CHAPTER 4: NOT A TRAGEDY
3 AM looks different when you work in it.
Not the 3 AM of insomnia or late nights out.
The other kind.
The fluorescent kind.
The kind where you can smell the difference between fresh coffee and the pot that’s been sitting on the burner for three hours too long.
You always knew which one it was before you even rounded the corner.
For five years I worked the overnight shift in an ER.
11 PM to 7 AM.
And what I can tell you is this:
humanity looks different at that hour.
The polish is gone. The performance is gone. What’s left is just — people.
Arriving at the absolute edge of themselves.
People who had too much to drink and weren’t quiet about it.
People in psychiatric crisis — frightened, fragmented, saying things that didn’t connect in ways that broke your heart if you let it.
People in drug-induced psychosis who were somewhere else entirely — somewhere you couldn’t follow, somewhere you could only wait at the edge of and hope they found their way back.
Addiction. Fear. Loneliness dressed up as a minor complaint. Emergencies that weren’t emergencies. Emergencies that were.
And outside — usually near the side entrance or the loading dock — maintenance workers, security guards, the occasional respiratory therapist, and sometimes a nurse who’d just had the kind of shift that required five minutes of cold air and a cigarette before she could go back in.
This was before the hospital-wide bans.
Before smoking on property became a thing of the past.
Back when a cigarette break at 3 AM was sometimes the only honest moment in an entire shift.
Nobody was performing out there.
They were just breathing.
And alongside all of that — nurses, techs, doctors, janitors, security guards, and clerks quietly holding the whole thing together while carrying entire lives of their own outside those walls.
I was one of them.
Showing up. Doing the work. Looking fine.
But that building — that particular building — would mean more to my story than I could have known then.
More on that later.
What I learned on night shift took years to fully understand:
Most people are carrying more than they show.
And many of the people quietly holding society together are completely exhausted.
I didn’t learn that in a classroom.
I learned it at 4 AM under fluorescent lights next to someone who hadn’t slept in eighteen hours and was still somehow showing up.
I don’t want this book to become a tragedy.
But I also won’t pretend it wasn’t sometimes one.
What I want — what I’m reaching for here — is something more honest than either.
Because the truth is, my life has not only been pain.
It has also been people.
Ordinary, brilliant, invisible people that nobody would probably notice at first glance.
My dad had a GED.
Before injury took that from him, he worked as a machinist and a truck driver.
But he carried the kind of intelligence people trusted without being able to explain why.
Not performative intelligence.
Useful intelligence.
The kind where if something broke, failed, stalled, or needed figuring out — people naturally looked toward him.
That shaped me more than I realized at the time.
I’ve known writers and janitors. Professors and cashiers. Ministry leaders and recovering addicts. People running businesses from garages. People surviving on minimum wage while pretending they weren’t exhausted.
And some of the smartest observations about life I have ever heard did not come from credentialed rooms.
They came from smoke breaks. Break rooms. Parking lots after long shifts. Late night conversations between tired people trying to make rent and still laugh somehow.
I think for a long time I believed that to tell the truth I had to keep digging deeper into the wound.
But now I’m not sure that’s fully true.
Maybe truth also lives in the glimmers.
In the people who softened something in you.
In the one sentence said at the right moment that unknowingly changed your life forever.
So maybe this part of the book isn’t about pain alone.
Maybe it’s about people.
The ones who shaped me. The ones I loved. The ones I disappointed. The ones who disappointed me.
And eventually —
the relationship I had with myself through all of it.
Because honestly —
that one may have been the most unstable relationship of all.
For most of my life I kept trying to become someone.
More healed. More stable. More certain. More impressive.
And now?
I think I’m more interested in becoming or rather STAYING honest.
Not polished.
Not fixed.
Just honest.
