At 36 I entered my Little Villain Era.
A short intense period where I returned temporarily to a past self, with an unhealthy obsession with revenge. It was my most secret pleasure. Not revenge-revenge which, given some of the people in my past, might actually have made sense. Bedtime revenge.
Specifically, revenge bedtime procrastination.
Every night, instead of going to bed and sleeping, and actually looking after my body, I’d stay up too late reading or watching TV. There was a lot of crafting. Online shopping. ANYTHING that let me put off tomorrow.
It wasn’t that I hated everything about what tomorrow was bringing. I loved working on my PhD and adored my kids. I just hated the mind-numbing repetitiveness of balancing little people, work and housework. Our marriage was in a hard phase too and I hated that tomorrow always came before I’d had time to just be me. I needed time to shake off the stress of what often felt like captivity.
Bedtime always came back around before I’d had time to rest and recharge in all the other ways I needed, that felt more important to me than sleep.
It always came before I was ready for it.
Since childhood, I’d made bedtime into a punishment in my mind, so whenever life felt hard, I wasn’t willing to go to bed until I HAD to go. Until I’d broken through into real exhaustion, felt a little bit sick and was ready to just collapse in a heap. Every day was an endurance challenge: I was pushing myself to make my days longer just like my personal trainer pushed me during workouts.
I didn’t realise that it was costing me:
- Patience;
- Productivity;
- Real self-love;
- Safety in my body;
- The relationships I really wanted; and
- Being fully connected to my intuition.
Much of that I’m sure came from the lack of sleep. But the lack of sleep itself and parts of all of the above, came from not being fully in my truth. I was revenge bedtime procrastinating because I didn’t want to wake up each day and not be ME.
I didn’t want to be a captive in my own life, and hadn’t bought into my own disempowerment for years and years. Yet here I was, waking up every day and choosing a belief that didn’t serve me at all – the belief I couldn’t change things.
The minute I realised all of this, my mind was blown! The thing I was seeking every night once everyone had gone to bed was ME. I didn’t want to go to bed at night once I found her again, because in the morning I would have to wake up and she’d be gone!
Looking back over my life, I could see every stage where I’d lived this pattern was the same. I loved who I was, when my “life” went to sleep and I got to play and just be me. Revenge bedtime procrastination showed up when my “life” felt like someone else’s life. Living someone else’s dream. Or living a nightmare. At it’s worst (right before I broke down, to break through) was when I lived in Spain. There I just skipped every day entirely and lived in the dark hours, salsa dancing the nights away with sexy strangers and completely utterly avoiding the reality where I was going through a horrible end to a horrible marriage.
How had it happened?
How had this disconnect slipped back in, ten years later? Into a life that was supposed to by my dream life? It happened little by little. Until one day, I finally realised that the life I thought I’d love, I was supposed to love, that I even had loved, was feeling so out of alignment I was stealing hours every night just to feel like me.
After sitting with it a bit (at night, obvs) I realised that the issue was one of belief in change. In the days, I felt like Cinderella doing the housework. At night, I played Cinderella at the ball, watching romantic movies or crafting beautiful things. It was more than just “I get to be me for a few hours” before the clock strikes twelve. Deep down, I was fantasising about a rescuer. There was a part of me that felt relief in those fantasy worlds because I so wanted a rescuer. A handsome prince or a warrior princess that would find me and sweep me off my feet, so that one day I would be lifted out of the world where I only got to play at being me for a couple of hours a night and I would be free to become her.
The answer was clear, but not easy. Instead of revenge bedtime procrastinating and hoping for a rescuer, I needed to fix this myself!
I started going to bed early and getting up early. First thing, before anything else, I worked on my goals and vision. Some days I wrote 10k words in a day. Even if the housework wasn’t done, I didn’t care. I worked on what mattered most to change our lives. I followed whatever nudges came my way.
Pretty soon, I passed my PhD without corrections and we decided to homeschool. I had an amazing time being with the kids, turning our days into adventures. Our marriage entered a blossoming phase. Meribelle was conceived and I followed the nudges all the way to this business.
I built the business 7 months pregnant with Meribelle. Bu the time she was 7 months old, Duncan left his 9-5pm. And I did it by putting my dream first and working on it every naptime, no matter what. It wasn’t about the exact strategy I used. Every platform can work, every kind of marketing can work, every kind of offer can work… It was that I did it in a way where I get to be ME now, all day every day. I don’t have to revenge bedtime procrastinate, because today I am aligned and tomorrow I will be aligned too.
If I ever wake up and I’m not aligned anymore, I know I can make amazing positive changes. I’m not stuck and neither are you. There are always, always changes you can make.
I did have a little blip on this, during the lock-downs. And guess what, just like the Little Ice Age, another Little Villain Era showed up. I revenge bedtime procrastinated AGAIN for a few weeks. This time, it was because there were new parts of me ready to come out of the shadows. Parts who had been in captivity for a long time and at last, were ready to integrate into “me” again. Whilst they writhed under the surface, that exact same feeling came up again, of being me only in the short while before bedtime.
Again, I reflected (this time in the morning) and I realised it had always been this way. That this feeling always comes when I’m changing and growing. When this happens, it feels like the situation is somehow objectively worse all of a sudden and it makes you feel insecure and less than. Things aren’t breaking down, you’re breaking through. It’s your rising awareness of your own needs and where you’re still not meeting them that creates the inner conflict and discomfort.
Having walked through this with so many clients now, I know this to be true: if you’re revenge bedtime procrastinating, you’re trying to tell yourself something, and that message matters. We work through those messages together, but we also observe 12 kinds of rest (sleep is only one of them), so that even when you do commit a little bit of bedtime procrastination, you stay in expansion, with 11 other ways to replenish yourself.
xoxo,
Dr. Morgana
