It Helps To Know You're Awake in Your Pajamas Too

I woke up the other morning much too early in the dark. I instantly did what I do when I wake too early — feel a nameless feeling well up inside me. It’s a mix of dread, frustration, and dismay — a sort of despair mixed with heated objection. It’s subtle, but it’s there in my torso where there should be sleep.

I lay there feeling the feelings, peeking out from under the blankets, noting no hint of daylight on the other side of my drawn curtains, when it hit me.

I wasn’t the only one awake at that moment.

I wasn’t thinking about the folks across the planet in work clothes in front of their computers, talking to customers, or at the kitchen sink. I was thinking about all the people who, just like me, were wide awake under their own blankets in my own time zone dotting the map.

Different fabric, same pajamas

This was an odd and wonderful thought to have, and it would have drifted into the pile of forgotten thoughts had I not expanded on the idea and fleshed it out. Once I realized there were others who joined me right then in unfortunate wakefulness, I went further and imagined them specifically.

There was a woman down the street just like me, eyes popped open wide in this same pesky misfortune. She had beige sheets on her bed and a mouthguard in her mouth like the mouthguard in mine, but her pajamas were flannel. Both our husbands were snoring like a flapping flag in the wind.

There was a fellow two towns over who was laying on his side, face scrunched into the pillow, an irked look on his face. His pajama pants had puppies all over them and his shirt was the same T-shirt he’d worn the day prior. He was already contemplating getting out of bed, unlike me, which made him courageous in my mind. I admired him already.

Then there was the couple who were on their phones, having given in to the premature waking monster, and one of them was asking the other if they’d gotten the pangram on the Spelling Bee game.

By putting faces and pajamas onto a shapeless commonality, suddenly my unsettled feelings shifted to acceptance — and this surprised me. What I was experiencing wasn’t a go-it-alone situation, a unique-to-me struggle. It was shared by many others — not in the future, not in the past, but precisely alongside me. Perhaps because insomnia or early waking happens in the dark when everyone else is asleep, I assume I’m alone in the struggle. But I’m not.

From numbers to tangibles

There are other struggles I share with other folks — not just sometimes or in the future with shapeless people, but on this very day with folks who hide bars of chocolate from their sweet tooth spouses, have a bum right knee, and have more socks than they need — just like me. I don’t share my difficulties with statistics. I share them with tangible human beings who are nearly identical to me genetically except for very few differences.

What about sadness, mourning, or depression? What about worry, fear, or anxiety? We know these are struggles shared by others all over the world, yet it’s a seamless part of suffering that we think we’re the only one in the world doing it at this moment with these circumstances and these things at stake. Shouldering a burden can so easily be a practice of turning inward to a place where there is a solitary person trudging up the mountain.

This isn’t to say these emotions — these physiological responses — are not valid or aren’t something to be taken seriously. This is only to say that knowing we’re not alone in these matters can be a comfort in some measure. If we thought it through, we’d understand the feeling of fear or sadness in our body is also being felt by random strangers — or acquaintances and friends — in the near vicinity, and around the globe.

Somehow, for me, this puts the experience in a different perspective. It turns my emotive state into a human fact rather than a condition that seems so outlier.

What if

What would it be like to envision with specificity imaginary people who are struggling with “our” issues? What if we imagined the face, the accent, the language, the clothing? What if we imagined the jovial kidding this person does with their loved ones, but not in that moment, because in that moment they are struggling exactly like us.

How might that shift our experience? When we normalize our struggles, we remove one weighty feature from our burdens: aloneness. This can soften the hard edge of anguish. When a thunderstorm hits, we might not like the crashing sounds and the torrential downpour, but we know this is what happens sometimes in the sky.

I guess this means that when I start to feel a little hopeless, I can think of Peter. He’s the imaginary young man across the state who’s standing in his kitchen feeling inconsequential, too. He hopes his efforts in life will be worth it and he’s sipping his coffee just as I am at that exact moment, both of us looking out our windows.

It means I can imagine Joan who’s worried about the future in an open-ended sort of way. She thinks about this while she dumps muffin batter into muffin tins, just like me. We’re so similar, especially considering we’d both like to leave our Christmas lights up until June — because, light.

It means there’s you, friend, reading through this like I am, wondering what idea I’ll bring out and whether it’ll have us think on things a bit. We’re so similar, you and I, in many ways. It might help me to remember this. It might help the tough stuff seem like a small piece of a shared, humane whole.