My Complicated Relationship With Midnight

Why is midnight peculiar? Well, let’s figure it out.

It’s dark and quiet. For those who struggle to sleep in pitch-black darkness, there is usually a dim light that remains on throughout the night. When you wake up, you don’t need to be scared of anything, because you have a clear view of every corner of your room.

You can faintly hear the sound of crickets chirping and the low hum of the fridge.

I’m the kind of person to wake up multiple times in the middle of the night - either to pee, drink water or even at the end of a sleep cycle. When I started living alone, I knew that midnights were going to be a problem.

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I wasn’t one to sleep alone without getting scared. Any weird sound could freak me out. And so I make it a point of duty to get a night light that could stay on through the night. At no point did I want to wake up in the middle of the night to total darkness.

As I referred to in my last blog, my solar-panelled lamp serves me well for this purpose. On days when I don’t feel like using it, I go for the light attached to my power bank.

As I mentioned earlier, I could be awakened by different reasons that are all natural, but what do I do in those moments? Do I go back to bed when I am done? It depends.

Sometimes, after I’ve gone to pee, I pick up my phone to “check a few messages” or “look at a few WhatsApp statuses”. That’s how they all begin. I reply to some messages here, laugh at some funny videos, and then I decide that WhatsApp is too boring for me.

Then I find my way to the ultimate attention-sapping, dopamine-inducing demon of an app - Instagram. Watching the logo load for two seconds before the app opens gives me this dopamine rush. It has affected me so much that the pink and purple hues of the logo now bring me happiness.

I watch the first video, I scroll, watch the second one, scroll, then the third and fourth and fifth, and before I know it, I’m two to three hours deep into doomscrolling. I have literally scrolled while my eyes begged for sleep. You know when you need sleep, but your dopamine well isn’t filled up yet - that’s if it can ever be filled.

When I’m not doomscrolling, I’m thinking about my life and the trajectory on which it’s headed. I indulge in a little overthinking. I genuinely think so hard that I start jotting down my thoughts in my journal. I start putting plans in place and figuring my life out. As if doing the same thing during the day isn’t effective.

Sometimes, I wake up at midnight to cook the food that I procrastinated about cooking before sleeping off. I lowkey love to cook at midnight. Knowing that when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have something to eat before going to work.

Midnights are great!

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