• 18 Nov, 2025

I used to think sleep was a luxury.

Not a need.

A privilege.

Something you earned after surviving the day.

But when my daughter was born, I learned the truth:
Sleep is not a reward. It’s a lifeline.

And I was drowning.

It was June in Dhaka. The air clung to my skin like wet cotton. The ceiling fan spun lazily above our tiny one-room apartment, its rhythm the only constant in a world that had shattered into feedings, cries, and panic.

I was 23.
I had no family nearby.
My husband worked 12-hour shifts.
My mother-in-law came every evening to help—but she left before midnight, muttering about her own prayers and the next day’s chores.

I was alone.

And I was exhausted.

Not the kind of tired you get from working late.
Not the kind you shake off with coffee.

This was bone-deep exhaustion—the kind that lives in your eyelids, your shoulders, your throat. The kind that makes you cry when your baby sneezes.

I’d lie awake until 3 a.m., listening to the symphony of Dhaka nights:
The distant azaan from the mosque,
The hum of the refrigerator,
The rhythmic thump-thump of the neighbor’s ceiling fan,
The occasional scream of a passing rickshaw,
And beneath it all—the soft, desperate whimper of my baby, waking every 90 minutes for milk.

I tried everything.

I bought expensive white noise machines.
I drank chamomile tea that tasted like grass.
I followed sleep “hacks” from Instagram—cold showers, magnesium, journaling.