I Write in the Dark
On performing in daylight and telling the truth before dawn.
Hi, Hello, Friends! 🤓
EMDR and trauma therapy are fucking wild. Because here I am diving into memories, and beliefs that I never thought I could have access to.
I’ve spent the last few months building what I’m calling a digital archive in Obsidian.
Which turned into a full side-quest through almost twenty years of emails, Word documents, Apple Notes, Google Docs, basically every place I’ve ever put words. And I have come to one undeniable conclusion: I was always meant to be a writer.
The other thing I found, and I keep thinking about, is the timestamps.
1:11 AM, 11:11 AM, 2:05 AM, 3:29 AM. 3:33 AM, 3:39 AM. 5:42 AM. 2:49 AM. 11:15 PM. 12:17 AM.
Almost every vulnerable authenically significant thing I ever wrote, I wrote in the dark. The posts I wrote in daylight were the performances. The ones making sure I was fawning and narrating to protect others.
It is truly almost like a different voice speaking, when I read the words, I can at times look a past writings and now distinguish between my fawning writing and authentic writing.
The ones I wrote before dawn were my authentic voice trying to be heard.
I used to think it was insomnia. It wasn’t insomnia.
The world is asleep at 3am. Nobody needs anything from me. My mini humans are in bed. There’s no one to read, no room to manage, no shape to hold. My nervous system has been running on high alert all day, scanning, regulating, performing, masking and by midnight there’s just nothing left to hold any of that up. What comes out isn’t braver. It’s just unfiltered. I’m too exhausted to be anything other than exactly myself.
I even found what I believe are likely my darkest writings, some that show I very clearly was dissociated and experiencing depersonalization and derealization.
Those dark writings are difficult, because I was so deeply depressed and also so very alone. Those dark writings coincided with my depression and internal collapses and when I was most alone.
Life can be a little cruel, that way.
I unintentionally published my last essay at 1:11 AM.
Of course I did.
Because here is what I was actually doing at 3am.
I was trying to understand something I couldn’t make sense of in the daylight. Something that kept slipping out of my hands the moment the world woke up and needed things from me again.
I was building spreadsheets. Making tables. Writing out the same dynamic from seventeen different angles, trying to find the column that would finally explain why I kept disappearing inside a relationship while simultaneously doing everything I could to hold it together.
Fearful avoidant meets dismissive avoidant. I want connection and am terrified of it. He wants connection and resents needing it. I give validation; he resents needing it. I explain to find clarity; he hears it as an attack. My core wound: I am not safe or enough to be loved. His core wound: I will be abandoned and controlled.
Both wounds, activated. Every single time.
I made charts about it. Actual charts.
At 1am, 2am, 3am. As if the right framework would finally crack it open. As if I could think my way out of something that was never about thinking.
The truth I couldn’t hold in daylight: I was not confused about my husband. I was confused about myself. Why I kept reaching. Why my husband’s silence felt like something I had caused. Why I felt like I had to be the one to fix it. Why I could see the dynamic so clearly on paper and still wake up the next morning and try again.
That question doesn’t have a framework. It has a history.
I had no idea what would become of this digital archive as I was building it and introspecting back through the deepest most vulnerable parts of my life in the last 20 years.
I found a pattern in myself. Twenty years of digital journaling.The same wound, wearing different faces.
I’m not safe to be me and I am not enough to be loved.
That belief didn’t start with any of them. It was already there. Installed and integrated so early and reinforced so consistently that my nervous system treated it as fact, and anything outside of that fact was danger.
So I kept finding people whose wounds fit neatly against mine. Not because I was broken or defective or had bad taste. Because that wound was looking for evidence, and it is very good at finding it.
No chart was going to show me that. In fact, my charts are part of the wound. The analyzing, the frameworks, the seventeen-angle breakdowns at 3am that was me trying to think my way out of something that lived in my body, not my brain.
The only way out was through. Which is the most annoying sentence in trauma recovery and also the most true.
You have to feel it to heal it. UGH.
Twenty years of timestamps. Twenty years of becoming a woman, and 20 years of a woman writing in the dark, trying to be heard by anyone who might be awake and listening.
I see her now. All of her. The 3am notes and the performing posts and the charts and the spreadsheets and the seventeen-angle breakdowns. The wound that was looking for evidence and kept finding it. The voice that told the truth when nobody was watching.
I’m writing this on a weekend, of course at 1:00AM.
I was always meant to be heard. It just took me this long to be safe enough to be the one doing the listening.
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
💌 Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, 🌙
Lauren 🪻🍀
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. 🤓