Blacklight Moments

You can hide ‘neath the covers and study your pain . . .
-Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road

I had the kind of week this week where I realized that they don't have a word for a bad light-bulb moment. That moment where something clicks but your first reaction is oh fuck. An example: a design for a website that I’m building, when I realize that the way I currently have it designed is going to be annoyingly difficult to use on mobile screens.

I think I’ll call them blacklight moments.

One thing I noticed though. Most of the blacklight moments I experienced this week were on one particular morning. I was lying in bed, sheet pulled over my head. The alarm had gone off. Ten minutes ago, then twenty. Twenty-five. All kinds of negative thoughts swirling around.

It's funny how negative thoughts demand you to stop and obsess over them. The effort required to brush aside those early morning scaries is sometimes the most difficult lift of the day. But there’s a difference between being horizontal in bed worried about a problem, and sitting down at the workstation to figure out a solution.

Fears fester in the dark. Very few withstand the light of sustained effort.