On January 22nd, I lay awake at 3 am. If you know my nightowl self at all, you’d sooner be surprised by the lying down part than the awake part. But over the past few days, I’d gotten sleep in two-hour scraps around the clock, so I was trying to restore a semblance of a circadian rhythm, hence the early-for-me bed time.
The past week had been a flurry of preparation for the protests on Friday and Saturday. Friday, January 20th saw the first rally I put together myself, to support #BridgesNotWalls worldwide. Saturday the 21st was Women’s March in Liverpool. During the weekend, I made a couple of new friends, talked to more people I usually interact with in a month, was approached by a handful of reporters, and had my first, albeit peaceful, encounter with the police. I made it to two newscasts of local radiostations as well as the regional branch of the BBC, an article in the local newspaper, and a Facebook video of the same local newspaper that got some 40k+ views and made a few hundred people very angry.
Photos by Liverpool Echo, myself, and our photographer Simon
The whole experience was gratifying. Following protests on social media is an entirely different experience when you’re also a part of them. Whether or not you see a picture of your event/face crop up somewhere, you feel connected to these hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
But enough with the platitudes, positive as they may be. Here’s the real talk.
When you try and fail to sleep, your brain is your worst enemy. It’s at those moments that all useful feelings – strength, camaraderie, even anger – fade away, and give room to fear. That cold feeling in the pit of your stomach that tells you that you can’t really change anything. That it’s all for naught. That all the ill-wishers– actually, let me take a moment and speak to the ill-wishers.
Hello, ill-wishers. Yes, you who slam protesters and activists for being pointless. Guess what – you’re not original. Or did you really think that anything you can say to us we haven’t already heard from ourselves? Spoken in our own voice on sleepless nights, from the dark corner of our minds, from the cold pit of our stomachs? You think your comments are a revelation to us? Then again, I doubt you’ve given it much thought. You just want to give yourself a little meaning at someone else’s expense. You’re pathetic. Moving on.
To battle my 3 am demons, I turned to my vials of light. You know, in The Lord of the Rings, when Galadriel gives Frodo a crystal vial containing the light of a star, and says: “May it be a light to you in the dark places, when all other lights go out.” I have a few vials like that, with distilled memories of certain days that shine brighter than others. When I need some light, I reach for them. Last night, I imagined it very clearly – pulling on a stopper, and watching the memory unfold from its crystal container, flooding my senses. It was a memory of a summer day a few years ago. It helped.
And then, with the vial back on the shelf, I turned back to my 3 am demons, and that was the moment I learned something very important. I figured out why I take action, online and offline – and why I will KEEP doing that, for as long as I possibly can.
I do it because it helps me be less scared. Because you see, the insomniac small hours of the morning always have and always will be full of demons. That’s nothing to worry about. It’s when they spread to your other waking hours that you have a problem. And taking action, it doesn’t banish the demons, doesn’t erase the fear – but it does keep them contained. Shackled to their 3 am prison. Only capable of hurting you when you’re at your weakest.
And when you’re forced to walk through the demons’ dungeon at night, through a corridor that’s so narrow they can claw at you through the bars of their cages – it’s important to know that at the end of this corridor, is another morning. When you will wake up, and take action. And the demons’ cages will slam shut, and stay shut.
Are you feeling scared about the world right now? Drag your demons out into the light. Fight them until you draw blood. Then put it on your banner.
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