I keep hearing people (mostly women) talk about waking up at 3 am. It’s been happening since November. Maybe not every day, but often enough.
Over and over again, I read things like—
I wake up at 3 am like I’ve been hit by lightning.
I wake up between 3 and 4 in a cold sweat. I had a nightmare, but I can’t remember it.
I wake up at 3:30 am and I doomscroll for 30 minutes and try to go back to sleep.
I wake up at 2 am to check on my kid, because I keep having dreams that they get taken away.
I wake up at 4 am and watch TikTok in bed for 2 hours before I have to get up for work.
I am in perimenopause, and we are becoming a totalitarian state, so my sleeping is a mess right now. It’s hard to know if the 3 am wake-ups are from looming dread, or hormones…..but why not both?
I used to be a champion sleeper, now I’m lucky if I get 6 hours. I do my best when I get over 7 hours. I’ve tried going to bed earlier, later, and everything in between. Without fail, I wake up any time between 3-5 am and have a terrible time falling back asleep. As soon as my brain switches on, I’m up, and that’s that.
For us neurodivergent folks, it is very difficult to put aside the pattern recognition of it all, especially if you have a working knowledge of history. It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just the way our brain connects dots. It’s super cool that we can do that, and not fun in any kind of way.
I never know when my brain is actually connecting the dots, or when my brain is trying to wrest control in a situation where I have no control. I can vote, donate, protest, and yell on the internet. That’s really it. My brain hates this. I am a bit of a control freak. I came of age in chaos, and the role I had in my family and in other relationships was “the fixer”. I took it upon myself to problem solve. I learned to regulate everyone else’s emotions. Now, I’m finally learning how to regulate my own.
I can’t help but want to take away everyone’s pain, to ease their discomfort, but how can I? I have no comfort to offer to anyone. When my brain runs every scenario and still lands on “yeah, we’re still screwed”, it makes it hard to keep going. But keep going we must.
The cognitive dissonance I feel every day exhausts me. I’m like welp, we have a secret police that has a $37B yearly budget, and it’s full of masked 4Chan users, but let me go to the grocery store because we’re out of onions. 20+ little girls died in a Texas flood, in part because they were not adequately warned due to the Orange Taint deciding that weather was too liberal, but let me finish this spreadsheet I guess. Then I think about people in 1930s Germany, and how they also had spreadsheets to finish, and meals to cook, and maybe I am part of the problem.
I cannot have a normal thought without it spiraling into thousands of other thoughts. It really gets exhausting.
Last night, I finally slept without waking up.
However, at 5:30 in the frickin’ morning, this one decided to sing an aria about her starvation.
When I’m up now, I’m up. If it’s not my brain switching on, it’s my bladder. And once these cats know we are up, it is up time. Period. They are both so wide awake in the morning. I don’t want to wish away the summer, but I could use for sunrise to be a little closer to 6:00 am.
They are insanely cute though, and I don’t know what I would do without them. Even when I am exhausted and on the verge of a Full Mental, they do something that makes me laugh my ass off.
For example, Annie has a roll of Emotional Support Paper Towels. Recently, she added an Emotional Support Sock.
She mostly snuggles with the paper towels, but as she is a cat, she forgets herself and starts bunny kicking the thing, shredding it and leaving a god awful mess for her dad and I to clean up. She knows that when she bunny kicks her sister in the face when they play fight, Talula lets her know when she’s gone too far. The paper towels cannot, and therefore, she doesn’t know when to stop.
When she’s done assaulting her poor friend, she stops and surveys the damage. She looks at me. Then she resumes cuddling with it. I don’t know when the sock became a thing, but Annie is a fuckin’ weirdo. I love her so much.
I hate the 3 am wake-ups, but Annie and Talula LOVE the 3 am wake-ups. One or both of them will come sit on the couch with me for extra pets and snugs. I don’t want it to become a routine, so as much as they run to where I keep their Churu, I will not give them a 3 am treat.
But, if I am out there for more than an hour, especially if I am on my phone, Talula will start yelling at me. If I ignore her, she will start screaming and wake up my husband, who gets up and tells me to come back to bed.
Talula is the smartest cat I have ever had. I frequently refer to her as a raptor. And yes, she has opened doors.
Cats are smarter than us most of the time anyway, though. They know that the glowy box is bad. I can only imagine that my body changes when I’m looking at it, that there is some perceptible shift in my demeanor. And for some reason, despite everything we know, I can’t always manage to put the stupid thing down. Even when it would be better for everyone involved. Even when it makes us ignore something as adorable as a cat.
I’ve started keeping my phone out of the bedroom sometimes. It helps, somewhat. I also stopped wearing my Apple Watch to bed. When I was dealing with health nonsense, monitoring my sleep and my heart rate helped me track symptoms. I don’t need that as much anymore, and now I find myself checking the stupid thing too much. The point is to reduce anxiety, not create it. I guess I am still afraid that if I don’t keep track of myself, I’ll never do anything ever again. I have to trust that isn’t true. And also accept that I have Summer Brain.
I’m trying not to eat sugar at night. I’m trying to not pour the extra glass of wine. I’m trying to do my nightly yoga. But at the same time, I can’t view a natural reaction to something as a lack of discipline. As a failure.1 As if I can control external forces. I already know that I can’t. I think it’s pretty normal that I’m having trouble sleeping, considering everything that’s going on.
The next time I pop awake at 3 am, instead of being annoyed and freaked out by everything I have to do the next day, maybe I should view it as an opportunity. Maybe I can view it as a time when I silently commune with all the other people who just woke up sweaty and tense, to feel in community with them, to say, “I’m feeling what you are feeling”. To just sit in that time of night where everything is quiet, except for our churning minds, and remember that we aren’t alone.
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Why is our health —mental or physical —viewed as something entirely within our control? Is that so they can have more control over our bodies? Is it so they have another reason to take our health care when we get sick?
That’s another tangent for another day. If I think about it too hard, I’ll scream.
It seems like we're pretty similar people! Thanks for sharing ❤️
I related to all of this. Thank you.