Day Brain vs. Night Brain

A zine for problematic Night Brains, plus thoughts on the book "Wintering" by Katherine May.

A few weeks ago, I posted a video of me reading this zine aloud on Instagram, and it must have struck a cord because it’s somehow gotten nearly 20K plays and hundreds of shares?! Apparently a lot of Night Brains are keeping people up at night!

Here are four ways my Night Brain keeps me up:

1. The Idea Machine — as soon as my head hits the pillow, my mind swarms with a bunch of mediocre, but occasionally excellent ideas that I absolutely have to write down because I can’t determine which kind of idea they are until morning, and what if it’s an excellent one?!

2. Endless Reruns — I run and rerun through conversations I had during the day and think about all the things I should have said instead, or I practice a conversation I’m worried about having the next day… over and over and over.

3. To-Do Lists — I am suddenly worried about a bunch of things I’m sure to forget tomorrow and start writing them down in my phone and email them to myself. I often wake up to several reminder emails from myself.

4. The Big Jerk — Occasionally my Night Brain is particularly cruel and decides to dwell on all my perceived failures whispering, “You’re failing at everything and you’ll never get to do or have what you really want in life because you don’t try hard enough and you don’t deserve it!”

Any of those sound familiar?! I hope not The Big Jerk one. That one’s the worst.

I recently finished reading “Wintering” by Katherine May. I tried to read it a year or two ago—sometime during the pandemic—but it didn’t draw me in amidst whatever other distractions (projects, books, feelings) I had going on at the time. But in the wake of losing my Dad, I sought this book out again because I was suspicious the timing was just right. While I was reading, I felt compelled to write down certain sentences and paragraphs, which for me means I’m really enjoying a book. For instance, the way May described her mind keeping her up night really stood out to me:

“In the dark, I am struck by a dyspeptic bout of conservatism. … I have squandered something, somehow, I am not sure what or when, but I despise myself for it. The precariousness of my life bites me hard. I can feel its teeth in my gut. I am nothing, I am no one, I have failed.”

Woah, I felt that! The teeth in the gut! I’ve been there. And then later she describes how she feels once she gets up:

“Now that I’m upright, my thoughts settle like flecks in a snow globe. Everything falls back into perspective.”

I love the visual of swirling thoughts gently falling back into place. What is it about night time that makes everything feel so fraught sometimes?!

Katherine May is a British author, and I enjoyed her writing style and word choices. For instance, I Googled to see if “swimming costume” was actually what they called a swimsuit in the UK, and yes, apparently that is a totally normal term for it. It evokes a Halloween-ish image for me, and I like to think of a beach filled with people wearing themed swimming suit costumes… Batman, a dinosaur, a ballerina, a werewolf, an astronaut, etc. Wouldn’t that be fantastic to see?!

May talked about a lot of concepts that I enjoyed, most of which had nothing to do with the occasional cruelty of Night Brains! I really enjoyed how she talked about cyclical time:

“…we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Give time, they grow again.”

For this book to resonate, I think the timing needs to be right based on what’s going on in your life. “Wintering” reads less like a self-help book and more like a memoir crafted along a string of personal essays, which I liked. I got the feeling that a good friend was talking to me, and I could extract insights from her experience versus being given actionable tips. Overall, I would fully recommend this book to people who are going through a difficult season of life.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me. In case you missed it, last week I wrote about being Devastated & Grateful this holiday season and launched a new paid tier of the newsletter: Print Club! The free version of this newsletter will stay exactly the same, but paid subscribers will also get access to download printable versions of zines or art prints each week. This week I’m sharing “Dear Day Brain” as a zine and a one-page comic!