Exit Light, Enter Night

I do a lot of thinking. Sometimes it's about some really deep shit. Sometimes it's not. I spent 20 minutes the other day trying to figure out if I could make pancakes out of normal cake batter (I was going to call them cake-cakes, and the answer is yes, you can). Like most people, the majority of my thinking has always been done at night.

This has come with mixed results.

I've worked out a lot of my writing when I'm laying in bed trying to sleep. That is when my poems really take form, or I suddenly know where to take a piece of fiction I've been struggling with. I mean, it makes sense, when you think about it. Rather than overthinking (as I'm incredibly inclined to do), just laying there and letting thoughts form and flow as they will allows you to find connections you were too busy to realize.

For every brilliant (I have a low bar) thought I've had at night, though, there have been a few far-less-than-pleasant ones I've had to contend with.

Night is when my depression kicks in. Night is when my anxiety spikes. The sensory deprivation that comes from just laying in the dark means that all my fucked-up thought patterns go largely unfought. Usually when it got bad I would take it as my cue to take a Tylenol PM, or count backwards from 300 (which seems to work for me), or throw a meditation tape on YouTube on my phone. Either way, it was time to force sleep.

Then I started working night shift at a hospital.

For the most part I really like it. I've always been awful at waking up to an alarm. It's easier for me to keep myself awake than it is to wake myself up. I can keep a headphone in one ear and listen to music all night. When it isn't busy I can read.

But I do my best and my worst thinking when it isn't busy. My body is so used to processing everything at night that I still do it. Sitting at my desk at 4am on a slow night with nothing to do is really the same as laying in bed, mentally.

Except that I can't force myself to sleep when I need to.

3am seems to be when the world goes to bed. Social media crawls to a halt.Texts start going unanswered. I realize in these moments that I am completely alone. Well, except for my thoughts.

The takeaway from this is that it is probably finally time to learn how to cope with the thoughts themselves instead of ignoring them in favor of unconsciousness.

At least I've got the time.

You Keep Using That Word; I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means

The first time I ever heard the word gay, I was eleven years old.

Mandy Clarke walked over to my locker and asked me who my favorite Spice Girl was. Her hair was in sunbleached cornrows, complete with beads at the ends from her trip to Bermuda. I looked at her faint mascara and lip gloss, and all I could see were things I wanted to be. She was beautiful. She was tan. She was popular. I was surprised she was asking me anything. I answered.

Baby Spice.

(I mean, really, was there any other?)

Before I had a chance to ask her which one she liked, Mandy slammed my locker shut and walked away, proclaiming, loudly, "Baby Spice is gay!"

I was crushed.

That was my moment. My chance. We were going to have the same favorite, and, clearly, becoming BFFs was the next logical step from there. I was going to be popular, she was going to teach me how to do my makeup, and all of my preadolescent problems were surely going to be over.

I spent most of that afternoon upset. It wasn't even until the bus ride home that I realized I had no idea what the word she had used meant. The way she had said it, I could tell it was a bad thing. Its exact definition seemed completely irrelevant.

I tried to figure out what it meant on my own. You know, context clues and whatnot. I came up blank. And in the pre-Google days, that only left me with one option.

I had to ask my mom.

The look on her face was one I hadn't seen since the time I came home and asked her what 'fuck' meant (FYI, it's something grownups do and you should never ever ever say it again for any reason, do you hear me?). It seemed as though this conversation was about to go just as well. She thought for a while, struggling with what she wanted to tell me.

"Well, Kate, that's what it's called when someone like-likes someone that's the same sex."

I was wholly unsatisfied. It just didn't make sense. Baby Spice liked boys, she talked about it all the time. And wait a second, some girls don't like boys? That was a thing?

My mom could see how much more confused that had made me, and she seemed surprised, almost certain that her explanation would have cleared everything up for me. She asked me where I had heard it, who said it, and why. I explain the Baby Spice Situation.

Instantly, her face loosened in relief. She smiled. She felt better.

"Hun, you're right, Baby Spice probably isn't really gay."

"But then why would Mandy say she was?"

"Because sometimes when people say something's gay, it means stupid."

Boom.

There it was.

There's the obvious here. There's the fact that that sentence wasn't immediately followed by, "And that's never OK to do because of x, y, and z." To say so matter-of-factly that it's just something people do sometimes implies such a personal acceptance of 'gay' and 'stupid' as synonyms. I understand her relief, though. I really do.

At the time, I hadn't had the sex talk yet (actually, I still haven't, but that's a post for another day). Here was a woman who hadn't even talked to her daughter about sexuality and relationships in general, suddenly faced with having to explain a rather complex thing. It would spike anyone's nerves. As I think back to this conversation, though, it strikes me more as a missed opportunity than anything.

Every time you shrug and say that something is just 'something some people do', whether you're saying it to a child or another adult, you are making a statement regarding what you deem as acceptable. It's up to us to make sure that that statement is truly the one we want to be making, and that it truly reflects the things that we believe.