The Midnight Carousel
Picture this: you’re cocooned in bed, the soft glow of your phone casting shadows on the ceiling, a book resting heavily in your hands, or the murmur of late-night television filling the silence. As the hours stretch thin, those insidious, unwelcome thoughts begin their crafty journey, infiltrating the quiet corners of your mind. Suddenly, it’s 12 a.m., and you find yourself an unwilling watcher to the moon’s journey across the sky, circling endlessly on the carousel of negative thoughts.
This descent into the nocturnal abyss is, for better or worse, an experience many of us endure. It is as though the night conspires with our deepest insecurities to amplify their whispers into alarming roars. Yet, there’s a strange solidarity in knowing this phenomenon is not entirely uncommon. The term normal—always subjective—feels slippery here, balancing between relatability and the peculiarities of individual suffering.
For me, this twilight spiral is tethered to the tenacity of OCD and the enduring scars of past trauma— lingering echos of vulnerability. The thoughts arrive innocuously enough: Did I lock the doors? Are my loved ones safe within my home? But they quickly metastasize into heavier whispers: What if tonight is the night the unthinkable happens? or How have others carved lives of meaning while I wrestle with mere survival? This inevitably provokes the relentless, tormenting self-interrogation: What might I have become if life had granted me sturdier support? Had the relentless cyclones of life not torn through my foundation so mercilessly, who might I have become?
This carousel of shame, self-doubt, and intrusive cognition is an exhausting nocturnal orchestra— *a chorus of factors: the absence of distraction, the stillness of the night, the circadian rhythms of our bodies betraying our cognizant minds. From an evolutionary perspective, perhaps this hyper-vigilance once served a purpose, keeping our ancestors alert to ‘the dangers of the dark’. But for the modern night owl, it manifests as a paradoxical duality: the solace of solitude is often tinged with a creeping despair.
And yet, I cannot wholly renounce the night. There’s an enigmatic beauty in its stillness—a kind of oil painting where disparate hues of shadows accentuate the light the longer you face it. I’m infatuated with the hushed intimacy of midnight conversations with friends, where vulnerability feels less like a burden and more like a shared truth. On nights when I find myself unable to escape the spinning carousel, I turn to creativity, letting my hands and mind work in tandem to transform pain into something tangible.
Winter, with its heavy drapery of Seasonal Affective Disorder, demands even greater artistry. It’s then that I seek refuge in camaraderie—inviting friends to trade homemade meals, uncork bottles of wine, share flora blended joints, or simply exist together in parallel. We exchange books that have moved us, nurture our respective creative endeavors, and build a kind of fortress against the cold. These gatherings are modest rebellions against the world’s harshness, a reclamation of warmth and connection in a season defined by its scarcity.
In the end, this nocturnal carousel may never truly halt, but there is power in learning to ride its circling track with grace. Through connection, creativity, and a touch of defiance, I find that even the darkest hours can hold a flicker of light—a gentle reminder that the night is not only a mirror for our fears but also a canvas for our resilience. In fact, it is our ancestors’ triumph in enduring the perils of the night that paved the way for our existence today.
“ But the carousel never stops turning...”
*Tubbs, A. S., Fernandez, F.-X., Grandner, M. A., Perlis, M. L., & Klerman, E. B. (2022). The mind after midnight: Nocturnal wakefulness, behavioral dysregulation, and psychopathology. Frontiers in Network Physiology, 1. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnetp.2021.830338
