It’s hard to talk about mental illness with any certainty – all one can really do is talk bout your own mental illness. Because all of us who are mentally ill are mentally ill in our own way.
For me, living with depression, with a history of suicidal ideation, has meant being afraid of the nighttime.
Not the dark. The nighttime.
Because the nighttime is when the bad thoughts happen. It’s when there are no distractions, no one to call, nobody to notice if you disappear. There is, at 3am, nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and think.
I love thinking, but thinking at 3AM is not my friend. Nothing seems small and insignificant at 3AM.
One reason I dislike the winter is that the nighttime comes quicker. By 4PM, the light has shifted, and darkness is creeping in. There is, I think, a part of me that wants to sit in front of a fire, bundled in a blanket, surrounded by my village of 150 people who know me well, and watch the flames dance while I listen to their stories. Our stories.
Best I can do is sit on a couch and read a book, a cat or two snuggled at my feet.
By nine or ten PM, I am exhausted, and ready for sleep – tired of the weight of the people I dealt with, the tasks I managed, the crises I averted, the political horror I am aware of but am powerless to change, knowledge of all the ways we hurt each other. I slide into the sheets and within minutes I am asleep, in the land of dreams where my dead father and grandmother visit me regularly, where I have imaginary conversations with old friends, where the impossible happens and seems real, where, when things seem to much, I can wake up instead of merely enduring.
The nighttime bathroom visits – and I’m a 54 year old man, so they happen more often than they used to – are mostly stumbling interludes, and I return to sleep almost instantly. But sometimes not.
Sometimes, I am awake and it is 3AM and I am staring at the ceiling, my mind full of things both done and undone, and I hear death breathing and sometimes – not always – my brain tells me that it would be lovely for it all to stop and for me to leave.
I know this is not true. I don’t want to leave, even if I do want it all to stop. But brains are like that. They lie to you. Or, at least mine does.
But it always feels like a miracle when the alarm goes off, and you realize that you did, in fact, manage to slip back into sleep and now you are awake, having survived yet another night, and you have a second chance, a new opportunity – anything is possible.
I will believe this until about 4PM, when the light begins to turn once again.