A bedtime story.
There once was a girl who couldn’t sleep. At night, she would white-water raft on her tumultuous thoughts and the blood pulsing through the veins in her head. One night, she was thinking - and, my, did she do a lot of thinking, this girl – and while she was ploughing through the files of her past, she tripped over an event in the salt plains of her history. Crack. She realised this must have been the time she had first encountered Insomnia, ushered in by her close associates Unsafety and Shame. They were to become life-long companions. Unsafety was very good at stoking up the adrenaline pots, while Shame sang mantras about how all the misery in the girl’s life had been invited by none other than herself. In the daytime, she would wear Shame like an invisible cloak of lead, and at night it became her blanket of tombstones. Over time, Shame turned into an old crone called Nagging Doubt, who would always show up at the most inconvenient times, like a cold sore at a party. One day, the girl met a Master, who did a Good-Will-Hunting-it’s-not-your-fault scene with her and things seemed to get better after that. The blanket was folded up neatly and put in the cupboard. But Unsafety and Shame had become almost inseparable, so whenever something bad happened, Nagging Doubt would again descend on the girl like the wings of a massive raven, whispering in her ear that she was an idiot, signifying nothing. “What a miserable story!” you might exclaim, “is there no happy end?” Well, of course there is, dear reader, because the girl summoned a glittering rainbow unicorn and rode off into the blood-red sunset.
