Borders are open! Lockdowns are over! We can reunite with our families!

But after almost six months apart, my parents looked aghast, not delighted when they saw me.

“Your eye wasn’t just bloodshot, it had blood in it. And your complexion was grey – like cement,” observed my mother a week later. “We were worried about you.”

Soon after arriving at their house, I took to the bed in the downstairs guest room, where I stayed for a week and emerged only for meals.

My parents were impressed at the amount I was sleeping. “It’s like you’re in an induced coma,” said my mother.

In a way, I was. I couldn’t stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. As I spent long hours down there in a hectic, vast dreamscape, I hoped that I was healing.

A few days earlier I had sustained a concussion climbing into a troop carrier (don’t ask why I was in a troop carrier – that’s for another time). Hoisting myself into the back of the vehicle with too much energy, I shot into the roof at great velocity.

“Oof,” said everyone in the back of the troopie as I hit the roof.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m OK,” I said. After half an hour with a plastic bag of ice on my head that was leaking over my face, in what looked like a grotesque parody of tears, I thought I had recovered, and carried on as usual.

But that night back in Sydney I started feeling off. At Una’s restaurant – carving through their schnitzel the size of a placemat – I had a sudden urge to be sick. My head didn’t feel right. I had to go home immediately.

The next day was woozy and slow. I interviewed the writer Christos Tsiolkas, and listening back to the tape, my voice was on half-speed, my speech disjointed. I sounded stoned.

After being given the all-clear by doctors in the emergency room at St Vincent’s (I had concussion. It would heal in its own time), I flew back to Victoria. I even attended a gig. But all was not well.

By the time I got to my parent’s house I had a blood eye and a cement head. I needed to rest.

****

Spending a week in bed – mostly sleeping – feels strange. This is the thing we crave and fear. To do nothing, to experience nothing, to have nothing to talk about at the end of it, to have produced nothing but a few grains of dreams (and even the dreams themselves were without substance, forgotten minutes after waking, spirits faded into morning air – except for a tone that lingered then disappeared with that first sip of coffee).

But then also to sleep! To let your body and brain with its brokenness and fatigue lead you to a place where a mysterious healing takes place – that is almost a delight, a compensatory benefit for the pain and inconvenience of injury.

I had walked out of St Vincent’s with no treatment plan or prescription, just the advice to take it easy and rest.

In my week of deep rest, whole days passed where nothing happened. I could scarcely register them as “days” as they merged in with the nights, and then into the following mornings. Without anything to do or anywhere to be, I could just follow the pull of sleep back down to the timeless place.

My waking life was also featureless – as plain as vanilla ice cream. Concussed, I couldn’t handle stimulation, confusion or too much information. I found looking at the fall of tweets down my phone too much. Twitter suddenly just seemed an absurd place to spend time and energy. Why would I want to read people’s complaints to their electricity provider or about their dislike of a television presenter? The platform suddenly seemed like a place for the truly unhinged. It was easier just to deactivate the app. And my 14-year relationship (addiction, whatever) with Twitter ended just like that …

News on the internet, particularly live blogs, were also too overwhelming. Another hourly, daily addiction just gone. My brain just wanted white walls, silence, dreams.

Executive functioning was also shot. The day after I got concussed, I purchased three tickets to the wrong destinations or the wrong dates while booking flights back to Melbourne. But on the upside, I look forward to taking a random flight to Avalon airport on 4 December.

Two weeks on, I am getting better and require less sleep. But I miss the nourishment of deep rest (and also the permission to rest) and now have an appreciation for the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. She attempts to sleep for a year by taking a cocktail of prescription drugs. Far from being a waste of time, to her, sleep “felt productive. Something was getting sorted out.”

Like death but less permanent, sleep is also a holiday from life – a break from the conscious mind that can drive us insane with all its demands, stresses and chatter.

Rest is the antidote to burnout - yet we resist it. To rest for 18 hours a day is to be unproductive. Even if you can financially afford to rest – not to read, not to watch anything, not to consume, not to do – feels radical in these times.