Before Dawn

Since dying three and a half years ago, I’ve become a total morning person. Not by choice. Not by discipline. By some kind of cosmic rewiring.

I wake up around 3 a.m.—sometimes earlier, sometimes later, but I’m always up by five. Three is the norm. Three is my magic hour.

It’s an incredible time of day. The world and its billions of human inhabitants are asleep, and they’ve finally shut the fuck up. There’s a beautiful silence that drapes the land like a soft blanket nobody else remembers exists.

Fucking people are fucking noisy, it turns out.

I wake with fire in my soul and my hands already itching to create. I reach for my Surface, start softly clanking away, letting my thoughts spill onto the screen before the sun even considers rising. Eventually a theme emerges, and I follow it. Some mornings it becomes a blog post. Sometimes a short story. Sometimes it cracks open a door to a new book. Other times it sends me back into a current project with renewed obsession.

But in the peace of the night—during that deep, incredible tranquility—I keep my own mouth shut and let the moment inspire me. I listen. I write. I breathe.

Before my cardiac arrests, I was a drinker. A heavy one. I suspect that’s what made me a night owl—chemical means of slowly altering my human brain. Alcohol does a whole suite of fucked-up things to the body, but I didn’t understand the extent of it until I quit. It is wild, absolutely wild, that we have built an entire social structure around consuming a mind-altering poison.

If coworkers want to hang out? Drinks.
Going on a date? Meet for drinks.
Backyard barbecue? Bring drinks.
Celebration? Drinks.
Commiseration? Drinks.

We drink because we’re nervous around each other. We drink because we don’t have the courage to say we’re in love. We drink because we want to “unwind,” because stress is hard and life is harder, and alcohol promises to take the edge off.

But alcohol doesn’t take the edge off. It sharpens it. It amplifies stress. It clouds the mind and corrodes the body. It mutates sleep into something broken and misshapen.

We drink because we’re anxious. We’re anxious because we’ve been mocked, bullied, humiliated, or shut down since childhood. And that anxiety soaks into every social moment of our adult lives. So we fucking drink.

It’s a travesty. A socially sanctioned self-poisoning. A cultural crutch nobody questions.

I did it for decades. The Navy? Sailors drink—aggressively. Factories? Drinkers everywhere. Everywhere I turned, alcohol was the glue binding people together… and the acid dissolving them from the inside.

There are very few people in this life who don’t drink, and those who admit it are often shamed for it. It’s fucking nuts. It’s fucking awful. Nobody is allowed to be clear-headed anymore.

But since I quit drinking—and smoking—my mind has been blossoming, opening up in ways I didn't believe were possible. I could not, absolutely could not, be writing these books if I were still pulling a fog down over my eyes every night. I couldn’t chase words, couldn’t capture the ones that float in the dark, if I were still dragging myself to bed drunk at 2 a.m. and waking up half-human.

Sobriety didn’t calm me down. It set me on fire.

So this morning, I’m grateful for the peace that hangs in the air after the bars close. Grateful for the silence. Grateful that I quit poisoning myself long enough to hear my own thoughts again. Grateful that I can do the work I’m here to do. The work that needs doing. The work that will leave my mark on this world.