A Brooklyn writer's 'funny relationship' with the persistent blinking light

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - For Rachel Sherman, the light outside her window took on human-like traits.

"I felt like he was really taunting me," she said of the flood light mounted to an adjacent apartment building. 

It was a light that felt hell-bent on making her life—most notably the sleep portion of her life—miserable.  That’s because it wasn’t a normal light—this one was blinking, 24 hours a day. It was positioned directly outside her bedroom window.

When it all began a few months back, the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, resident, and freelance writer had recently moved into her apartment and didn’t have curtains at the time—just blankets tacked to a wall.

She assumed the bulb would die or that someone, surely, would fix it. But days and then weeks went by.

"It kept going, and so I named the light and I named him Blinky," Sherman said. "Because he was blinking incessantly."

But if giving it a cute name and developing a pseudo-relationship with the light makes you think she shrugged it off with a laugh, think again.

"Oh no, I was bothered," she said. "I’m sort of a bad sleeper as is."

She tried the city’s 311 hotline. Her landlord offered to tape black garbage bags to the window. She relied on a sleep mask.

When she began documenting her saga on Instagram, friends started making suggestions, the most common being blackout curtains.

They decided against that. Her boyfriend did play a role, though. He found contact info for the building’s property manager and owner, and after several attempts—27 days after Blinky began, well, blinking-- she finally got in touch.

But oddly enough, a part of her now misses Blinky, as she wrote about in an op-ed for Hellgate NYC.

Before it had been obliterated, it was a distraction from the world’s problems.

"It was like an object that could take all of my frustration," Sherman said. "There was just sort of like a brief time where Blinky was the thing taking up the most space in my brain, and it became this sort of fixation and the thing to laugh about."

"Everyone could empathize with their just being like something that's driving you crazy while you're trying to go to sleep," Sherman said.

But sleep is, thankfully, something she is getting once again.  And if you’re wondering, she has since put up real curtains—but she still opted against blackout curtains.

 "They’re kind of ugly," she said with a laugh.