Creative Non-Fiction By Kari Burroughs Kraakevik
My earliest memories are not of my mother or father. Not learning to walk. Not birthdays or toys.
My earliest memories are of being awake.
Awake when everyone else was asleep.
I loved the moment the house shut down for the night. The closing music of Masterpiece Theatre. My father clicking off the television. My mother’s hardcover book snapping shut. The light switch. The pull chain on the ceiling fan in their bedroom.
I knew every sound.
From my room, I could hear them as if they were happening beside me instead of down the hall. I listened for them in order, like a ritual.
Television.
Book.
Light.
Fan.
Only then would the house belong to me.
My senses were, and still are, unusually heightened. At night, they seemed to sharpen even further.
My parents used to joke that maybe I was a vampire. At six years old, being told you might be a vampire was less funny than they intended.
Did they really think I was a vampire?
That night, I licked a scab to make sure I didn’t like the taste of blood.
Confirmed: not a vampire.
I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I wasn’t afraid of being alone. I certainly wasn’t afraid of the quiet.
I needed the quiet.
The quiet allowed me to recharge in a way I didn’t yet have words for.
As I got older, however, that need became complicated. The desire to be alone remained, but it was joined by something else: a fear of aloneness.
The need to be alone and the fear of being alone existed in direct contradiction.
I was probably the only elementary school student seeing a sleep psychologist. My parents were generally opposed to therapy of any kind, but apparently my inability to sleep warranted an exception.
Then came the prescriptions.
Over the years I was prescribed almost every sleep aid known to mankind.
By college, I had developed a relationship with Tylenol PM. I thought it was safer than the prescription medications.
It’s Tylenol, I reasoned. How bad could it be?
I could take nine in a night and still wake up for class feeling as if I had barely slept.
To be fair, I was in a high-stress relationship, in a high-stress program, at a high-stress university.
The stress never stopped.
Neither did my brain.
It was my roommate who finally took the bottle out of my hand.
“You have a problem,” she said calmly.
I remember staring at her, genuinely confused.
“I don’t do drugs,” I said defiantly.
“This is a drug,” she replied.
I quit cold turkey that day.
I don’t have much experience with addiction beyond that period of my life, but it gave me a profound sense of empathy for people who struggle with it.
I wanted the Tylenol PM.
I missed it.
I cried for sleep.
I felt like I was losing my mind.
Years later, I can still remember the taste of FD&C Blue No. 1 Aluminum Lake, the blue dye coating the pills.
I graduated at the top of my class.
I was exhausted.
For the next twenty years, my relationship with sleep was almost as volatile as my actual relationships.
The more successful I became, the less I slept.
Each accomplishment seemed to come with a cost. Every promotion, every production, every business milestone, every publication felt like another reason to stay awake.
I began to suspect there was a direct relationship between high performance and sleeplessness, as though rest and achievement occupied opposite ends of the same seesaw.
If I was sleeping, I wasn’t producing.
If I wasn’t producing, I wasn’t succeeding.
At least, that was the story I told myself.
Several times over the next twenty years, my body objected.
Sometimes it appeared as welts that spread across my skin and lingered for weeks. Sometimes it was bronchitis so persistent it seemed to become something else entirely. Sometimes it was a minor stroke. Sometimes a seizure.
My body had a remarkable ability to say what my brain refused to hear.
Slow down.
Rest.
Stop.
But I treated every warning like an inconvenience rather than a message.
I didn’t understand that the hours I spent alone as a child had never been empty. They had been restorative.
I thought “doing nothing” was wasted time.
So I filled every available space with work, achievement, obligation, performance, productivity—anything but stillness.
Anything but the quiet I had once needed so desperately.
As a high achiever, perhaps because I viewed twenty-hour workdays as not only feasible but completely doable, I packed every available hour with something productive. By twenty-six, I owned two brick-and-mortar businesses on top of my gamut of higher education degrees. To the outside world, I was a promising young entrepreneur, even a young professor.
Inside, I was breaking.
The strange thing was that from the outside, everything appeared to be working. The businesses were growing. The students were enrolling. The degrees accumulated. The opportunities multiplied. Every year there was another reason to keep going. Another reason to work later. Another reason to sleep less. Success became evidence that my system was working, even as my body kept trying to tell me otherwise.
My ex-wife used to tell me I was hyperactive and encouraged me to work out, to exercise until I was falling over, so I could finally sleep.
Instead, I found my solace walking.
At two in the morning, I would walk miles away from her, our house, the loud but adorable dogs, and the endless spreadsheets that only another entrepreneur could understand.
One night in particular, I walked and ran fourteen miles.
I walked until I didn’t recognize my surroundings. Until the familiar sounds of the city had disappeared completely.
That’s when the fear arrived.
I looked down at my Apple Watch.
Seven miles?
I was only halfway home.
I was convinced the watch had to be wrong.
What city was I even in?
For the first time that night, I became acutely aware of my aloneness.
I ran.
I ran until my legs burned.
I ran until I recognized the streetlights.
I ran until I knew I was close to home.
Then I ran another seven miles.
I wish I could say those fourteen miles taught me something, or that there was some moment of self-discovery, some grand realization.
There wasn’t.
I went home, slept for a few hours, and got up the next morning to do it all again.
The businesses still needed me. The students still needed me. The deadlines still existed.
And the ironic thing is, I am still proud of that work.
I just wish I had been as protective of myself as I was of everything I was building.
The last five years have brought much-needed change. A new marriage. Less direct management of the businesses. No teaching. Time.
Time to write.
Time to think.
Time to simply be.
The three hours between midnight and 3 a.m. may be the only hours all day that require nothing from me.
No one needs a decision.
No one needs a response.
No one needs a performance.
The house is quiet again.
And for a few hours, it belongs to me.
That is the only time my mask is truly off.
The hours are not empty.
They never were.
* * *
Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a writer, composer, and arts educator based in Boulder, Colorado. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Divergents Magazine, Open Secrets Magazine, Larina’s Lit Lounge, Backsliders Magazine, Chicago Story Press, The Genre Society, and Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine. She is the founder of several arts education and performance organizations and writes about identity, illness, belonging, creativity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
