Is menopausal insomnia actually the witching hour of old?

I’m eating chocolates that Helen bought me for my birthday and drinking caffeinated tea at 2 am because I’m now fifty and I give myself permission to do what I want for the rest of forever. The fire alarm is beeping again in the middle of the night despite the batteries only being changed last week and I’m obviously certain it’s my mum’s way of saying she’s with me at my special birthday time. When I admitted defeat to the 2 am menopausal anxiety insomnia, I switched on my light and there was my pet woodlouse in the exact same place it was on my birthday day despite also making a visit on my clothes in the gym on my birthday. Either I’m going insane and were infested or she’s with me. Maybe one of those theories is more likely than the other and I’ll leave you the reader to judge.

Whatever is really happening all I know is I’m yet again wide awake at 2 am aged 50 and two days and I’m too short to pull out the batteries of my faulty fire alarm. The tall men in my house are sound asleep. I should start a wide-awake club for all the menopausal women out there to have a 2 am group chat. I wonder if our anxieties waking us from our slumber would be the same. Here is just a little selection of mine. I think I overstepped the mark with a client today and I’m worried about any fallout. I’m really worried about bills and how expensive everything has become. I’m desperately sad that that I’ll be empty nest again in a few days as my grown-up son leaves on Saturday. I’m now worried how I’ll do my work without any sleep and concerned it might trigger another 2-day migraine attack. Then randomly I’m suddenly thinking about all my favourite deceased pop stars from the 1980s and then I consider how really scary it feels to think about death of people I love. Courtesy of all the TV ads reminding me since I turned fifty, I give two minutes thought to how my own death will come but I’m not allowed to know when despite it being mine so I should get to know really so I can plan for it and be at peace with it. Reading back the list of worries I realise that a wide-awake club for menopausal women sharing all this stuff would likely send us all a bit over the edge and it’s therefore just another 2 am menopause anxiety bad idea!

So, my random 2 am thoughts turn to how I’m so fascinated by witches these days and how they, like other indigenous cultures have been almost but not quite exterminated during this recent paternalistic capitalist phase of humanity. The wonderful series about witches on BBC sounds seems to fall down on the side of magical behavioural patterns such as spells and rituals being in our DNA, almost inherited down through the female line generation to generation. Schizophrenia runs in my family and so I may be more comfortable than most with the idea of reality and illusion being the same thing, or at least equally powerful. This may or may not aid my openness to such things as visions and clairvoyancy. Demons were definitely real for my family member anyway. Had they had psychotic visions in the 1600s, would they have been burnt as a witch? I’ve benefitted from reiki, I am fully aware of my chakras, and which has tendency to get blocked (solar plexus, throat), I love to get my daily tarot card from the moonily app and say namaste after every yoga session. Is that enough for me to be considered a witch?

Because I’ve lived my entire life in uber secular materialistic anti spiritual England I’ve spent years removed from something that feels inherent within me especially as I get older. It’s more than alluded to in Channel Four’s wonderful the Change so I know I’m not alone. Admitting to feeling a little bit spiritual however still makes me feel ashamed. I’m just a silly gullible woman for believing in “all that woo woo shit.” My uber atheist friends would say that the spiritual and self-help industry preys on the vulnerable and disenfranchised and is full of narcissistic shysters. My inherent wisdom is telling me there is magic in all of us and that the patriarchal capitalist system has tried to eradicate it due to its powerful natures. After all, if we are empowered by magic and in tune with nature, then we won’t work long hours for the man will we? Is it OK to think that maybe both things are true?

Within the two camps of my spiritual and non-spiritual friends, I can’t help but notice a gender divide. What I think both my spiritual, wellbeing and self-help friends (all female) and my atheist, pro-western medicine and anti-self-help friends (mainly all male) can agree on is that women are definitely still disenfranchised whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. We still have very VERY little power. If we make it to fifty, we might just have a propensity to start investing in counselling, hypnotherapy, reiki, yoga and “alternative” belief systems simply to reclaim some agency over our lives and heal ourselves from the last toxic fifty years. Were finally starting to look after ourselves in ways that feel right for us.

