Day 133: Sleep is for the sheep

Well, I fell asleep. Home from work, wanted to sit at my desk with a mug of Earl Grey, ambient music playing, and settle into some writing, not knowing where it would take me, go on an adventure, get done early and have the rest of the evening to relax. But then I fell asleep, and napped through until now.

I think I’m coming to see that the way I live is not healthy for me. Like, obviously. But specifically my sleeping patterns. Pretty much since being a teenager I’ve turned myself into a night owl, but I don’t think underneath I naturally am a night owl. Just by accident I've listened to a few podcasts recently that have discussed sleep, and they’ve all said that people fall into categories of when they should sleep. Some people thrive off going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 5am. Some people work better late at night, and should go to bed at 2am and get up at 10pm. We are not all the same, and there isn’t one perfect sleep schedule that suits us all.

I stay up ridiculously late, then sleep as long as I can the next day. Partly from working in bars for years, but I was doing it before then as well. I’m not naturally productive at night, but I can force myself to be. I’ve written many posts at 3am, eyes bloodshot, the house around me silent.

But as a child I’d wake up very early, 5 or 6 in the morning. I never had a problem getting up for school, I didn’t use an alarm and would rise quickly and get into the bathroom without internal strife. As a teenager I loved sleep, and would stay in bed all day if I could, but this wasn’t because I couldn’t get up, more just that it was so lovely being warm and safe under the covers.

But then I started drinking regularly, and at uni I had few 9am lectures, and I got into the habit of staying up later and later. There were plenty of drug-fuelled all-nighters, bleary days rising at the crack of dusk. I went through a period educating myself on classic films, reading Roger Ebert’s list of important movies, buying stacks of them on DVD from Play.com - and I’d watch them by myself with a joint and a bottle of bourbon, starting late in the evening, ploughing through a couple a night in a magical liquid realm where the edges of things blurred and the world was my own and Tartovsky and Scorsese showed me what cinema could do. It was like the mirror of my six-year-old self getting up at dawn to watch cartoons by himself.

... I want to write quickly here because it’s past midnight now and the point of this post was supposed to be that I’m going to try going to bed earlier and rising earlier and seeing if it makes a difference - but this sleep schedule seems to me indicative of a larger movement in my life: away from my natural tendencies and purposefully towards a crafted persona as someone edgier, cooler, less utterly lame, than I saw my younger self as being, looking back as a teenager.

And I know why. I was bullied for a long time in secondary school, for being wet, weak, nerdy, for being a mummy’s boy, for reading The Lord of the Rings and wearing Debenham’s own-brand clothes and being axiomatically, unfeasibly clueless.

And I think so much of what I did in my later teens and early twenties was an attempt to reforge myself as my peers (I felt) thought guys should be. I started skateboarding, listening to punk music, smoking weed, turning away from all responsibility. And I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was at least partially tied to that.

And, yeah, probably that is the story of every teenager ever. I guess what I’m thinking now is that I never really found my way through that. I never went too far in a few wrong directions, got lost, and then discovered an equilibrium and a place that I was comfortable being me. I’m still looking.

But then, maybe that’s also more common than I assume.

But anyway, I think much of what I’ve been doing recently has been reappraisal. Returning to long forgotten modes of being and reevaluating them now as an adult. I’ve been drinking all my adult life, drinking too much, and basing much of my identity around alcohol. To a lesser extent also with marijuana, other recreational drugs. So I’m experimenting with stopping completely. I spent so many years hiding my love of nerdy things, the less macho aspects of myself, hiding the things I thought people wouldn’t like. So now I’m trying to be more open about all that, even as it makes me itch with embarrassment. I never used to talk about the struggles with acne I’ve had since I was fifteen, so I’m forcing myself, slowly, to write about that.

And I think a good next step is to try going to bed early and getting up early, see if that works better for me. Just to be curious. 

Maybe I'll find with all these things that I was happy where I was (though I doubt that). Maybe I was made to drink beer and stay up all night, and be a weird mix of intellectual and stoner and dropout and pansy and nerd. Who knows? I sure as hell don’t. But it’s worth getting curious about it, I think, shaking it all up, seeing what happens.

So, yeah, all of which means: I'm going to bed right this second. Good night.