My Life The Way I See It

Recently I have been experimenting with attempting to get up at sunrise and go to rest at sunset every day. This morning, for example, my alarm went off at 4:49am. Most days I go straight back to sleep again, sometimes for many hours, but I figure my habits will change eventually if I persevere. Why am I doing this? Well I used to just rest whenever I was tired regardless of whether it was day or night. This stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have to go to work during the day. But there’s a problem with this approach: your sleeping habits begin to get inverted and you start to sleep more and more during the day. Now the rest of the human race still sleeps predominantly at night (as you will probably have noticed) and has done for millions of years. This means it is active during the day – biologists say we are diurnal – and so anyone who tends to sleep a lot at this time is going to find they get disturbed by people going about their daily activities. For this reason I took the decision to try to revert back to resting at night only. Will I be able to make this transition? Only time will tell.

So why don’t I go to work? Do I have vast sums of money like Dudley Moore in Arthur. Sadly not. The truth is I am sick. I suffer from mental illness. I have done since I left school 36 years ago. This means I have been ill for two thirds of my entire life (I am now 54). I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have to be somewhere at 9am five days a week. This privilege comes with a heavy price tag. I’ll be expanding on this a lot more in future posts.