If you think about it being a woman born in the 1970s, it’s a pretty unique experience and actually an utterly shambolic time to be a woman. At least previous generations of women during the capitalistic paternalistic period since the 1600s onwards were categorically told they had no place walking into boardrooms or gentlemen’s clubs. Owning land, having agency in how things were run, even the right to work and feed ourselves was taken away from us during the enclosure years from the 1600s onwards which is expertly written about in the book Trespass by Nick Hayes. Simultaneously you have the rise of industrialised capitalism and the burning of witches. Whilst obviously the suffragist and women’s rights movements have clawed back our rights to work and manage our own health and be involved in politics, it’s really only since the gen x generation that women have been expected by society in the west at least, to work in a practical day to day sense again, allegedly on an equal footing with men. With a few exceptions, Gen x women know only too well that the narrative that we could have it all and operate with the same power as men was a total and utter lie fed to us through our tellies, educational institutions and 1980s magazines. At least our grandmothers had morning elevenses with their neighbour Mrs Bray and afternoon tea with Mrs Liddle and an understanding of their place. That they could not have access to anything more than that, and therefore not be set up to fail like their granddaughters is in a way a better burden than the lie that you should “have it all” and therefore you should be more than what you are an be able to just do everything and ignore the fact that domestic and emotional work is actual work.

I saw a meme on the train back from London this evening. I love Instagram memes. For me they are like the psalms read out in church on a Sunday and I hope I don’t offend too many Christians with that comment, I think psalms are great. Maggie in this one said, “Why I prefer using the term exploitation over burnout: burnout makes it about worker feelings. Exploitation draws our attention to employer practices and policies which require structural change.” I think this sums up nicely the issue about the female “burn out” phenomenon. There are lots of excellent and many well-meaning life coaches fixing women when women aren’t the problem. The system is the problem. Yes, life coaches and counsellors do necessary work for burnt out and unconfident women, but it’s a sticking plaster on a bleeding corpse and potentially a bit gaslighty unless we recognise that the system is simply rigged against most women and marginalised groups. It reminds me a bit of the fashion mags of the eighties that kept telling me I should look like catwalk model even though my body didn’t manifest that way.

This Russell Brand shitshow is still getting me really angry. Walking around a business conference today the rigged system was clear in plain sight. The networking break outs were all full of men. The real business, by that I mean the multi-million-pound business being discussed on the table next to me still belonged to the white privately educated men whilst their exhibition stands were being “manned” by women and working class and BAME men. In the now removed interview on Diary of a CEO, Russell brand was starting to talk about how spiritual leaders take on female form by wearing long feminine clothes. He explored how we’ve been robbed in the west of our inherent magic by patriarchal capitalism. I was “Team Brand” on this point. But it looks as though he was the ultimate patriarchal capitalist shyster, wasn’t he? Great. You slay the beast, and it grows another head. Will this ever end? Will we finally now in this moment stop beatifying male shysters? In the many wasted minutes I’ve spent phone scrolling over the fallout of Russell Brand one of the angry men on Facebook said it was time to start burning witches again. So, the time to start burning witches again is when a few powerless women with zero capital and power may have just told the truth about a man with lots of capital and power? Amazing! Yes! Now is the exact time to burn the witches!! Like we’re all going around doing witchy stuff every day and not actually mopping up everyone’s shit and working our backsides off to have any time for our spell making duties. I wrote this blog in under an hour at 2 am after another impossible day in the world of capitalist patriarchy. In writing this blog, you could say I concocted something during the witching hour. Maybe the most radical thing a woman today can do is not to join a trade union or an activist group but simply to join am actual coven.

I don’t know if the faulty fire alarm or the woodlouse are signs from the afterlife, or simply part of the story of my own hormone and stress induced insomnia. I don’t know if there’s any link between the menopausal 2 am club and the witching hour of old. I don’t know if magic exists. But I do know that Helen is real and magical at the same time. Helen, despite having some very serious domestic issues to deal with and a family and job to hold down, found time to leave a card and a gift and chocolates on my door handle for my birthday two days ago. I don’t know about magic, but my friend Helen is 3D and real and IS magic and I bloody love her.

So, embrace your coven. Embrace your insomnia witching hour with chocolates and blog writing or whatever fills you with joy. We don’t need a male shyster to remind us that the system is rigged against us.

Step forward witches. Step forward.