The Night-Time Spirits Whispering In My Ear When I Read Emails Late At Night or Early in the Morning

I don't believe in evil spirits, not in the way the stories might describe them. But I can see why, in the stories, they show up at night.

My night-time and early morning thoughts seem different to other times of the day. More prone to disaster. More prone to spirals. More prone to cause emotions I'd rather not have: the feelings of anxiety, worry, and woe.

It doesn't seem a big leap to imagine a poltergeist, or a ghost, or a boggart, or one of Philip Pullman's spectres, whispering in my ear or nibbling at my soul.

This morning I found myself reading an email shortly after I'd woken up. It's Sunday, and so that isn't what I intended to do. But that's one of those funny things about the technology of today, isn't it? You can just find yourself accidentally scrolling or reading something, even without thinking. Sometimes many minutes after you last thought anything.

And so my fingers and my subconscious took me to my work email, probably searching for the dopamine-friendly opportunity to archive some emails. And I read one of the messages, even before I'd worked out who it was from or thought about it. And it was a rejection.

Now if you're going to set yourself a faintly ridiculous target of appearing on 100 podcasts in a year then you're going to have to put yourself out there, and if you put yourself out there you're going to face some rejections. I even realised part way through: 'I'm not getting enough 'No's here.'

That meant one of two things: I wasn't sending off enough requests to go on podcasts, or I wasn't asking big enough shows. I should be getting rejected. I know, of course, from my coaching business, of the power of chasing 'No'.

But there I lay, still in bed, on a Sunday morning, reading a rejection and feeling crushed by it.

In the moment, after all these years of developing my psychology, I could catch the thought for its unreality. I knew it was a nice rejection. And not even a rejection, really: it was a very specific 'No for now' from the lovely host of the Rebel Author podcast.

I knew if I had read it on a Wednesday at 10:30am after some exercise and a morning coffee I would have felt different.

But I didn't. I read it late in the early hours, where the night-time spirits were still nibbling at my self-belief, whispering seditious words into my heart. And it hurt.

The night-time spirits are something I have tried to work with in various ways. I have concocted morning routines to lessen their power on me. I have changed my technology habits so that they don't catch me unawares when the spirits have lessened by resilience.

And I have done the psychological work to try to make myself better at catching these things when they are happening and lessen their power.

But I don't think these spirits will ever disappear from my life. To me, they feel like a part of a cycle. The cycle of waking and sleeping, disrupted of course by my ability to stay up late because of electricity, my various vices (caffeine, alcohol, spectacularly good television, etc), a small red-headed girl and more.

Our energy changes with the seasons, with the moon, with the sun.

The night-time spirits are, really, a sign I am not rested. A sign that I am not looked after. A sign that I am not sovereign, as Jordan Hall might call it.

And, they are a part of me. So, welcome, little spirits, to my world.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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