I was never a morning person, until a few months ago, when I started waking up at 3 a.m. for absolutely no reason. Not that I have any alarms on, I wouldn’t dare because those apple alarms are seriously upsetting no matter how good it sounds while picking one.
At first, it made me angry. Sleep leaves me completely the moment my eyelids peel open, completely. Once I’m awake, that’s it. No matter how hard I try, sleep refuses to come back. I lie there, annoyed at my own consciousness, listening to the quiet.
Mr. Bean usually works like a sleep pill for me after a long day. It’s my go-to when I want to drift off. But it does nothing during those early-hour awakenings, when the world is still asleep and I’m not supposed to be conscious yet.
I think I trained my body into this routine. There was a period when I had to wake up around that time to read for school. I enabled alarms, dragged myself out of bed, and counted down the days until I could stop. When that phase ended, I disabled every alarm with relief but my body never forgot. Painfully, it adjusted. Now, even without permission, it wakes me. And when I jolt awake, the first thing I do is reach for my phone. The first app I open is TikTok. That app is dangerously addictive. And I’m constantly trying to break free, hoping that one day I’ll come out of this a warrior. For now, I keep losing small battles.
I tried using Screen Time, tweaking the settings, setting limits but somehow it never logs me out when the time is up. Either I’m missing something, or the app just doesn’t care enough to save me from myself.
What I hate most about that hour is the silence. Sometimes it’s peaceful. Sometimes it’s dreadful. And then there’s the cold, ugh, the cold. I rarely draw my curtains before bed, so when I wake suddenly, a gust of cold wind sneaks in, brushing my skin and filling me with this strange mix of discomfort and fear.
I want to get over this TikTok addiction so I can enjoy reading again. Real reading. Maybe I need to return to hard copies. Perhaps when I remember the ridiculous but somehow worth-it amount I spent on a book, I’ll cherish it more. Maybe I’ll choose pages over watching strangers do dangerous challenges, over hating the fact that I’m living vicariously through their screens.
And then, because TikTok never lets you rest, I found out that Kristy Sarah and Desmond have split. His new partner is everywhere on my FYP, talking endlessly. She pisses me off ngl. Years of shared life, investments and memories, all gone. What hurts most is knowing that she wanted to make it work, and he was already done. That scares me deeply.
They were the last thread holding my belief that real love existed, that two people could love each other for years and not fall out of it. Now they’re done, and he’s moved on so quickly that my heart aches in a way I didn’t expect. My belief in marriage, in lasting love, has dropped to a fragile two out of ten.
Okay I’m done rambling! Whew.