Here Comes The Sun

A glance at the clock tells me that it’s 9:38 p.m., and ah, I just got home about 20 minutes ago, which means I left the office at 8:45 p.m., and as some people who got PERKY! PERKY! PERKY! e-mails this morning can attest, I arrived at the office, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 7:07 a.m. All of my daily blogs were read by 7:10, and I was on my third cup of coffee by 7:45.

Did I not mention my sudden change into Morning Person Extraordinaire? No? Well, it turns out, I have discovered the secret to getting up early feeling rested: go to bed early. I know! Someone give me a medal for this brilliant, groundbreaking discovery! But lo, I started going to bed early, and by gum, I was able to actually get up earlier. Now, please understand, I’m not loving the early mornings necessarily, especially when they involve nothing more than a perfunctory once-over to make sure my hair isn’t a complete and total disaster, because oh yes, I showered the night before, and why repeat the performance? However, I find them infinitely less repugnant than before, and I don’t even hit snooze anymore, and sometimes — and these are my favorite mornings of all — I’ve run two miles before 7 a.m.

I don’t know either, man, I just live in fear of that slippery slope that leads to people like my in-laws, who go to bed at 7:45 p.m. and get up at 4 a.m. They call us with random questions at 7 a.m., because Jesus, it’s MID-MORNING, and they’re on their way to the sidewalk sale at Bealls, and how are we not up yet?

Perhaps the most embarrassing point here is that I achieved this miraculous sleepathon by using a hypnotizing cassette tape that a therapist made me at one time. And ah, every night, I’ve been drifting off to the sound of her voice imploring me to let the thoughts come, but let them flow … flow … FLOW into blissful nothingness. I need not take any action on these thoughts, you see, but I merely need to let them pass … pass … PASS to the land of nod. Concentrate and inhale … inhale … INHALE and let the breath come while the hammock rocks … rocks … ROCKS … you to sleep.

Are you asleep yet? Because I’m letting them pass …. pass … PASS to the land of nod, and I’m rocking … rocking … ROCKING in some hammock somewhere, apparently, and whatever, look, it works, and I’m sleeping better and also up earlier, and this is a miracle, given that I very publicly swore it would never happen to me, but here I am, up before the sun, and running in the dark, for chrissake.

The reason I’m doing this is that I’m working more, and when I’m working more, I let my body and my health fall off of the map completely. For me, working is a compulsion, and one that I haven’t really learned to control, despite my best efforts to the contrary. When I took this job, I deliberately made some changes (ahem … salary, hours) that would force me to change my tendency to work until my fingers fall off, I’ve got a constant headache, and oh, when was the last time I ate something other than fried take out? Or exercised?

It’s an awful thing, and one that employers love to easily exploit. However, honestly, my current employer isn’t being unreasonable about what they need from me right now: what I’m doing is, actually, entirely necessary, given circumstances completely beyond their (or my) control, and there is an end in sight, albeit a vague, fuzzy, unclear ending with no actual date, but again, that’s no one’s fault. What’s freaking me out, however, is that I’m liking it. I love the satisfaction of working really hard on something, and the rush of finishing something and finally pulling it off.

I remember once, a few years ago, wrapping up a really stressful project — so stressful in fact, that if I screwed something up, not only would I be fired, but people would be indicted – and I threw up into a garbage can underneath my desk when it was all over, a release of all of the churning anxiety that had built up in my system, booted in one fell, literal swoop. And instead of seeing this as a sign that maybe I should change jobs, I got a little excited, because dude, I’d not only survived, I’d triumphed. And when can we do it again?

(I am forgetting that after a while, I hate working like this. After a while, when I haven’t seen my family in weeks, and I’m fat and have bad skin and can’t remember the last time I laughed. So I must stop this! Soon!)

It’s a sickness, you see. So in all of this right now, I’m trying not to push too hard, compete too much, fight too much simply for the satisfaction of winning some sort of game I’ve got with myself that yes, I can be the best, hardest worker anyone’s ever seen, and wow, look at all that productivity and brilliance! OMG LOOK HOW SMART SHE IS SHE IS THE BEST WORKER EVAR OMG.

(For the record, I’m aware that this very likely points to some sort of deficiency in self-esteem and/or overly competitive nature, but really, I’m focusing only on fixing it and not analyzing the underlying problem, like maybe I wasn’t held enough as an infant or something or my dad wouldn’t let me braid my hair or … I don’t know.)

What I do know is that getting up early, at the very least, makes me take care of my body three days each work week. Those mornings, I get up and run before trucking into the office, and for a half hour, it’s just me and the Today Show, or maybe the Cocteau Twins, and I forget about everything else. That makes me feel good, and it’s a hell of a lot better than I ever managed before.

So, ah, hooray for mornings.

Happy Tuesday!

*The Beatles

23 comments August 13th, 2007