It took me a 5 a.m. jog around my school track to finally accept it.
I’m a morning person.
I should have seen it coming. What others have only guessed about me for years from watching my regular patterns has finally surfaced as undeniable fact. My body naturally wakes me up when the sun rises. I need breakfast to get through the day. I love my morning coffee, and I can be productive before noon. Whether I wanted to be or not, whatever my friends happened to be or not, I was an early bird. Not a night owl.
Now, you may be wondering, just why was this so hard for me to come to terms with?
There are plenty of people who'd proudly admit to being a morning person. "I love to get up before sunrise and go for a jog." They have their set routines everyday—exercise at 6:00, shower at 7:00, breakfast at 7:00, then get to work or class. It's the perfect health & wellness magazine lifestyle of a zen yoga master or a hip, trendy office worker in a busy city. It's the image we all aspire to reach by our mid-twenties, an image that we have at least some parts of our lives put together.
Mornings don't look so cookie-cutter for us college students.
I know maybe one or two people my age who actually follow this kind of idyllic, leisurely a.m. routine. For most of us, mornings are hectic. We sleep in through our alarms. We wake up groggy and exhausted from late nights of studying (or partying) the night before, and we scramble to get ourselves ready for our first class we have in less than thirty minutes. We barely have time to brush our teeth and put on clothes before rushing out the door. Forget about making coffee or breakfast. A granola bar on the way will have to suffice. This, at least, is the image of morning for a typical college student. And if we don't have class or work? We'll be sleeping in well into noon. On a college student's weekend, mornings don't exist.
My morning routine fits into neither of these extremes, mostly for the fact that I can't have a routine. My problems around eating and stress plagued me with sleep issues from my freshman year. I was certainly never a night owl until college. But I'm not what you could call an ideal early bird, either, because I never chose to wake up so early. My body naturally began waking me up in the middle of the night, then at sunrise. I never know when I'll wake up or be able to fall back asleep. If I'm hungry or thirsty, I can't sleep until the problem's been fixed. My sleep is so sporadic and irritatingly sporadic that half the time, I feel like I'm not even fully asleep. Sleep, unlike for many of my friends, is my worst enemy. I'm just waiting for morning to come so I can get it out of my life—until, of course, night comes again.
Having such terrible sleeping problems has isolated me from people who can confidently call themselves one thing or the other: early bird or night owl. I can be neither, because I don't have enough control over my patterns to decide. Sleep deprivation doesn't just rob me of energy and rest. It takes away my power to choose how I want to function in my everyday life.
Of course, most people who don't know all the gritty details of my nightly battle with sleep just assume that I'm a grandma. Sleep early, wake up early. It's easy to imagine with my high-productivity values and reserved personality that this is how I want to structure my days. There are nights when I wish I wouldn't start yawning at 10 p.m. There are mornings when I don't want to see the sun rise. I would trade in my early rises any day just to have a "normal" sleep schedule of a college student (a.k.a. no schedule). I don't get into my bed before midnight because I want to; I do it because I don't know how long it's going to take for me to fall asleep that night. I'm not an introvert who'd rather stay in my little cocoon than go on late-night boba runs; I physically can't. No need to applaud me for waking up at 5 for a morning jog; I was awake anyways.
So having to come to terms with the fact that I'm a so-called "morning person" when I never wanted to be one? Not the most exciting discovery in the world. Being up at seven, eight a.m. when all my friends are happily getting the extra ZZZ's they deserve? Also not the greatest feeling. To say I resent those who can sleep would sound harsh. I only hope they can appreciate the blessing it is to need an alarm at all. Don't take sleep for granted. And don't call me a grandma before you know the whole story.