videos, replaying the worst parts of my life in colour complete with sound and smell. I wake exhausted. Stan is refreshed after doing nothing all night. How does that work?

Mum had me sedated when I was three months old. To be fair it wasn’t her suggestion. She didn’t have any help, few people had phones or cars and although in those days daughters often lived in the same street as their mother, this wasn’t the case. Mum was on her own with a baby that didn’t sleep and didn’t stop screaming. I think the screaming had a lot to do with chilblains; I was born in the summer but had to wear mittens all the time. Now I am older and suffer chilblains in my fingers and sleep with gloves throughout the year, I know how painful they can be. After three months Mum lost the plot. Advice at the time was to leave the baby in a pram at the end of the garden, our garden must have been too short. After being locked in a room for a weekend (the suggestion of the GP who assured her it would sort me out), I was diagnosed with brain too active for body and prescribed phenobarbitone (prescribed for epilepsy which I don’t have), until my body could catch up.

I have never heard such rubbish, I asked Mum about it, she said that as a new mother of a crying baby it was music to her ears to be told there was a medical issue that could be easily sorted with a chemical straitjacket. We emigrated to Australia when I was four and ran out of drugs enroute. The Australian doctor refused to give phenobarbitone to a child without epilepsy and told her to take me to kindergarten. We didn’t last quite a year in Australia, but I didn’t get sedated again.

This is my usual looking sleep graph.

The advice is the same. I’m not taking any advice from my watch; I do all those things and more. My watch is not the boss of me! It even started telling me I have messenger messages; I managed to shut that up. I bought it because I wanted to use the GPS function for running. I have had it a couple of years, but I never got around to watching the video (to be honest not much running either). I would have liked a little ‘how to’ guide. Usually, I press all the buttons until nothing works. I have shifted it to my right wrist and managed to turn the face upside down, so it is the right way up, that is clever.

Who says blogging isn’t cathartic! Look what happened. Best sleep ever and even Watchy Mcwatchface agrees!