My body is very angry with me.
I’ve worked at 6AM every day this week. Normally, I love the 6AM shift because a) 10AM is the halfway point of the shift and that will always blow my mind and b) leaving at 2:30PM always feels like playing hooky because you have a whole afternoon ahead of you, full of limitless possibility. Except for me, there is only one possibility - a nap.
My coworker and I usually split the 6AM shifts so that no one is in a situation where they are doing too many in a row but this week she’s off, and it just turned out that the people filling in for her can’t really work that shift so it fell to me each and every day this week. And my body has had enough.
Part of the problem is my own. When I work this shift, I get up at 4AM because I am VERY serious about having time in the morning to wake up, drink my coffee, have time at my computer just putzing around and playing music. That part of it is so essential. I’m just not one of those guys that rolls out of bed and is ready to go to work. Those days when I oversleep my alarm and am put in a situation like that usually mean that the day has the odds stacked against it. Every day I get to about 11:30AM and I’m so ready for a nap I can’t even tell you. But I push through to get to 2:30PM at which point I’m like “so long everyone, I am OUT of here.”
I told someone yesterday that when I was 32, this was no problem. I would work 9 days in a row a lot, and double back from evening shifts to early morning shifts and I would barely notice it. Now at 52, not so much. I’m reminded of that quote from J .D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey which I read so long ago and I am due to reread, “You can’t go on abusing the body indefinitely, year in, year out - regardless of what you may think.” And it’s true. I live in a constant state of battle with my 52 year-old body, but the thing I have to come to terms with is that some things I could do 20 years ago are no longer reasonable. I have to sleep.
I have this sleep app on my phone that monitors my sleep deficit, and this morning it stands at 15.6 hours which is ridiculous. Try as I might, I can’t seem to get to sleep before 10PM. I definitely suffer from revenge bedtime procrastination. I feel like I barely have enough time to work, eat, and sleep let alone do anything fun. Now, of course this is completely untrue but boy does it sure feel like it some days.
This being Friday, it’s my last 6AM shift for the week. As a coworker told me once, it’s only 8 hours and you can do that!