I talked to people who painted a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude; of relief, of escape…
Author not known
It’s after 4 am as I’m writing the beginning of this personal essay, having been up all night as is my custom. I’ll finally head to bed soon, but I’m not sleepy enough yet.
I’ve started enjoying a cup of coffee after supper around midnight which makes me more alert, even though I don’t need it to stay awake. Being awake all night is normal for me. I’ve had this routine for years. It started in ernest when I had to be up at all hours of the night during the years I was taking care my mother when I was her main caregiver. We never had any home-aides at night. It was just me.
But going back years earlier when I was working I’d often be up on the computer until 3 am or later writing and chatting, and get up at 7 to be at work by 8:30. In those years 2000-2017 I could function fine on 4-5 hours of sleep. I don’t think I could do that now. Also, when I was much younger, I was always up with a book or magazine until 1 am or so. I guess you could say I’ve always been a night owl.
Recently, I took the 16 Personalities Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test (MBTI), and the result was that I was an INFP-A. Pretty accurate, but I wonder what it would be if I took it again two weeks from now. This test always makes me feel like I am more well-adjusted and “normal” than I really am.
I’ve only done the test a couple of times previously and found the results somewhat comforting, but only partially useful.
The INFP personality type is one of the 16 types identified by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The acronym stands for:
• I – Introversion
• N – Intuition
• F – Feeling
• P – Perceiving
According to a description from the Internet, “INFPs are often called “The Mediator” or “The Idealist.” They are introspective, imaginative, deeply reflective people who strive to live in alignment with their values and ideals. They tend to seek meaning and authenticity in everything they do, often guided by a strong inner moral compass.”
I am one of those introverts who love staying up all night because there’s no sense of having to be anywhere or do anything in particular, with or without people. It’s very quiet. I can do my deepest thinking and writing, and I can stave off the madness of the outside world for many blissful hours. As a lifelong single person, this is much easier for me than it would be for a more “normal” individual who, say, lost a spouse and is retired, and suddenly is living alone. I can’t imagine what a difficult adjustment that would be.
Being sick with Covid for the first time recently shook my “alone-against-the-world” foundations, and prompted thoughts about how none of us, except for true hermits and solitaries, are really that independent of others. I could for the first time know, at least to some degree, what others had already suffered through with this dreadful virus. When you are sick with Covid, you paradoxically feel more isolation than you perhaps ever had before, but at the same time more connection to others through your own dread of mortality and need for comfort and reassurance.
While I am a true “loner” and don’t seek out others and keep to myself, if my brother and his wife were not here in the area (I have Sunday dinner with them weekly), I would consider moving where they relocate, or move to Seattle to be near my sister and her family. I couldn’t take not being near what little family I have, as much as I love Charleston. I am very close to my sister, the youngest of the three of us.
I’ve had a lot of sadness living as a loner who nevertheless has always had a highly gregarious and extroverted side. Without ever having an immediate family of my own, I compensated over a lifetime by throwing myself into whatever job or career came my way. No grand plans for anything. I worked really hard. I was enthusiastic and idealistic, even as I approached the end of my working life in 2017. I made really good work friends. When I once lost a job that I had sunk all my career hopes in, as well as the friends from that job, I was devastated, and this led to months of suffering with major depression.
But today depression is in the past and rarely ever on display, in part because I’ve taken an antidepressant for years now. I want to believe this because it’s too late to turn back now. I could quit the med, but I’m afraid to do that, frankly. I told someone the other day that perhaps I am now my “medicated self,” and that this is what has molded my late-life identity and concept of personhood. I don’t get intensely sad or lonely anymore. This could also be because of my age and having lived a long life, for a man, anyway. I’m 74.
The spiritual, psychological and physical fortresses we construct over a lifetime of knowing the good things in life, coupled with surviving and coping with life’s grief, sadness and setbacks, makes us more capable of enduring and surmounting the anguish and fears that come with being alive, especially when we are getting old. In the middle of the night, or earlier, the peace and quiet make me stronger and more hopeful than I am in the glare of day.
Generally, when you are depressed and lonely, you want to sleep. The night offers escape in deep sleep and dreams. Normally, it would seem crazy to me to literally and willingly stay up all night. You’d only do that if you were tormented by insomnia.
So I sleep during the day. Scars from past horrendous experiences haunt my dreams, and I often have sudden flashbacks to the most awful times, but I sleep well enough because I accomplish so much during the dark hours. My dreams lately have been full of high strangeness, weirdly confrontational outbursts and speaking up for myself. Last night I dreamed I had gotten lost and was trying to return home from an unknown place that was at the same time quite familiar. Or maybe that was the other night. It’s a recurring dream. Often co-workers I disliked appear in my dreams on a fairly regular basis, but also those I most often talked to and got along with.
By 4 or 5 am I am usually becoming too tired not to be able to fall asleep fairly quickly. It no longer seems odd or unusual to have my breakfast and coffee at 2 or 3 in the afternoon.
Being an introvert doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy people when I am in their company. But never groups. As the social critic and comedian George Carlin once said, “I love people as I meet them one by one. People are are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot when there are five of them or 10 or even groups as small as two, they begin to change. They sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group.”
Fortunately, I’ve had a number of good friends over the years, all acquired in jobs that have given me a great sense of accomplishment in helping others and serving the public, such as my work as a librarian for two decades, for example, or my journalism career before that, the brief time in the mid 70s when I worked in the field of developmental disabilities and in the early 80s when was an English teacher. I’ve done a lot.
I guess in a way, I’m not as different from others as I imagine. I think most people are loners or want solitude more than they admit. At the deepest level, we are all basically alone.
So the nocturnal life suits me very well in retirement. I can write whenever I want, and immerse myself in my photography on a daily basis and work on my photo books and projects in the earliest hours of the morning.
The late night and early mornings from 11 pm until until about 4 am or later, are the perfect time for indulging my aloneness, while not feeling lonely. It seems like the most natural and peaceful form of solitude. It’s much easier in the harsh light of day to see how this lifestyle is not the healthiest for most people, but for me, it works. It’s hard to imagine anything else.
Basically, I have always been an introvert, ever since adolescence and adulthood. I had a much more normal childhood in comparison, at least as I look back. But now, in old age as a nocturnal person, I feel set apart from others. But that’s the price I pay for how I have chosen to live.
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