At four a.m. this morning, I woke from the loveliest dream to an onslaught of chatter. I felt disoriented for a moment, as though I’d lost time and ‘come to’ in a room full of people. 

How did I get here? Blink blink in the darkness. 

The contrast between the dream and this tsunami of unloveliness was stark. From delight, warmth, and wonder, to this? Ugh. 

The parts of myself that almost never sleep were holding some kind of meeting behind my back, and without my permission. The furor died down as consciousness came on like a freight train, but I caught snippets that stung, and I felt that all too familiar prickle in the backs of my eyes that signaled the onset of a lonely cry with my face pressed into a pillow.

She’ll never. She always. So stupid. What is wrong with her? Who does she think she is? Nothing good. Nothing right.

This was not pleasant. I don’t recommend it. 

I did the usual pillow mashing thing I often find myself doing at four a.m., and tried to go back to sleep. I knew I’d find a gentler world at dawn, but that was hours away. There was nothing I wanted more but more sleep, but my brain would not cooperate. My legs twitched. My eyes stung. 

Blink, blink in the darkness. A deep, exasperated sigh. 

I threw off the blankets, inciting a riot of tail wagging and kisses from the dogs, and gave up on sleep.

There’s an entire Ted Talk by Rives, who is one of my favourite slam poets, on the subject of 4 a.m. In it, he riffs off of all of the mentions of this hour he can find. 

“Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour. 

A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from “The Godfather.” Coppola’s script describes these guys as, “exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning.” – Rives

You can find the entire talk here.

After listening to it, I felt like I was a part of a not-so-secret club, a cult of sorts, and I felt just a little bit less alone. It helped, but only a little, and definitely not at 4 a.m. this morning. Naming reality is something I love doing, and the reality is that I have terrible, intrusive thoughts on a regular basis. I’m willing to bet I’m not alone. But knowing a thing is true is not the same as fixing it, and I want this fixed. 

I wasn’t willing, this 4 a.m., to wait for the sun to rise, and the gentler voice to arrive. I wanted it to stop now. But how?

I have a metric butt tonne of trauma layered up over 51 years of a life lived through mean times. The ‘brain gremlins’ as I like to call them, are a feature of my C-PTSD. It’s been helpful to think of these voices – especially the mean ones – as somehow separate from me, but lately, that’s been backfiring. More often than not, I get frustrated or angry with these intrusive thoughts. I yell at them to shut up and leave me alone, or I shake my head in disgust at what they’re saying, judging them. Berating them. Shaming them. You know. Tit for tat. They dish it and I dish it right back. 

This is SO NOT WORKING.

This morning, I tried something different. I got quiet. I did the thing my therapist taught me where I ground myself into the present moment by naming five things I can see, four things I can hear, three things I can touch, two things I can smell. I scanned my body for places that ached or twitched or felt somehow too alive. I breathed into them. Nice and slow. 

And then I addressed the voices like so:

“Hi. I know you’re only doing your best in there, and that all the worst-case scenarios you deliver up to me at 4 a.m. are meant to somehow keep me safe, but I gotta tell you. It’s getting old. I wonder if we can work something out so that instead of waking me up with a laundry list of everything that could possibly go wrong, or every thing I’ve ever done wrong, or everything that’s wrong with me, we could try being gentler. What if you just said “OH HEY I’M AFRAID”. What if you tried saying “I HAVE DOUBTS CAN YOU HELP ME?” Even if it’s 4 a.m., I promise to try.”

Things got quiet. I kept breathing, and I felt something in me soften. Empathy flood my entire body, and the hair on the back of my neck rose up. I got goosebumps. The center of my chest ached with longing, with loneliness and I realized that I was longing and lonely for these parts of myself that are so afraid that they are willing to hurt me in order to feel safe. I wanted them to get on board with me. I wanted to gather them up, like fluffy yellow chicks, and tuck them all up under my wings. 

The tears came, and I let them. The dogs took up their usual stations when they see that I’m not okay. One curled up on my hip and one curled up against my back. We all breathed together as I let my breath flow. In. Out. A tsunami of grief poured out of me, silently, easily. 

You are probably going to cock your head at me like I might not be quite right in the head when I tell you this, but it felt really good. Honest. True. It felt like the weight of a thousand oceans had somehow, miraculously lifted. I felt clean. Clear. I felt empty. All was quiet. 

And then the sun began to rise, and I sat up to watch it. A pink sky bloomed like a rose before my eyes, and as though we were related, the sun and I, a rose of hope began to bloom in my body, right in the center of my chest.

“Good morning,” I said out loud, to the sun, to myself, and then the starlings descended to squabble on the roof next door, and the dogs got up to gambol around my feet while I made the coffee and fed the cat. 

Good morning.