Content note: This post talks frankly about depression, anxiety, grief, and suicide.
There is a line in a story I wrote about 15 years ago that goes, "the same kind of freedom that comes from both surrender and resignation."
That's where I am finding myself these days since my insomnia decided to grasp hold of me. At best, I get about four and a half hours of sleep, which means that I am waking up around midnight everyday. That also means I fall asleep before 8pm. A couple of nights that's meant falling asleep before 7pm. Then I wake up before midnight.
This makes for incredibly long nights / Witching Hours / mornings. I have a lot of time for my thoughts, and I am in deep dialogue with books, ideas, and the cosmos. It is a rich experience of trying to understand and make meaning of the chaos that swirling constantly around us, and it seems there is a lot of it these days. We are descending towards the darkest night cosmically. For many, that's scary and maybe even terrifying. It's why preying on fear works so well.
I have little fear of the night or the dark. It is a friend and relative, a comrade. Darkness is when as a child I was visited by ghosts, as a teen grappled deeply with suicide, and as a young adult satisfied seminarian callers. Darkness might have become something terrifying, but it is precisely in that darkness where I had to find light.
Depression and anxiety, like darkness, are dear friends and relatives, comrades, too. They comfort me, wrap me in a warm embrace, remind me quite regularly to not take my own being too seriously or get too wrapped up in my own ego. They used to be uninvited guests that I spent lots of time trying to shoo away. Now, I help them take off their shoes and rub their feet. It's better this way, to treat them as beloveds rather than as pests. It's made them less scary, less monstrous.
When I wrote that line 15 years ago, I wanted to surrender, and I believed myself to be doing so. Really, I was resigned. I was burnt out, unemployed (again), and trying to find work that both fed my being and paid my bills. I spent my days at a coffee shop writing. Eventually, I became a barista, and then a manager, at the coffee shop. Less than a year later, I was burnt out and unemployed (yet again) after catching the owner steal wages from my undocumented coworkers. I resigned.
It took a massive installation inviting people to Be Jason, a subsequent existential crisis complete with a cyst growing behind my right knee, and both the death of my father and queer brother due to cancer to shake me to my core and rearrange my insides. This transformation also came thanks to radically honest and vulnerable conversations with my father and my queer brother before their deaths and with my husband about our marriage. It also came as the result of going into business with my dear comrade Crystal Mason. Caring, radical relationships changed my relationship to grief, which in turn changed my relationship to depression and anxiety. I didn't realize how much I was grieving.
I have many sleepless nights these days. I know my being (not just my mind) is processing quite a bit of this world's chaos at the moment. So much has me thinking and feeling from the genocide of Palestinians to the abandonment of all political parties to their people to the constant assaults against my trans siblings to the war on reproductive freedom to climate catastrophe for our most delicate of relatives (including us humans) to what I know to be (continued and) rising fascism. There is a lot to drive my fear, especially of the future, of what's unknown. It's why I don't sleep much.
I am also not resigned these days. I am surrendering to this moment. I am not seeking to change everything (or even my sleep.) I am clear where my purpose currently resides: to tend to cultural co-creation in ways that affirm, heal, and care for all our relatives (human and more-than-human).
I have good comrades that affirm when I am on this path and (gently) correct me when I stray from it. I, too, have books and their ideas and authors as companions during the Witching Hours helping me navigate the larger cosmology in which we live, breathe, create, and die. I keep finding myself under the bright, watchful eye of Jupiter, whose orbit now I follow daily.
The darkness holds no fear. For it is there where I find light.