Location Taken: Columbia, Maryland
Time Taken: March 2007
Through a variety of circumstances, I happened to be driving at 7 this morning, heading home to get some sleep. It was just getting light out, the world was softly lit, the air was nice and crisp.
I love that time of day. All the pollution and noise of the day has faded away overnight, and the gentle light is gorgeous. The trees are painted in muted greens, the birds are just starting to sing, and the traffic around my old high school is really heavy because the school buses are dropping off the students now…
Ok, that last one doesn’t fit the tableau right. It’s also why I hated mornings for many years. I was seeing them from the wrong side.
I was born a night owl. By nature, I would never see the early morning, because that is the “right” time for me to sleep. This was fine until I hit middle school years and went from being home-schooled and able to sleep in to my natural waking time of 10 or so to having to get up at seven grumble grumble in the morning to get to classes at 8:30. And High School started even earlier, at 7:30. And my bus came at 7:00. Which meant I had to get up at six grumble grumble instead…
I usually missed the bus.
And Dad had a really hard time getting me up in the morning. He even occasionally had to pour a cup of cold water over my sleeping head to shock me awake. But my natural rhythms did NOT want to wake up 4 hours earlier than they wanted me to. And I kept having to do so, and slowly I adjusted some, but not in a good way, and certainly not in a happy way.
I’m pretty sure that’s what broke my circadian rhythm. Being forced to wake up far too early made my rhythm complain and strain and finally it just threw in the towel and said “Fine! I’m not messing with you anymore! Heck, I’ll even make your life more challenging!”
My current rhythm isn’t a rhythm. I do not naturally fall asleep and wake up at the same time every day. Instead it shifts, usually slowly, a few minutes one way or another each day, but occasionally I have “reset” days where either I get really tired in the middle of the day and fall asleep really early or I just can’t fall asleep at all for hours and hours after the time I fell asleep the previous day. And it sticks. That’ll be my new rhythm for the next week or so, until I have another reset.
This makes committing to any schedule long term difficult. Especially since I’m allergic to caffeine (I get really nasty headaches from it), and thus don’t have the normal morning pick-me-up option available to me. I’ve trained myself to be able to get up and be functional on very little sleep, but the training actually made my inability to fall asleep if I’m not tired enough even worse.
Heck, even simple schedules are tough. I’m currently working at the Renn Fest two days a week, which involves getting up at 8 in the morning. I fell asleep at that time today. Tomorrow will be really fun, since I’ll have to work during the hours my rhythm’s claiming I should sleep…
It does seem a little ironic that what prepped me for being able to function in the adult world (high school) is also what made it impossible for me to function as expected in the adult world. I’m not able to commit to a standard job because either I’ll keep running more and more sleep deprived and go crazy or I’ll try my hardest to keep my sleep schedule constant and go crazy as the strain from that builds up.
Why do schools still have such early start times? There’s been study after study that show that later start times are much better for teenagers, improving both academic performance and behavior issues. Is it really too much to ask for, the slight inconvenience on parents of shifting the times later, in return for smarter and happier kids?
And maybe it would prevent night owls like me from breaking our rhythms.
