Lying in bed yesterday evening, reading on my phone while my wife helped our daughter get ready for bed, I felt the usual feeling of self-conscious embarrassment at how early, and how eagerly, I crawl into bed. Usually when I get this feeling I remind myself that I sleep for about seven hours a night - I wish I could sleep longer - and the reason I go to bed ridiculously early is because I get up even more ridiculously early. I’ve been steeped in this pattern for a couple of years now, and while going to bed so early feels a bit awkward, the mornings have continued to be an amazing time of peace and satisfaction for me. Getting up hours before most other people allows me to find a sense of calm that I feel is harder and harder to locate these days. I stretch in the quiet house, I make my cup of coffee and write or work while sipping it, I meditate in front of the large window that looks into the woods, where I often see deer wandering through the yard or down the street. And I run. I run in the dark, alone, when it’s windy and cold, when it’s raining or snowing, when it’s icy or otherwise unpleasant. I run for an hour. It’s hard on my body. It’s challenging. And it feels amazing. Every day I finish, I can’t believe I did it.
My mornings are my special time, my self indulgent time, the time I reserve and protect for myself. I have prioritized this morning time over many things - going to bed early means that most social engagements don’t work for me. Some people say going to bed early is “antisocial”, and I agree. It is. I don’t miss the social time too much, but when I don’t get my alone time in the morning, I miss it terribly. When I run during the day, and the sun is out, and other people are around, I feel self conscious and strange. It feels less like a magical experience and more like, well, exercise.
Lying in bed last night, while my wife helped our daughter with her bedtime routine, our daughter started to have a meltdown. This happens somewhat frequently (I think my daughter and I have a lot in common), but last night was particularly bad. While my daughter was screaming irrationally, refusing to eat even though she was hungry, refusing to put on pajamas even though she was cold, refusing to brush her teeth, refusing to come to bed even though she was tired, I felt both annoyed and angry by daughter’s behavior, and I also identified with it and felt a great sense of empathy for her. I started to realize that I have constructed a meticulous structure in my life to prevent me from having the kind of meltdown that she was having at that moment. While I think it’s great that I have found a healthy, constructive way to address my needs, I’m also not sure it’s fair to my family. My wife has to adjust her routine to accommodate mine, to compromise her needs so that mine can be met.
I love my mornings. But do they make the rest of my day any easier? Or, am I living just to experience my special morning time? Can I really structure my life to enable me to have this morning routine as if nothing else matters? And how did I make it all those years without doing this?
I know what happens if I don’t get to do my morning routine - I am irritable, I get annoyed and frustrated with others, I feel like I let myself down, and I feel like things are just “wrong” and I can’t make them right. I think, in other words, I might be feeling the exact thing my daughter is feeling when she has a meltdown. But I’ve learned how to contain it so that I’m not kicking and screaming and crying. I’m turning silent, or being rude if people try to talk to me, or getting snarky and impatient, but I appear to be more or less composed (people who know me more intimately see the less composed side).
The way I coped with this before the pandemic, which allowed me to have total control of my time, was dependent on the circumstances. There were periods of my life, such as college, where I similarly retreated from social engagements by going to bed early, and getting up long before anyone else, so that my waking hours overlapped as little as possible with the majority of other students. I was teased, thought to be weird, and had very few friends, but it helped me cope with the strange and incomprehensible world I was placed in. Later in life, as I learned to be more “normal”, I managed through a combination of masking and alcohol use. I did a lot of acting. I played what I thought was the appropriate role in different situations to get through it. I looked forward to drinks later, and reveled in them when the time came. On the surface, things were great, but I also felt I was living with a level of inauthenticity that bothered me. And waking up with a hangover filled me with terrible feelings of guilt and shame.
As the pandemic and its restrictions fade further from people’s minds, as the days get longer with the sun setting after I go to bed, and as my daughter expresses more of her needs, the more I am realizing that I need to move into a new phase and adjust from the routine I’ve been finding sanctuary in for the past two years. The challenge is that I don’t know what that looks like or how I will manage it. I don’t think I want to go back to the way it was before, where I masked and suppressed and drank excessively. But I don’t know what the middleground looks like yet.
In order to be more present for my family (and others) in the evening, I’ll need to sleep later and figure out a way to incorporate meditation and exercise into my day. Right now that feels unimaginable to me - my morning routine works so well that the idea of changing it just seems impossible. At the same time, until two years ago, I never did this and somehow everything was fine. Or was it? I definitely survived, and in many ways thrived during the years before the pandemic. In those years I frequently went out in the evenings, traveled often, incorporated exercise into my day, made time to meditate in the mornings, and generally felt good. What I’m trying to pin down is this - what has changed? Why am I so reluctant to go back to the way things were, when by all accounts things were pretty good?
I feel like I’ve come to a new level of self understanding over the past two years. I have a deeper knowledge of who I am and how my brain works, I have an increased awareness of the lack of tolerance and acceptance in our society and the bias that surrounds us in our daily lives, and I have a different sense of what is important now than I did before. I don’t want to prioritize work, that is clear to me and a major change from my pre-pandemic focus. I wouldn’t say that I don’t want to prioritize relationships, but perhaps it’s that I’ve embraced the fact that I don’t need or particularly enjoy social occasions, and I like making connections and fostering relationships in other ways. Sharing ideas online, having focused (and time limited) conversations, meeting for a walk or a coffee in the daytime. I don’t miss parties, dinners out, or meetings at the bar. My whole life I’ve been told that not doing those things is somehow wrong and that doing them is part of a normal, healthy life. It doesn’t seem “healthy” to me (compared to my lifestyle of the past two years), and I no longer care about trying to be “normal”. Perhaps that is the biggest change of all - I realize that for most of my adult life I’ve been trying to do the things that I thought normal people were supposed to do, and now I feel comfortable living the way that feels most enjoyable to me. I’m OK with the idea that I don’t find joy in the same things that others find joy in, and that others often don’t understand how I could find joy in the things I do find joy in.
But, of course, my life isn’t just about me. If I lived alone, I think I would continue in my current pattern indefinitely and be quite happy, as limiting as it would be. But, I am fortunate enough to share my life with my wife and daughter. I made those choices because as much as I am content on my own, I also love having the company of, and the bonds with, my family. These are indescribable things that add a richness to my life that I am very grateful for. I want to make adjustments to better meet the needs of our lives together rather than prioritizing the needs of my life alone. That said, I know it won’t be easy and I’m sure I’ll be returning to this topic in the coming weeks.