How To Go To Sleep

Collage #2: Life has improved significantly since I sleep-divorced my laptop and phone.

Jun 19, 2025

🌙 What do you remember from your childhood bedroom?

IKEA opened its first Scottish store in 1999. Car journeys back from Edinburgh would sometimes feature an IKEA diversion. On one of these trips, I got a blanket for my turquoise-orange-and-green bedroom (paint colours chosen by yours truly).

The lime green blanket would sit at the end of my bed. Waffle stitch, a little scratchy. It wasn’t my favourite thing but it’s something I think of when I remember my childhood bedroom.

My biggest memory about this blanket was the ink spot. Spilled from a black pen, it made a sooty lake on the bright green landscape, about the size of a thumbprint. Night-time was the perfect time for drawing, and my bed was the perfect artist’s desk. Casualties were bound to occur.

Garfield, April 1991 comic strips | Garfield Wiki | Fandom — Jim Davis

Drawing before bed was my favourite activity. The final hours of the day involved a mix of A4 printer paper, comic books and pens fanned out over my bedsheets. New Pokemon were invented, an anthropomorphic family of dogs embraced the ups-and-downs of domestic life, and angels in flare jeans stood up to their bullies at their Angel High School. The goal in life was to become a cartoonist and live in a high-rise condo with my German Shepherd.

In these dreams of the future, I would be the Jim Davis of dogs.

🛏️ Bedtime in 2025

Do I even need to tell you what bedtime looks like, 20 years later?

But I’m not here to talk about… all of that (I am putting a personal moratorium on social media discourse because talking about it is thinking about it and I am trying to think about it less).

Let’s talk about my nightstand instead.

Life has improved significantly since I sleep-divorced my laptop and phone. A few weeks ago I experimented with putting them on the other side of the room at 9:30pm each night. Now, instead of my electronics next to my bed, I have my water, pills and a growing collection of books and pens.

Instead of scrolling Instagram and sending reels to friends, I put books, pens, notebooks on my bed and started drawing, writing, cutting things out and sticking them in.

Every morning that followed one of those curfew nights, I woke up feeling so well-rested. Like, a level of rested that I didn’t think was attainable on a weekday.

It’s been maybe 2 weeks of drawing in bed again. And I like it. Ink stains are a risk, but it’s worth it to feel like I’m in my own little world.

✨🎲 Olivia