My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It started off very innocently: I was plagued with misery, anxiety, and a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.”

The narrator describes a personal breaking point. Truly believing that only sleep can bring relief, she sets out to dupe the first psychiatrist she can into dispensing prescriptions. On a small scale, this passage reflects her unreliable narration; she plans to lie from the outset, yet she says this plan begins “very innocently.”

“Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.”

The narrator knows that she is playing a dangerous game by lying to a doctor. She also knows it is dangerous to misuse these many drugs, but her desperation outweighs her caution. While the narrator has no plans for suicide, she is willing to risk fatal consequences if it means she could leave her old self, painful memories and all, behind her.

“I was just trying to pass the time. I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

This quote indicates a major epiphany for the narrator. She realizes that she is utterly ambitionless; she has no desire to engage with life. Though she has an impressive job at an upscale art gallery, she has no intentions of building a career out of it, because she has no intentions of pursuing any kind of career at all. This realization leads to her poor job performance, which inevitably gets her fired and opens up her schedule for sleep.

“The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness.”

The narrator reflects on the beginning of her sleep experiment, which begins when she is working at a fine art gallery in Manhattan. During the workday, she takes hour-long naps in the supply closet. The escape that the dark, quiet closet provides makes her feel safe and calm.

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”

The narrator believes in the transformative power of sleep, but she also conflates transformation with escape. With no family, friends, romance, or desire to engage with life, she finds solace in sleep, where she can ignore her personal problems—namely, all the things she hates about herself and her life.

“My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”

This quote reflects the narrator’s belief that by dedicating an entire year to focus on sleeping, she will emerge a new person. She wants nothing more than to forget her painful memories and start life anew. Rather than seek professional help in the form of therapy or try to deal with her regrets and anxieties in her waking life, the narrator convinces herself that, more than anything, sleep will heal her.

“But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”

After losing both her parents, the narrator is left with her childhood home, her parent’s property in Poughkeepsie, New York. Rather than put it on the market as her agent advises, the narrator holds onto it, and with it, the acknowledgement that she “had not always been completely alone in this world” (64). Selling the house would mean officially ending a particularly painful chapter of her life, one from which the narrator still has yet to heal.

“And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived.”

The loss of her parents is devastating for the narrator for multiple reasons. For one, they were the only family she had, so to have survived them is to live a life without family. The loss is even more painful when the narrator thinks back to her relationship with her parents and realizes that they are probably just as good dead, considering none of them were close to one another.

“This is how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life.” 

Once the narrator’s new sleep schedule is in full effect, she finds herself less miserable in the few hours of the day she spends awake. With the help of her pills, the narrator reaches a state of numbness and begins to feel hopeful, but she doesn’t realize that numbness and detachment are not the same as healing.

“Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world.”

This quote reflects how disconnected the narrator feels from the world. With no family, friends, or romantic partners, the narrator lives largely isolated. The act of disposing of her household garbage via the apartment trash chute—the same that everyone else in the building uses—gives the illusion of connection to others.

“The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine.”

Attending the funeral for Reva’s mother forces the narrator to reflect on her relationship to her own late mother, to whom she was never close. The narrator views Reva’s relationship with her mother as ideal, given that they were close, and Reva is deeply pained by the loss. Witnessing Reva’s pain allows the narrator to realize that the drugs and excessive sleep are influencing her emotional state; while she can conceptualize feelings of sadness and loss in regard to her own mother, she is unable to actually feel them.

“And I wanted a mother. I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza.”

This quote illustrates that the narrator’s grief is multifaceted. She mourns not only that her mother is gone but also that she will never have the relationship with her mother that she always wanted. Additionally, the narrator is remorseful for not expressing her desire to be close to her mother while she was alive; however, partly because her mother was addicted to alcohol, she was too cold and distracted to ever be open to that conversation.

“More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good.”

In the years following her parents’ deaths, the narrator would often turn to cosmetic treatments and beautification services for comfort. She has always known that she is beautiful, and actively preserving her appearance is a welcome distraction from her loss. Knowing that she is still beautiful is reassuring to the narrator because it is the one aspect of her life that has remained constant and reliable. Unlike her parents, her beauty has not left her.

“Reva scratched an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine.”

The narrator views Reva’s expression of her grief as contrived and overdone. This dismissal of Reva’s real pain empowers the narrator to dismiss the grief she herself once felt for her mother. Reva’s grief also reminds the narrator that she never had a real relationship with her own mother, rendering Reva’s heartache unfamiliar and bizarre.

“I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present.”

Pondering her decision to remain friends with Reva despite their opposing personalities, the narrator realizes that Reva functions in a similar way to her sleeping pills: Because the narrator paints Reva as superficial, she has a numbing effect on the narrator. When Reva complains about things the narrator has no interest in discussing, often for hours at the time, the narrator can achieve her goal of feeling and thinking nothing.

“I wanted nothing but white walls, bare floors, and lukewarm tap water.” 

When the narrator hatches a plan to sleep for six months in the hopes of transforming into a new person, she decides to get rid of all her earthly belongings. She disposes of most of her furniture and even her impressive designer wardrobe, which she gifts to Reva. The act of relinquishing her possessions empowers the narrator to fully commit to her six-month hibernation. Without the material goods—or their associated memories—the narrator can devote herself to healing without distraction.

“If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.”

At this point in her life, the narrator is desperate for change. Unable to deal with the painful memories that plague her daily, her strict six-month hibernation plan is a last-ditch effort to recover from her miseries and move on with her life. Her suffering is so great that she is willing to end her own life if she does not emerge from her sleep in June new and improved.

“Even a shade of curiosity would sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.”

The narrator is steadfast in her mission to emerge from a six-month hibernation period as an emotionally healed person. To do this, she urges Ping Xi, the artist who will be documenting her hibernation for an art project, to leave no evidence of his activities in her apartment. Any reminder of the outside world could be detrimental to her plan, as she needs this time to focus solely on resting and nothing else.

“During this period, my waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance.”

Once her strict six-month hibernation plan is in full effect, the narrator begins to see positive changes in her attitude and behavior. Waking from an Infermiterol-induced sleep every three days, she lives her waking hours with intention, slowly nurturing herself back to a healthy mental state. Resting and relaxing her body and mind enables the narrator to begin treating herself with love and respect.

“The fear felt like desire: suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again.”

The last time the narrator puts herself to sleep using Infermiterol gives way to an important realization. Not knowing how she will feel when she emerges from her last three-day sleep, she begins to panic about what awaits her after she resurfaces. This is a significant turning point because though she is scared, she is still hopeful; in this moment, the narrator begins to feel a desire to engage with life again.

“Every night I lay down on the smooth hardwood floor with a stretch and a yawn, and I had no trouble sleeping. I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal.” 

The narrator finds herself new and improved in the weeks following her months-long hibernation. She no longer relies on chemical substances, such as caffeine or drugs, to get through the days. She lives her days intentionally and begins to engage with the world, spending time in nature and being around other people.

“She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contractions and fears.”

This quote illustrates the love that the narrator has for her best friend—her only friend—Reva. Although the narrator spends most of their friendship being incredibly judgmental and dismissive of Reva, she emerges from her hibernation with a newfound appreciation for her. She realizes that all the aspects of Reva’s personality that once annoyed her should be cherished and celebrated, because they make her who she is.

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess— as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive”

This quote marks an important realization for the narrator. Staring at a painting at the Met one day, the narrator wonders about the lives of the artists—the things they regret, the things they worry about, and how maybe painting was simply a distraction from their anxieties. The narrator reaches out and touches the painting, deciding in that moment not to let her past dictate her future.