I managed to crank out a marketing deck, an analytics review, set intentions for 3 months of working with a new client and basically mark off every major assignment for the day. Then I had a late brunch, by 10 a.m. I was tired and took a nap and now, here I sit at 11:33 a.m. blogging to you, dear friend. 

Why did I feel the need to share this? Because I was surprised that I could do it. I have lived all of my life by structure, routine predictability and whatsmore, I LOVE sleep. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. More accurately, my body that is often in chronic pain loves sleep. So giving myself permission to get up when the rest of my world was slumbering was a big deal. I kept telling myself, I’m a grown ass woman. I can sleep when I want, I can work when I want, I can nap when I want. But I don’t think I truly believed that until last night. 

It’s true though. I left a life ruled by corporate America so that I could create the life I wanted. I can work odd hours of the day or night, I can take a nap after lunch, I can snuggle my dog while he lays in the grass and does his afternoon sunbathing. It is a luxury that I designed myself, but I just now, after a year and a half, am coming to take advantage of it and enjoy it. Up until this point, I had still been trying to fit my schedule into a classic M-F, 9-5 arrangement. Why? I’d still been telling myself that I had to go to bed early every night to wake with my husband at 5:30 a.m. every morning to maximize my day. Why? 

I’m not even a morning person dammit! I can wake up early and enjoy the early sunlight with the best of them, but I don’t like noise or to be talked to and I definitely don’t like talking back until after about 9:30. I especially dislike morning meetings before 10 a.m. and prefer to use my mornings in solitude in meditation, journaling or studying Kabbalah. So again I ask, why have I been robbing myself of that experience? 

After having these realizations, it actually felt pretty empowering to wake up and work at 3 a.m. or 1 a.m. or whenever I felt the call to do so. I might also romanticize this concept because I often read of prolific Roman emperors who only slept three hours and work away through the night because there was less interruptions, Kings who only surfaced at night, eating, working and taking the grand palaces in only by the view of candlelight, philosophers, poets, authors, all who had their heads so filled with inspiration and ideas that they simply could not sleep until they got every last word down on paper, writing in a feverish frenzy through the night. 

So you see, I think secretly, I always wanted this. Isn’t that odd? It makes me giggle a bit that it would be a fantasy of mine. 

I see so many people sharing about how they cannot fall to sleep or get a solid night’s sleep because of insomnia and it seems to have gotten particularly severe during the pandemic for many of you. For that, I truly do sympathize and I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing here, because I can imagine that wanting to sleep so badly, but physically just not being able to would be a remarkably frustrating experience. I usually can get myself back to sleep if I listen to a sleep story on the Calm App, put on an old show like “Perfect Strangers’ or ‘Bob Newhart’ or do a visualization technique that I love where I imagine myself walking through the gates of Disneyland and picturing every detail I can remember – every storefront and window display, every sign and flowerbed, every bathroom and food stall, all of it. I am obsessive about Disney so it works for me, but you can try this with any room in your house or location that you deeply know. 

No, the truth is that for me, I’ve been discovering the last few weeks then when I wake in the middle of the night, my thoughts have crystalized into clarity. My mind feels hyper-focused and crisp. I get ideas for things that I struggled to conceptualize during the day. I feel energized to create and suddenly a list of blog topics, reel themes, plot twists for my novels, all coming spilling out of me in these beautifully precise ribbon-wrapped packages. It feels like a subconscious gift I’ve been giving myself. I had the thought the other night that this happens because it is truly one of the only times where my brain is quiet and still. There is no stimulation, no distractions or interruptions, no pressure, just nothing. And that is when my brain becomes alive and wants to play. And from now on, I’m going to let it. I’m going to spoil it rotten. I’m going to honor the crap out of it, because it serves me well and I let it sleep when I need to. It just isn’t always during regular hours…