When I was in high school, my best friend used to attend a lot of raves. I think I went to one, maybe two. I have a vague memory of someone declaring that the hours between 2-4am where the “ungodly hours.” I find myself inhabiting these hours now, and understanding with new clarity, the term.
Firstly, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be awake. I feel far from my body and I feel far from my mind. I feel far from any type of loving god.
In recent years I have prided myself on having nimble facility and control - for lack of a better word - over my mind. I’ve been a meditator for years and overcame my own chronic pain with deep connection to my mind and my ability to redirect it away from danger, panic, or pain. At times I’ve felt like my own personal superhero - able to navigate stormy waters by holding steady to the wheel of the mind.
These days though, in the ungodly hours, I’m up against it all and I am powerless. It’s like watching an IMAX presentation of all my greatest anxieties, frustrations, fears, and angers. Though more than IMAX, it pours into my body, filling my limbs with the heat and restlessness of anxiety - did I check the front door? has my old dog had an accident? do I need to pee? and so on.
Mostly I am playing out a conversation with my mother. Lately, it’s all blame. Lately, I wonder if the tool I have used least to motivate change in her, the tool of blame and shame, might actually work. In the ungodly hours, I tell her she / her disease is ruining my life. I tell her I feel lost, I feel far from my friends, I feel further even from my work. I tell her I’ve lost my best friend to this disease. I tell her I miss her and I miss my life. I tell her this disease is not just happening to her. She is not as isolated as she thinks.
And then the ruminating continues, and suddenly I am mad only at myself: how could I let her disease affect me so harshly? Why can’t I separate us? I have to pull myself together. I have to hold better boundaries, I have to exercise, I have to get back to work. Another type of shame cycle.
All the while, in the front of my mind I am counting breaths. I am trying to follow a body scan to relax myself into sleep. I am hoping my partner will throw an arm over me for its comfort and its weight. But I don’t want to drag his deeply sleeping self into this storm with me. And I just want to cry. I want to kick and scream and cry because I feel so weak against this that comes for me in the ungodly hours.