I have never classified myself as such, but I am a night owl. I don’t think there is any denying it anymore. Post after post after post, I have mentioned how much I resent being unable to sleep earlier, constantly feeling more “alive” and “awake” at night. I have written about how I really want to wake up earlier, and get stuff done in the mornings like I used to.

It is hard to believe I used to be an early bird.

Other people, such as colleagues at my old workplace, found it hard to fathom. This is how I was when I was an early bird, which was about five years ago:

• I would wake up at 5am on weekends, do some work for an hour or two, then take a quick nap, and then by 8am, I would be refreshed and ready to do something more challenging.
• I got to school at 7:45am or earlier. I lived a fair distance. I still managed to walk most of the way.
• I got to university at 7:45am. This meant I had to leave home at about 6:50am. I still managed to do something like homework before I even got there an hour earlier than I was supposed to.
• I would go for a run in the mornings, every morning, between twenty and forty minutes long. Of course I would have time to take a shower and get ready for work. It took me an hour to get to work.
• Sometimes I liked to slowly watch the sun come up. It has always been hard to see because I am sort of at the lowest altitude of the town, but it is still nice to be awake for dawn.

This is how I am as a night owl:

• I get a little tired at 10pm, but I don’t sleep until many hours later because I am usually working hard or on a roll on something. Sometimes something that isn’t that important, like getting up to date on a forum or replying to emails that are not urgent.
• I find myself working late at night on things I really do not have to do late at night. Like doing my staffing duties at TFL, or working on a new design for one of my websites.
• I go to a handful of concerts a week, sometimes, and I am fine with returning home every night at around 1am.
• I find myself blogging at 1:30am.
• I look at the time when it is about 10pm and I am away from home and I think, “Hmm, it’s not that late”.
• I hardly think about how much sleep I will get when I sleep late, or how I need to get to work in the morning. I just think, “Ah, it is getting a bit late”.

These are signs or reasons why I dislike being a night owl:

• I work better in the morning. I know it, I just do.
• I live in suburbia, an hour away from work, and I hate when buses no longer run after a certain time and I have to fork out money on a taxi.
• I am always in a rush in the morning. I hate it.
• When I am blogging at 1:30am, regardless of timezones, I backdate my post to 11:59pm the day before, just so it looks like I was not up until past midnight to write it. I don’t even display the time of my posts on my blog.
• I am still a little scared of the dark.
• I constantly complain that I do not have time for things, when a few years ago I never complained.
• Further to the above, some of you might recall in 2010 when I was studying for my Bachelors degree and working three part-time jobs at the same time, and people wondered how I was managing to write a website review every day and respond to dozens of comments on my blog posts. I got the question, “Do you even sleep?”

Here is a note on sleeping. I do not have trouble sleeping. I have no symptoms of insomnia whatsoever. I can fall asleep fine, as long as I lie in bed and think about it. I don’t get easily tired during the day. I get tired by afternoon, but no longer to the point where I feel like I need to nap.

I used to feel like I needed to nap when I got home from work. Now I think it has gotten to the point where I have transitioned from being used to sleeping early, to being used to sleeping late.

I dislike it, and I keep complaining. I keep trying to find “pockets of time” to do things in. I will read emails on the bus. I will write responses to emails on the train. I will use my lunch break at work to read something I could have read the night before. I really want to be the early bird that I once was.

I am lazy. I am too lazy to try. And lazy is not an excuse. It is a state of being.

It is a state of being that I do not wish to be any longer. And it will take a considerable amount of effort, and time, to really turn that around, but hopefully, hopefully I can do it this time. I haven’t ever given up, it is just that I haven’t prodded myself enough in the back to try harder.