Women, Liberate Yourselves

A few nights ago, I jolted awake at three o’clock in the morning in a state of panic. There’s an expression my mother-in-law uses to describe this type of insomnia, which snatches you out of sleep and catapults you into a multihour spiral of despair, your thoughts racing as fast as your heartbeat: “The demons were dancing,” she says. On this particular weeknight, the demons were dancing to a demented stream-of-consciousness monologue that went something like this: You need to repaint the moldings in the bathroom you never baked your husband a birthday cake isn’t the furnace repair guy coming this week when was the last time you exfoliated.