petition to change my orientation
Since childhood, I’ve been prey to this life-wasting pattern:
I struggle to the surface of dream late in the morning, a corpse rising from the crypt. I scrape off graveyard soil, toil through fog waiting for a sign of conscious presence in my body. Through the day I slowly perk up. I retire when I must, when body crashes but mind keeps going, buzzing, elated and inspired. By next morning, it’s the same thing over again.
Rarely, I wake early and my day feels rich and full. But mostly it’s a wasteland.
Can I please be a morning person instead?
June 24th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I am a morning person, and trust me, it ain’t that great. At 5am I’m rarin’ to chat with somebody (anybody!) and all I get is groans and dirty looks from the drowsy sleepers in my life. Full of energy, I jump up and run around like a headless chicken for a few hours, doing everything on my to-do list and writing a new to-do list, before crashing at about 2pm. It’s all downhill from then on, after my brain turns off and my body must continue walking like a zombie through the remainder of the day and evening, until the sun sets and it’s finally a respectable time to retire.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thanks for the re-frame, morning grrl… it’s true. The bright side is, I have a lot of fun at parties and I get to stay up late.
Isn’t that every kid’s fantasy? To get to stay up late, and sleep in when I want? Here it is 11 pm and I’m on a roll.
Morning people get more done. Night people have more fun. Is that how it works? If so, I suppose I can roll with it
September 10th, 2007 at 12:31 am
And then there is the likes of me …
I have lived with insomnia for most of my adult life. I was going to say “suffered” with, but that isn’t always the case. Insomnia has been mostly an annoying state of sporadic wakefulness punctuated by equally annoying crashes of dizzying tiredness at inappropriate hours of the day. I have no particulur schedule of sleeping pattern. Generally if I have worked a full day I am ready to sleep shortly after I stop moving and pumping adrenaline. But I tend to sleep lightly and it takes very little to wake me. A closing cupboard door or a shard of light is all it takes. And once I am awake, that’s all there is for a number of hours. (NOW being a good example — 1:30 in the morning and I’m wide awake after only 2 1/2 hours of sleep.
This can all lead to feeling like a modern vampire, except that the timing isn’t dictated for me by sunlight or the call of the night. I can force myself to function when I’m sleepy if I really want to. That’s when I feel most like a vampire — the attempt to function in a mortal setting while feeling undead.
Having no specific schedule of rest means I may be doing my odd jobs while others are still sleeping, and trying to be quiet to preserve the “ordinary” schedule of their sleep. Or conversely, trying to sleep while the sounds of daytime activities buzz around me, imposing on my “normal” patterns. Of course, forced or comfortably functioning, I also sometimes manage to participate in the events of generally accepted timing — dinner parties, an evening of videos, card games. All calculated, naturally, to conceal the fangs of my vampiracy.