Quite Stupid After Eight

My phone buzzes with a notification. It lets me know that my nightshift is starting in 10 minutes. Only, I am an ocean away, sipping coffee with my cat at 5am in the Kent marshland. My regular nightshift rotation is beginning, but I am not there to slog out the hours. It feels a little ironic that now that I don’t have to work my nights I am still awake for them.

I have been awake since 4am. Wide awake. Without shift work to interrupt my body’s natural rhythm I am having to embrade the dreadful reality that I am a morning person.

After 8pm–I tend to be very stupid and we wont talk about this.

Usula Le Guin

I have mythologized myself as a force of chaos. Someone who thrives in disorder, has difficulty with consistency, struggles to keep a basic scedule. That is the person I have met in myself over my adult life.

But what I have discovered over these last three months not on shift work, is that I actually do very well in order. It occurs to me, as I write this first little morning blog at 6am on a Friday, is that maybe all this time, I have been a lark living in a night owl’s rhythm.

If I find myself tired and un motivated after 12pm, maybe that’s because I am actually meant to be awake at 5am taking the early morning watch. Maybe it’s ok that by 4pm all motivation to be productive leaves me, and, to reference Usula Le Guin, I am quite stupid after 8.

At the end of August I resigned from my perminant part time posistion. This means I will no longer have regular scheduled nightshifts. Since 2009 I have been doing some verson of crisis shift work and have had to function on a disrupted sleep schedule.

For the last three months, and for these final 6 weeks as I finish my time in England, I have not and do not need to interrupt my natural sleep rhythms. Instead I can be fully present to them.

It is really embarassing, but it seems I am a morning person.

What I am discovering is that I have gotten my self mythology wrong. Or more acurately, the stories I have told about myself have been situational, rather than intrinsic. Maybe when I am a lark living in a night owl schedule I am an inconsistant and chaotic person.

But who am I as a morning lark?