My Soft Rebellion

At night, there’s just no pressure to perform. 

When I was younger, there was always this time in the house before everyone would wake up, where it would be so intensely peaceful. I remember the euphoria I used to feel — to be awake before everything was going to stir. 

They were my times of absolute restful peace.

I used to go to bed around 8 a.m. in the morning and wake up at 4 or 5 in the evening in the summers. Nighttime was a way for me to check out of a house I was often not allowed to leave.

I watched an insane amount of YouTube — from KevJumba to Hannah Hart to Equals 3 to Epic Meal Time to O2L… I was on it.

As sobriety has hit me — which is a word I find kind of weird to use on myself since I’ve always used it for alcohol (odd that it applies now to my pot addiction lmao) — I’ve been finding I’m staying awake much longer into the night.

I used to think it was because I just couldn’t get to bed, but it’s more so that my nights are a way for me to let my mask slip in a deeper way — in a way I could never do when everyone’s energy was buzzing around me.

Basically, classic sleep procrastination has hit me hard without Mary Jane to force me to bed.

I love my nights. I can feel myself get more and more calm as they progress; as everyone rests, so do I.

It’s a time of limbo, where I can just blissfully stay awake and forget about the future — quite literally, since I very much regret the choice to sleep at 2 a.m. when I need to get into the office the next day.

But the thing is, maybe that’s just it. Waking up leads to a life I am quite gratefully dreadful for.

I have never felt normal in any regulated system. In school, I was putting on a consistent performance. Sitting in classes was just daydream time. And interacting with adults especially is where I looked to others for cues.

This is just a side note, but my parents were so strict that the way I acted around my teachers was very odd — always afraid of authority. So, I would look at other people and see how they interacted with them. The kids who were so fun and casual with teachers were kids I considered on another echelon of life. I always thought, how do they not feel that fear? How are they so charismatic?

I eventually learned how to do it all. I was eighth-grade valedictorian, so you can say I learned really well (this is a flex I tend to pull out often lmfaoooo).

This performance eventually became harder to achieve however. Eventually, I found weed and realized — oh, this makes things a bit more bearable. So I smoked and trudged through my days, moving forward at all costs.

And then smoking at night became necessary as well; otherwise, I’d never get to bed. Because the same rules applied from when I was a kid — the night was still the only true reprieve that I had. If the pot allowed me to, I’d stay awake as much as I could, but like pot does, it would eventually knock me out.

My nights lately, now, as a 26-year-old and not a 15-year-old, are very different. My habits now actually replicate sixth-grade me — before she ever found out she could smoke away her problems.

I’m back in this loop of trying to take care of myself but rebelling at the same time. As I write this, it’s almost midnight, and I might just watch another episode of the show I’m obsessed with.

I can see very clearly how my mind turns back to its old, deeply rooted ways of coping.

I stay up, I watch a show, I revel in how quiet everything is.

But I am not quite sure what I am soothing myself from. Years of abuse, self-harm, racist work environments, shitty boyfriends — I don’t even know. 

It’s all a blur and something I don’t even care about anymore. I feel like I’ve beaten the dead horse over and over and over. I understand there will always be times where I grieve, but my trauma no longer has a hold on me like it used to. 

My past is something I just want to leave in the past, but when I’ve been sleeping at 2 a.m. every day, I feel it crawl back up my spine. I’m back in a state of trying to escape it all — even if it’s just an illusion, even if I don’t even know what I’m escaping. 

If it’s not my parents I don’t want to deal with, it’s just regular old adult life — with the spiciness of being a woman of colour in patriarchal and white supremacist settings, with undiagnosed (insert one of many things that it could be here).

All I know is, I crave these moments of silence — these moments of just doing nothing, of just enjoying, of just being with myself and marinating in my life. 

I crave these moments of absolute zero pressure to perform.

That’s what my nights have always done for me — allow me to feel human again.

Maybe I can turn my days into nights one day soon too.