One of the best/worst parts of staying home these past months is that time has lost all meaning. I quickly discovered that the only thing keeping my night owl tendencies in check was life outside the house, so once that life evaporated, I took it as permission to shed my last clinging remnants of "normalcy" and embrace my
Best Vampire Life.
And it was glorious.
At least for a while.
Nighttime is so peaceful, you guys. If you've never stayed up all night to write then I highly recommend it. There are no leaf blowers going, no phones ringing, no notifications clogging your screen. You can be alone with your thoughts and actually focus on a single thing at a time. So I leaned into the siren call of productivity and stayed up later and later, working all night and going to bed around dawn.
That schedule wasn't TOO bad, considering I usually stayed up 'til 3AM anyway, but there was a problem. I'd opened Pandora's box, y'all. I'd unleashed the beast. My internal clock was off the chain, drunk, and staggering around the living room in its underwear demanding we "KEEP THIS PARTY GOING
WOOOOOO"
So I stayed up later. And later.
I told myself this was actually a
good thing, because I was seeing the sunrise for the first time in decades. I'd open all the shades around 6:30 and watch the house slowly lighten with dancing rays of light, and listen to the nesting cardinals and mocking birds sing. It was so beautiful, so restful. The perfect way to end my day.
Once I was staying up 'til 7 or 8am, though, I realized I could get even MORE work done if I wrote the Facebook updates before going to bed. Except the CW post doesn't go up 'til 9AM.
So I stayed up past 9AM.
Once I was awake past 9AM I discovered more things I could do before going to bed: Now I could return phone calls and DMs, even chat with my early-bird friends who I usually never got to see.
I'll spare you the rest of this word journey, and skip to the part where I woke up to start my day at 11 o'clock... PM. By this point I never knew what day it was, because I'd wake up on a
Tuesday and go to bed on a Wednesday. I lived in the in-betweens, a hazy purgatory of days... and
it felt like it. To quote a famous scientist, I felt "so funky" 24/7: a little spacey, a lot disconnected, and I can only imagine what my poor cortisol levels were doing.
Sleeping through my online therapy session was a wake-up call... literally, since my therapist had to text John to ask where I was. (John was going to bed himself around dawn, so we'd
both forgotten what day it was.)
I tried reining in my hours a bit, but by this point my internal clock was completely upside down. I was going to bed between 1-3PM, a full 12 hours off from my usual schedule - so I didn't know if I should move backwards or forwards!
Then came Mother's Day weekend, and the infamous Key Lime Donut Incident.
Many of you know I'm on a modified
Low FODMAP diet to manage a lifetime of gut pain. Happily I can eat most donuts without issue, so long as they don't have milk in them, but I forgot how heinously bad High Fructose Corn Syrup is to me - and how most fruit-flavored donuts are
packed with it.
So I ate a delicious Key Lime Krispy Kreme, and 8 hours later was in so much pain that it started to scare me, and triggered my first panic attack in 4 months. I spent the next day on the couch spooning a hot-pack, and since I couldn't sleep through the pain
anyway, my addled brain decided I may as well add on to this misery pile and try to turn my sleep schedule around.
