Creature of the night

I've been getting up by at least 7 AM most days for.....many months. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience, because I like the morning. Birds sing, the world feels fresh and new, and the whole day is ahead of me. I'm too much of an optimistic, "the world is my playground" type of person to not like the morning. But I am not a morning person.

I was reminded of that today. Having no immediate responsibilities to get me out of bed, I didn't get up until 10:30. And I didn't even really want to get up then, but I was tired of laying in bed. I have a need to be busy, even if my busyness isn't accomplishing anything important, but I do prefer to accomplish something important. So when I got up I started looking for something to do, and there were plenty of things to be found. The only problem was I didn't feel like doing anything. At all.

It was kinda weird at first, because I've been jumping up and attacking every day for a good long while. I can be a convincing morning person. So good that I apparently convinced myself. Over the past several months, if I was ever talking about it with someone, I would still say that I wasn't a morning person, but with getting up early like I did and being so exhausted every day that I rarely stayed up late, they were kinda empty words. There wasn't much conviction behind them.

So I was kinda thrown off for a minute, then I was like, "Wait a second...this is the way I've been most of my life. This is not unusual. What I've been doing over the past year of school is what is unusual." I just lost sight of that somewhere along the way.

So I just decided to not get all wound up about it, and just find something calm and quiet to do that didn't take much effort, and if I ended up being lazy all day, so be it. And that's what I did. Then, by about 5:30, as the afternoon was ending and the evening was coming, I suddenly felt ready to tackle the million and one things that I did not want to do that morning. And it's about 11 PM now and I feel more energized than I did all day. I remember this feeling.

I am such a night owl, much like I am such an introvert. The biggest difference is that I'm good at pretending like I'm a morning person, but I'm not very good at pretending to be extroverted. That requires more acting skills than I currently possess. But as far as where my energy comes from, it comes when I'm alone, particularly at night.

And this getting up early business was starting to wear on me. I did okay during the fall semester, meaning that I didn't threaten to fall asleep in class much. But this most recent semester was a different story. Even though I was sleeping all night, at least 7 hours, usually more, it was very common for me to get to the point that I couldn't hold my eyes open. And that makes me feel so bad. First of all, I miss important information when I'm drifting off to dreamland, and second of all, my professors deserve the basic respect of me staying awake and at least looking like I care what they have to say. (I fear that sentence seems to imply that I don't care what my professors have to say, but I do. I'm just saying, it's much more encouraging for them for their students, if they're not interested, to act like it. It's a big morale booster.) On top of that, I was falling asleep at home in the middle of the afternoon all the time. I did post a blog a while ago talking about some medication I was taking that was knocking me out every day, and once I quit taking that, I stopped falling asleep as much, but it was still common for me to nap. I've never been a napper. I quite dislike naps, truthfully.

So, for my sake, - physically, mentally, emotionally - it's about time for me to have a break from acting like a morning person, and get back to being up with the bats. Even when I don't get much sleep, I do much better that way. I have a feeling that every day this summer is going to be like today, except for Sundays, the days when I'm at church camp, and during the big get-together of downhere fans in July. On those days, I will be happy to get up early.

But for now, it's about 11:30 and I have stuff to do. I'm so happy that my room is cut off from the rest of the house and the stuff I do in middle of the night won't bother anyone else. It's a night owl's dream. :-)