My brain rewrote the rules of day and night as an attempt to protect me from bad decisions

By Jayne Millerton

I felt like a vampire, only in reverse.

I couldn’t go out at night. The darkness made me weak and vulnerable. After I got arrested, the paranoia had settled in and hardened. I was convinced the police or bad peoplecoming for me. They were out at night, and I was afraid of making a mistake.

So I stayed inside after sunset. I told people that I served the light, and was weakened by the night. I was also scared of becoming a wild creature at night, like a werewolf.

It was an obsession with the sun that bordered on religious. I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m describing what actually happened in my mind during that period.

The sun was the giver of all life. The sun was protection. The sun was truth. The sun was everything that mattered.

I watched almost every sunrise and sunset. Not casually. Deliberately. Intentionally. Like these were appointments I couldn’t miss, rituals I had to perform. I needed to see the light come, and I needed to see the light leave, they were sacred.

This sounds crazy when I write it out, but it took months to recover from. In the moment, it made perfect sense, it was logical. The sun was powerful. The darkness was dangerous.

I also became obsessed with candles too. I had them lit constantly. The house was full of small flames. I’d light them, watch them burn, feel reassured by their presence. Fire was another kind of light, another way to push back the darkness.

At the time I was chain smoking. The glow of cigarettes, the ritual of lighting them, the way they created a small orbit of light around my hand, it felt important.

What I understand now is that these things can be common in mania. The magical thinking, the symbolic systems, the rituals. They’re not signs of supernatural connection. They’re signs that your brain’s reality-checking system has gone offline, and you’re generating narratives to make sense then, but don’t have any basis in external reality.