Nocturnal Admissions

"Why do you keep this schedule anyway?"

"Mostly just to be alone."

On average, I go to bed each morning around 7-8am, local time. I get up around 5pm or so, usually after having the radio on for an hour to slowly transition into a state of awakening. That gives me an hour to shower and get dressed, although sometimes it takes closer to an hour and a half. Dinner is at 6pm sharp, every single day. Notice that I don't have "weekends" where I get to sleep in. Honestly, I think having a standard schedule is better overall, because you completely eliminate the whole morning-after-the-weekend where you didn't get any sleep the night before, and you're not constantly adjusting and re-adjusting your internal clock. As much as I'd love to be able to sleep in a couple days a week, I just don't think it's worth having to get up painfully early, even just once in the week.

The way sleep is for me, is that I tend to have a lot of sleep inertia. When I'm awake, I have a hard time falling asleep (usually because I can't shut my mind off), and when I'm asleep, I abhor having to wake up. Therefore, my ideal system would include long chunks of waking periods followed by long chunks of sleep, so that I'd only have to go to sleep when I'm way too exhausted to do anything else, and I'd only have to get up when my body is fully and completely rested. I've discovered that this system would require a cyclic period of longer than 24 hours. So to implement it, I would need a rolling schedule where I'd get up a little bit later each day. This is generally not easy to put into practice.

The only anchor in my life right now is that 6pm dinner. I figure that to stay in this house where I don't have to pay for utilities or food, it's only polite to at least join the table for dinner every day. It's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make. But because that is my only anchor, my schedule has come to revolve around it. Coming home after graduation, I was used to having to get up in the morning for classes. But without classes, it didn't take long for my schedule to shift later and later, until I was getting up just before dinner. And that's where I've kept it since. However, the fact that this results in a nocturnal schedule is extremely convenient for me.

What is the appeal of living nocturnally? I get the idea that the general feeling people have about a nocturnal schedule is that it is a dreadful way to live, where your days are consumed by darkness, and your interaction with people is minimized. Ha! To me, that sounds like a dream come true! Although it's different when my brother's around the house, since he's not a stranger to my kind of schedule himself, I typically have the house to myself between the hours of 11pm and 7am, approximately, when my dad and my other brother (the working man) are in bed. Even though I have my own room to myself, there's still a very different feeling in the house when I know my dad is downstairs watching TV or doing housework or something, or my brother is making a snack, or hanging out (awake) in his room in the basement, than there is when the house is quiet.

The idea of going downstairs, through the living room, and making myself some food in the kitchen, when my dad is sitting right there in the living room watching TV, makes me anxious. It's nothing personal at all - I honestly think my dad is one of the coolest guys I've ever known. Yet, there was a huge misunderstanding when I was younger, where my dad thought that I absolutely hated him. I didn't hate him, it's just that it bugged me to go about the house doing things when I knew there were other people about. It would have been the same with anyone else; he just happened to be the one around a lot during that period, and received the brunt of my frustration. The idea of somebody watching me or hearing me, even unintentionally, and the thought of them judging me and my actions, and the possibility that they might criticize me for something I am doing - like, 'you can't have a snack now, we'll be eating soon', or, 'that's not how you make a cup of tea, you have to put this in first'... it really is ridiculous, but those kind of thoughts tear away at me and make me want to crawl into a hole and hide - and I don't mean just when people actually say them, but simply imagining people saying them freaks me out. So I do tend to hole myself away and wait until the roost is empty before I make my move.

Every morning when I get up, around 5pm, there's a point at which I have to open my door and head to the bathroom to start my shower routine. Most of the time, at this part of the day, my dad is watching TV in the living room, which is just down the steps. Luckily it's not in view of my room, but the distance is not large, and it's hard to sneak by without making noise. Every faculty of reason in my body tells me that this is not a big deal, that I should have no problem with announcing to the house that I am up and awake and that I'm going to take a shower. And yet, every day, when I have to make that move to the bathroom, after having been officially out of people's consciousness during my sleeping period, I get anxious at the thought of making myself known in any way.

I like to listen through the crack of my door, and try to wait for a moment when he heads into the kitchen, so I can sneak past with a better chance of going unnoticed. But sometimes, that moment doesn't come, and it gets later and later, and I need to get started with my shower or I'll be uber-late for dinner. It's best when I just try not to think about it at all, and just force myself to open the door without thinking about it, before I give myself a chance to turn chicken. But I can't always do that. I have to know, I have to plan, I have to be in control of the situation, so that I don't run into an unfamiliar scenario where I'd have to improvise. That would be the worst thing. It's ridiculous.

So I like living in the night, where I can pretend I'm the last person left alive on the Earth (as long as I'm quiet), and I can just be me and do what I want without constantly dealing with issues of anxiety left and right, everytime I sense the presence of another person. This is not sane behaviour. But this is what's comfortable for me. It's also nice to be able to go to the couple 24 hour stores in the vicinity and not have to deal with crowds of people all sitting up in the aisles you want to shop in, and all that. Plus, even the streets are more empty, so you got less stress from aggressive drivers. In my mind, living nocturnally is a natural avoidant reaction to a fear of people. Of course, most people don't get that 'fear of people' part. I understand that. Now it's your turn to try and understand me.