The Three AM Test

It's coming for all of us.

When I was 19 years old, I survived a shooting. I won’t go into details, other than to say that I was very nearly killed, two of my friends were murdered, and my life thereafter was destroyed. I was already hanging by a thread – I had struggled mightily in school and was suffocating in the closet. The shooting made an already brutal situation many times worse.

While I was never formally diagnosed with PTSD from the shooting, I developed many of the symptoms through my early 20s, and the worst of it always happened at night.

Nightmares ravaged me. I would regularly wake up screaming. On two separate occasions, I had nightmares that someone was attacking me in my bedroom, and I tried to escape in my sleep by throwing myself out of my second-story window. I woke up each time when I was hanging halfway out, covered in shards of glass and splintered wood.

During the day, I was hyper-vigilant and terrified of the entire world. I felt like I was trapped behind glass, able to see and communicate with people but unable to emotionally connect with them.

In this isolation, I confronted all the nightmares, survivor’s guilt, and hopelessness alone. It feels impossible to describe the absolute loneliness of this period of my life. I frequently resorted to self-injury as a perverse method of getting through. I had no choice but to endure, to white-knuckle it.

My resources – my friendships, rituals, and habits of mind – failed what I like to call the Three AM test.

The 3 AM Test is this: are your resources sufficient to help you navigate the most brutal time of your life without harming yourself or others? It’s important to note that it is not you as an individual who passes or fails the Three AM test. You are only a suffering human being deserving of all love and compassion. We are examining the adequacy of your resources and skills, not your personhood.

I mean Three AM both literally and figuratively. It is those literal Three AMs when you are lying in bed awake devastated by shame, depression, grief, or fear. It is also symbolic of those seasons of our lives when we get sick, get fired, get burnt out, lose loved ones, or lose faith that there is anything worth living for at all.

Too many people have nothing, much like I had nothing. Not only did I lack the skills to build trust and vulnerability with other people who could care for me in those dark moments, I had zero skills to get me through the storm. I confronted the hurricane of loneliness and human violence utterly naked and alone.

There have been many Three AMs since. Loved ones have died, mental breakdowns have occurred, and suicidal ideation has plagued me. I’ve come out of the closet, lost communities, and struggled to find my bearings in life as an adult. This isn’t because I’m uniquely fucked up. It’s because I’m human. Life, for all humans, is brutal. Three AM will eventually come for all of us.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to pass the three AM test, and I’ve come up with a rudimentary list drawn from my own experience.

Friendship

I don’t mean Facebook friends, I don’t mean work acquaintances, and I don’t mean people you find marginally pleasant to be around. I mean friends to whom you can bare your soul with the assurance that they won’t walk away; I mean people who genuinely love you and want the best for you, and vice versa.

Friendship is the ultimate crisis fund. We save up money when times are good so that, when we are struck down by disease, job loss, or despair, we have a buffer between us and hell. Friendships are the same but on a much more existential level. Friendship is the safety net for the soul. Kahlil Gibran wrote of this essential dynamic of friendship in The Prophet:

And a youth said, Speak to us of Friendship.

And he answered, saying:

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

True friendship requires vulnerability, and I confess that I struggle in this regard. I rarely talk with my friends about the aftermath of the shooting because it still feels too deeply vulnerable. It feels humiliating and somehow shameful, and I’m as baffled at those feelings as you probably are at reading them. I still have that deeply engrained male horror of showing my darkest emotions. When I do talk about my darkest times, it’s almost always flippantly or as a joke. “Bro, I was so fucked up I threw myself out a window, it was insane.” I mask the pain with humor and a shrug.

Despite these blocks, I’m no longer alone. I have friends who incessantly push me to be courageous and confront my fears, who show up as a gentle, listening presence, and who meet me in my curiosity and strangeness.

Mentorship

Mentors are wise teachers who’ve walked the path before you and know the way.

When I was in my mid-20s, I started attending a 12-step program (CODA) because my life was in shambles. In the process, I found a sponsor – a country butch lesbian named Cindy who had beaten alcoholism. This woman became my sage, teaching me the most rudimentary skills for facing life unfiltered by compulsion or self-injury. She taught me mental habits for distress tolerance, how to talk to my partner about my feelings, and how to navigate basic conflicts in the workplace. These were all skills that I apparently needed to be taught. She was forthright, kind, and exactly the teacher I needed.

We aren’t rats. We don’t come out of the womb pre-loaded with essential skills for survival. Our skills for emotional and social survival must be taught, and I learned mine from Cindy. I didn’t know how to confront my emotions without hurting myself, how to tell a friend I needed help, or how to get up and go to work on time. I needed mentors like Cindy to help me.

Mentors can equip us with the wisdom (see below) to confront Three AM with courage. Cindy taught me how to de-escalate my own emotions to a manageable level and not take the present moment so personally. Crucially, I couldn’t learn how to do this on my own – I needed a guide to show me the way.

I know a lot of people sneer at the young men who look to figures like Jordan Peterson to tell them to clean their rooms. The truth is, though, that a lot of people need to be told to clean their room, both literally and figuratively, and lack the mentors to do that. There is no shame in that.

Ritual and Spiritual Practice

One of the most important insights I gleaned from my time in the Catholic Church is that we practice rituals – the rosary, Mass, and confession – during the good times so that we have something to ground us during the bad times. While I am now an agnostic atheist, I have retained this core insight from Roman Catholicism. I meditate daily when life is going well so that I have a routine to stabilize me when times are bad.

Regular rituals can be divided into two categories that overlap: grounding rituals and spiritual rituals. Grounding rituals can be religious (observing the Sabbath each week) or secular (reading a novel every night.) The key is to do them consistently so that, when Three AM comes, you have a scaffold that you can hold on to.

Spiritual rituals can also be secular or religious, but serve the purpose of self-transcendence. My daily meditation practice falls into this category, as does the Catholic Rosary, attending religious services, or occult rituals.

I recently had COVID for the first time, and it unleashed a sort of psychic hell. I lay in bed for a week besieged by depression and fever dreams. I had the ritual of my meditation practice to fall back on. I practiced non-dual awareness, noticing what it was like to suffer in the ways I was suffering.

This didn’t take away the pain, but it did transform it enough so that it hurt less. In his book Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright describes meditation as helping us experience “pain that doesn’t hurt.” Meditation removes the personalized sting.

Wisdom

By wisdom, I mean the habits and skills of mind that can be found in many of the great religious and philosophical traditions, from Buddhism to Stoicism. Wisdom is understanding that feelings are immaterial storm clouds that pass through the open sky of the mind. Wisdom is recognizing that being fully alive means embracing the entire spectrum of human experience – even the bad stuff. Wisdom is the hard-won knowledge of your limits and when you need to ask for help.

Wisdom is the product of friendship, spiritual discipline, and mentorship. Wisdom is what allows you, in turn, to be a friend and mentor to others.

Do your resources pass the Three AM test? I fear the answer for too many people is no. We are in a friendship recession, religious institutions that previously provided scaffolds of ritual are in steep decline, and social institutions that create the necessary context for mentorship are increasingly rare. Confronting the possibility that your resources don’t pass the Three AM test might be terrifying, but it is also necessary to take the steps required to live a fulfilling life.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.