I Have Napped Everywhere and I Regret Nothing
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from staying up too late or working too hard. It comes from living inside a life that doesn’t have any quiet in it. No space that belongs just to you. No moment in the day where nobody needs anything or wants to discuss your spiritual growth or remind you that being alone is basically the first step toward sin. Finding quiet time for yourself is impossible.
I lived that life for fourteen years.
And during those years I became, out of pure survival instinct, one of the most creative nappers who has ever lived.
The Moped Incident
Let me start with the soccer kids, because that one still makes me laugh.
I was in my early thirties, living in Honolulu, deep in the years of the high pressure evangelical church that managed nearly every aspect of my life. Sundays meant morning service, an afternoon break, and then an evening meeting. The gap between the two was not really free time so much as time I was expected to fill with something productive and godly.
On this particular Sunday I had parked my moped under a shady tree in a big open park near the evening meeting. The park was empty when I arrived. Just open grass, a few clusters of trees, swings in the distance. I sat down next to my moped with my backpack and my notes from the morning service, intending to prepare for the evening.
I was so tired.
I laid back, put my backpack under my head, and let the warm afternoon sun do what warm afternoon sun does to an exhausted person who finally has thirty seconds of silence.
I have no idea how long I was out. Long enough for the sun to move, because when I woke up I was no longer in the shade. Long enough for an entire organized soccer game to materialize around me, with children running and laughing within five feet of my head like I was just a feature of the landscape they had learned to navigate around.
I laid there for a moment completely disoriented, blinking at the sky, children streaming past me on both sides.
Now. How do you exit that gracefully?
You don’t. You just stand up, fire up your moped, and go.
The Afghan
I should clarify that the moped incident was not my first experience waking up somewhere unexpected. That particular skill had been developing since my teenage years.
We moved a lot when I was growing up. My father was an undercover narcotics detective and relocating was practically routine for our family. Which meant selling houses was also routine, which meant strangers walking through our home on short notice was just part of life.
One afternoon I was lying on the living room floor watching television. This was completely normal. I fell asleep, which was also completely normal. What I did not know was that my mother had an open house scheduled, and rather than wake me up or move me to another room, she apparently just draped an afghan over my upper half and continued the tour.
I woke up confused about why I was covered in a blanket I did not put on myself. Then I heard adult voices I didn’t recognize and it all clicked into place. The house was being shown. To buyers. With me on the floor.
I considered my options. I could stand up and leave, which would require acknowledging the situation. Or I could just stay exactly where I was and let my mother show the living room around me like I was part of the original character of the home.
I stayed exactly where I was.
They saw me. They just moved on. My mother kept talking about the natural light and the original brick exterior, and nobody said a word about the teenager on the floor.
I respect that efficiency enormously.
Hawaii
Within a few years of the moped incident, I was working at the University of Hawaii law school. Beautiful campus, gorgeous weather, meaningful work, and I was completely and utterly exhausted all the time because I was still in the church and still living a life with no real privacy or rest.
The back side of the law school had a long sidewalk running the length of the building, with a railing along the edge and then a dramatic drop off into the mountain landscape below. On a warm day with a full stomach it was an incredibly peaceful place to eat lunch.
I sat down against the building one afternoon, back straight, skirt arranged properly, completely intending to just rest my eyes for a moment.
When I woke up I was no longer sitting against the building. I was fully horizontal on the sidewalk, head toward the building, feet pointing toward the railing, approximately ten feet of concrete between me and a significant drop. Students heading to class were simply walking around me the way you walk around a planter or a bicycle that someone left in an inconvenient place.
I sat up. I looked around. I stood up and pulled my skirt back down.
Nothing had happened that required addressing. I went back to work.
I will say that if I had been out there much longer, the skirt situation could have become considerably more interesting. But we don’t need to dwell on that.
The Two Dollar Movie Theater
Here is the one that isn’t funny. Or rather, it’s funny but there’s something underneath it that I want to tell you about.
In the church, being alone meant you were probably sinning. Solitude was treated as selfishness or pride, a failure to submit yourself to the community and the accountability structure. You lived with roommates, you went out in groups, you went on chaperoned dates, and if you wanted to just sit somewhere quiet by yourself for an hour you had to get creative about it.
I didn’t have a car, just my moped. I had roommates at home. I was surrounded by people who loved me and also monitored me, and some days the combination of those two things was genuinely suffocating.
So on Sunday afternoons, in the gap between services, I started going to the two dollar movie theater alone.
I was asleep before the opening scene every single time. I would wake up when the lights came up at the end of the credits, stand up, and leave. I have no idea what any of those movies were about. I wasn’t there for the movies.
I was there for the dark. And the quiet. And the two hours where nobody could find me or ask me anything or remind me of my obligations. This was before cell phones, so it was easier to be unreachable.
Two dollars bought me the only room I could find that belonged entirely to myself.
The Confession Nobody Needed
One afternoon while working at the law school, I had my own office, which felt like an almost incomprehensible luxury after years of never being alone. I had a door that locked. A small square of carpet behind my desk where a person could lie down if they were strategic about it.
On the days I was too tired to function, I would lock the door at noon, eat a quick lunch, and lie down behind the desk where I would be hidden from view if anyone peered through the window in the door.
One afternoon I set no alarm and woke up. WHAT TIME IS IT? It was an hour and a half since I laid down. Thirty minutes late back to my desk. I sat there for a moment assessing the situation and decided the right thing to do was to confess.
I combed my hair. I composed my expression into something that said responsible employee rather than woman who just woke up on the floor. I walked into my boss’s office and told her what had happened, that I had napped through lunch and woken up late, and that I would stay thirty minutes after five to make it right.
She glanced up from her desk.
“Oh,” she said. “I never noticed.”
I stood there for a moment processing the fact that I had just confessed to a crime that had no victim, no witness, and no consequence. That I had marched in there with my freshly combed hair ready to face justice and she did not even know I had been gone.
I went back to my desk.
I have thought about that moment many times since. I came clean about something I absolutely did not have to come clean about, because somewhere in my years of living under a system that required constant accountability I had developed the reflex of confessing even when nobody was watching.
It took me a while to unlearn that one.
Finding Quiet Time for Yourself: What I Know Now
I am not in that church anymore. I have not been for over twenty years. I have a home with a couch I can nap on anytime I want, a husband who does not require me to account for my afternoon, and cats who will come and sit on me if I lie down which honestly just improves the whole experience.
I still nap. Freely and without apology. The difference now is that the exhaustion I’m recovering from is the regular kind, the good kind, the kind that comes from a full life rather than a controlled one.
If there is anything I want you to take from a story about a woman who fell asleep next to her moped in a public park and woke up in the middle of a children’s soccer game, it is this.
Find your quiet wherever you can. Protect it. If two dollars and a dark movie theater is all you’ve got, use it. And if you ever have to choose between confessing to a nap nobody noticed and just quietly going back to your desk, I give you full permission to go back to your desk.
Some things don’t need a confession.
They just need a good long rest.
Want to continue reading about my experiences and discover how I Found Love at 39 and He Was Ten Years Younger. Or go read about how I learned to Surf in Hawaii.
