The Witching Hour- Thoughts that arrive in the stillness before dawn, when sleep escapes me.
For those who have known me a long time, it will not come as a surprise that sleep has rarely come easy to me.
As a child, nights were filled with hypervigilance instead of rest.
My mother’s addiction meant I stayed awake listening to the sound of her moving through rooms, cleaning compulsively, music playing too loudly or for too long. When she was gone, I remained awake, suspended in thought and hyper attentiveness.
My nervous system adapted to instability, not in a hugely dramatic way, but in a quiet, internal one.
Deeply reflective. Acutely aware. Constantly tracking emotional undercurrents, shifts in energy, changes in tone.
This was not a personality trait, but a response to an environment that required vigilance. Neurodivergency likely amplified it.
Layered onto this was the complexity of secrecy. I learned early that telling the truth was unsafe, and so honest connection to self and others became fractured. I could not fully meet others where they were, nor pretend to be like other children, because my inner world was governed by realities that had no permission to exist outside the home.
Psychology now recognises that prolonged childhood stress, particularly when paired with secrecy, alters the nervous system’s baseline. What looks like introspection or withdrawal is often protection.
Through my teens and into early adulthood, nights and early mornings became hours of intrusion. Flashbacks. Looping memories. Self criticism. The signatures of what I now understand and have been diagnosed with as Complex PTSD.
Even when the trauma quietened and my environment became safer, my mind did not. I analysed interactions relentlessly.
Tone, ethics, behaviour, kindness, harm. The interrogation was humbling, but it lived alongside paralytic social anxiety, depression and fragile self worth.
What I did not realise then was that the very hour that once held fear would one day hold reverence.
The witching hour is the liminal space between night and morning and it no longer belongs solely to hypervigilance. It has become a place of depth, inquiry and awe.
Yes, my C-PTSD still surfaces, but it is far easier to decipher and work through and work with. Less from childhood now, more from the cumulative micro and macro traumas of recent years.
Still, the quality of the night has changed. It is no longer only a site of intrusion. It is also a site of emergence.
This is when my deepest thoughts crystallise and when experiences and memories start to integrate rather than attack.
Stepping outside beneath the stars at these hours brings a particular humility, a reminder that we are all floating on a rock, suspended in vastness, worrying ourselves into exhaustion over systems that rarely care for our inner lives.
Mystics have always known the importance of this time.
The witching hour no longer asks me to survive it.
I’ve come to see the sleepless nights not as a flaw to be fixed, but as a terrain to listen and explore.
Many of the things I write begin here.
From time to time, I’ll be sharing reflections written or thought about in the early hours between night and morning when thoughts surface.
I’m calling this series The Witching Hour. It’s a place for unfinished thoughts, insights, and the kinds of reflections that tend to arrive when the world has gone still.
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