The Bedtime Insurgency

daniel jacob self
Aug 6, 2023
4 min read

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❣️ Are you a current client? First time here?

I'm self conscious

I want to take a moment to talk about what you're going to hear here.

This is a place where, through the medium of heightened, poetic prose music, and sometimes even dance, everything from the minutia of day to day neuroses — so often written off as petty or melodramatic — to the depths of isolation and despair — so often obfuscated, lest it show us to be weak or sick or incapable — can be given voice without judgment.

Many of us silence these parts of ourselves, but especially, ironically, those of us who facilitate healing for others.

All of the philosophies and practices I share in my writing and my facilitation are the fruits of my own lifelong healing journey. The wisdom that I've been gifted by mentors and family and friends. The community around me and the community within me. All the parts of me: the angry, the hurt, the joyful, the resilient, the despairing.

So much of what I'm able to offer to those I work with comes from some initial moment of pain or discomfort in me that has led me to seek out greater wholeness. Which I'm then able to share with you: my community and my clients.

So often we see the fruits of a healing journey, but don't get any insights into the labor: the twists and turns along the way.

We see the shiny outcomes, but not the pain that often motivated us to seek the healing out in the first place, or keeps us committed to the work of collective healing.

So Self Conscious is, in essence, the place where I honor my 'uglier' sides. The parts of me, that in my journey of learning to care for them, have proven that old Leonard Cohen quote so very true.

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Self Conscious is also the place where I honor my inner angsty teen and, let's be real, my inner angsty adult! I hope it might speak to yours as well.

However, please know that the monologues in Self Conscious, while based on my own experiences, are works of artistic expression.

Some of them come from different parts of my life. Some of them were written when I was much younger or are about experiences when I was much younger. Some of them are amalgamations of different moments in time, sometimes told with different details for the sake of the heart of the artistic expression of each piece.

As Pablo Picasso once said,

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie. That makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given to us to understand."

So my only request in breaking with the norms that would encourage me to keep this form of artistic expression very separate from the rest of my work in this world is this:

If you are someone I work with in a coaching, therapeutic, or facilitating capacity, please take a moment to discern for yourself if you would like to hear these more vulnerable parts of my journey.

For some, it can be radically humanizing and affirming to hear being able to see the humanity and vulnerability of someone who holds space for us and offers guidance. For some, it can feel off putting or distracting: taking away from our experience of having a place we're able to go that can be wholly and fully about our experience without the complexities that can come from the awareness of another person's struggles, feelings, differences, and similarities.

So I ask you to give yourself the gift of discerning for yourself.

What would be most in alignment with your own healing journey right now?

And to remember that what you do here will not necessarily be current time, literal truth, but artistic expression: drawn from experiences across my lifetime— some of it expanded or shifted for artistic purposes.

All that being said... if you decide, you'd like to listen. I hope you enjoy.

I encourage you to listen with the parts of yourself that perhaps have always felt too melodramatic, or too much, too sensitive, or all alone in parts of your pain.

I hope you can laugh with me at the neuroses and perhaps cry with me at the moments of hopelessness. Some perhaps relatable and some perhaps very different to your unique travels through this sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful journey of life.

If you do proceed, thank you for receiving these vulnerable parts of me.

If you decide not to proceed, thank you for honoring what feels right to you right now.

If you do proceed, I hope if nothing else, these pieces resonate with and help certain vulnerable parts of you feel they deserve expression. No matter how small or how large.

And as always, please join in by commenting below.

I'd love to hear what you connect to, what you feel moved by, and what comes up for you as you listen.

Because ultimately...

I don't know.

What do you think?

I'm self conscious

I. Can't. Sleep.

But what's more interesting, to me at least, is that — I'm beginning to think that what for the longest time I've always called insomnia, might really be more akin to a childlike refusal to just go brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, and get into bed.

Let's go back...

When I was a child, my mom — out of a heartfelt, well-meaning, and deep feeling desire to ensure she was showing me a certain kind of conscientious care that she herself did not fully receive — would often devote herself to the aspirational task of earnestly engaging with a resolutely oppositional little Me about why it was time to go to sleep, why it was that sleep was so very important, and other such perfectly reasonable and seemingly inarguable justifications, which I somehow, nevertheless, apparently found a way of refuting and parrying with such pint-sized aptitude that these post-gloaming-time debates would sometimes stretch on for hours.

This! — Rather than simply putting me to bed. Despite my brilliant treatises on the Tyranny of Unexplained Nighttime Consciousness Boundaries Being Imposed Upon My Helpless Little Form.

Because it was what was happening. Because it was the thing that happens at this time, the thing we do now.

Thereby forcing me to, you know, deal with that.

That dysregulation in one's body when one has a strong impulsive desire to do one thing, but is being told they must in fact do something else.

You know that feeling... the one that becomes internalized as you grow, thus allowing you as an adult to do the things you might not want to do, but need to?

Or just as importantly, not do the things you might really want to do, but know you need to not do?

But let's go back even further for a moment.

My mom says, when I was a baby she and dad would have to put me in the car and drive me around for hours before I'd finally fall asleep...

I can always rest when I'm traveling.

It's something about stillness — everything stopping — that an anxious and excitable little child within me seems unable to abide.

I think that's why I love trains so very much — or the backseats of cars I've mentioned before. It's like a very low to the ground experience of flying: effortlessly soaring through the world, feeling the regulating vibrations of the carriage trundling along beneath me... I don't have to do a thing, but a thing is still happening to me.

I can rest, then.

It seems, for me... it really all does come down to this idea of movement.

There's a scenario in a favorite book of mine* wherein time has stopped completely and those who are still around must move constantly lest the oxygen surrounding their bodies be used up.

I think that's how I feel.

As though stillness and rest before the point of utter exhaustion is the equivalent of standing still in a growing miasma of carbon dioxide as the oxygen quickly diminishes.

So, most nights... Static and stationary and chasing after my own unruly inner child — I sit, wanting to watch just one more video, research just one more topic, play just one more little game with the World before ending this day's journey. Read, in essence, one more bedtime story before turning out the lights.

There's this concept I came across...

With the provocative title of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination*

It describes what appears to be a relatively common experience of sacrificing sleep for the sake of mindless, pleasurable dithering, which there wasn't time for during the day.The idea being that the "revenge" is against — well, oneself ultimately — but feels as though it's against the circumstances of one's day, which did not lead one to have enough time for said dithering earlier on.

"Take that, Overcrowded Day!"

One seems to say in a cutting-off-one's-nose-to-spite-one's-face sort of tone,

"I'll contribute to my own ever-growing sleep debt! That'll show you."

But, regardless of this intriguing insight into my seemingly communally reflected experience here, I nevertheless seem as good now at convincing myself of the right timedness of these demonstrably ill placed nocturnal activities as I was at convincing my loving mother all those years ago.

Almost as good, that is...

Because the difference is that I am, after all, in here with me, as it were — in my own head — and can therefore clearly see after all these years that the "one more whatever-it-is" will always, inevitably lead to a one more and a one more, and a one more... until...

The dawn creeps up tenuously, not sure if winter's gray will allow for it and my eyes begin to droop, tempting me into another world with its soft, persistent grasp.

Far more convincing than any parent, inner or outer could ever hope to be.

Far more satisfying than any revenge against myself or my circumstances.

And I begin to drift.

Sleep now feeling like the single greatest gift I could be given in spite of myself, rather than the frustratingly necessary action-ceasing event, interrupting all the fun there is to be had in the warm and twinklingly dark blank canvas of the night.

I'm not sure how I feel right now about being a fully grown adult grappling with himself over his own bedtime...