For most people, the morning hours are trialling; getting out of bed is never on the ideal agenda.
For most people, this is simply because they can’t be bothered or went on a night out.
But for people like me, it’s because we can’t find the motivation or had a long night awake. We can’t find that motivation because we feel like we have nothing to live for, like this day is going to be like every other, like we’re living in this never ending cycle of long days and longer nights. And we’ve had that long night awake because things don’t only cross our mind, but they plague us, they haunt us, they torment us.
Around 11 we might go to bed and pull the covers up to be warm and half an hour later we might kick them off because we’re too hot, because we had to wear a long sleeve top so our mothers wouldn’t find out. Around 1, sleep becomes hopeless. So we pick up our phones and take them off charge. We scroll through an endless Facebook feed for maybe another hour but then thinking becomes contemplating and contemplating becomes action.
That action might be to cut, to call a close friend, to cry, to panic or to breakdown. And it happens in the dead of night when the rest of the house is sleeping because that’s the time when our mind is most active- when it opens up to us the most. Whether it’s our thoughts or memories, this is the easiest time to access them but it’s somehow the hardest time to overcome them.
So when I say I’m lucky to get an hour or two of sleep and you say ‘what were you doing, talking to some boy?’ and I shrug it off, don’t persist.
But that ‘lucky’ isn’t always the case. Night terrors are something most people won’t acknowledge- to them it’s a childish thing and you’re often told it’ll pass. But when it’s so graphic and detailed and intricate, you can’t forget it and you can’t escape the fear that every time you sleep, it’ll just happen again.
You might see someone being hunted or dying, someone cutting, someone committing, someone crying, someone shattering… It’s horrible to see, but you can’t stop it.
So when you wake up in the morning, you’re half glad it’s over, but half let down by the fact that the nightmare is going to start all over again. You’re let down your alive and living this life; you’re wishing you just died peacefully in your sleep.
So for me, and people who live the same way, the morning hours are trialling, but so is every hour and every minute we’re breathing.
So this morning, I lay in bed, my alarm went off and I opened my eyes. My senses came into focused and I wearily switched off the alarm. I dreaded the light peeping through the curtains and the rest of the world outside. Then I said a prayer, I got up and I got dressed. All this time not forgetting that one lucky night, I will be consumed by darkness and won’t take another breath.
As to that prayer, I think we all know what it was for.