I had a wonderful restorative acupuncture session the other day with the lovely Rebecca Rapaport Ness in San Francisco. I’ve had a lot of acupuncture with a variety of different types of practitioners. Rebecca practices a style I’ve never experienced called Classic Acupuncture, which apparently translates to “less needles, more TLC.”
One of the things I love about acupuncturists is that they tend to make lifestyle recommendations such as these actual nuggets of advice I’ve gotten from more than one such expert:
“You should eat red meat, as often as possible.”
“You should never deprive yourself of something that you really want.”
And my favorite, courtesy of Rebecca: “You should really make an effort to take a lot more naps.”
(Incidentally, Rebecca has a book in her office called Take a Nap. Change Your Life.)
Being a pretty major overachiever, I got right on the nap thing. I took a good one today. Unfortunately, I remembered why I don’t always get around to taking naps:
Nap Hangovers.
When I was 22 I got my very first solo apartment. It was a grimy little walkup over an art store in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts. This was about a twenty-minute drive from the rural hill town where I grew up, and was, in my sheltered country mind, the cosmopolitan center of the universe
(As a sidenote: the year I lived there, Northampton was mentioned in a Newsweek cover story as the lesbian capital of the country. It’s a progressive place. Other Northampton claims to fame: Sylvia Plath lived there for years before she killed herself. It’s also the site of a former state mental institution that was shut down sometime in my childhood because of funding issues. They later filmed the John Irving movie Cider House Rules in that same building.)
Anyway, I loved living alone. I worked three waitressing jobs to afford the $450 a month rent. (I was a terrible waitress.) I learned to cook for myself (cheesetoast, mainly), took on ambitious craft projects, journaled every day, learned the fine art of drinking vodka alone, and watched a lot of really obscure movies.
I remember waking up from a nice long afternoon nap one day in that apartment, and suddenly not feeling right at all. You know those nap hangovers… the ones that leave you feeling deeply out of sorts, melancholy, grumpy, vaguely homesick (or maybe just thirsty), and anxious. I was kind of freaking out, and inexpressibly lonely.
So here’s what I did: I forced myself to throw on some shoes and just leave that apartment. I walked out onto Main Street, and I looked around, and I realized that all was the same as before the nap. I took in the energy of all the happy people out on the street, enjoying the summer twilight, on their way to movies and dinners, all completely oblivious to my little existential problem. I think maybe I got some ice cream (a smoosh-in from Herrell’s, it would have been), and sat on a bench and watched people walk by. I felt a lot less lonely—even though I didn’t actually talk to anyone—just knowing there were other people in the world, and life seemed to be going on just fine. I felt like it was all going to be okay.
Suddenly, I live alone again, and when today’s nap hangover threatened to derail me, I decided to follow my own advice. I got out of the house and took a drive. I admired la luna. I felt better.
