Why I’m A Morning Person

When I was fifteen years old, I did things that made me a night person, at least in the summer, as I was just starting to “cat around” with some of the slightly older guys in my town. I never really gained anything positive from the experience, but I had a great time doing it.

When I was fifteen I had an altercation with my father, when I walked off with a friend who had stopped by and asked me if I wanted to walk down to the store. It was a store where we young punks would hang out and steal cigarettes when we got the chance.

I won that final round of our struggle against each other and effectively ended his control over me, leaving me to do whatever the hell I felt like doing.

That newfound freedom turned into nightly catching a ride to this drive-in restaurant where everyone who was anyone hung out. It was where it was “happening,” seven nights a week.

Before that, I would hear some of the others talk about sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon and I’d always think, “How can anyone sleep that late?” because even then I valued the daytime more than the nighttime. When I started regularly getting home at two o’clock in the morning or later, I fell into the realization that I needed to sleep in late.

I thought I got to like it, but in reality, I needed it more than I liked it.

It became a necessity, and I realized that fully, but I didn’t care anymore about daylight so much… I loved hanging out all hours of the night so much that I figured however much daylight I was getting was enough for me.

It really was a pretty short habit, lasting just until I got out of high school. I went to work right out of high school, and though I still liked to party late, I had to reserve the behavior for partying on the weekends. It really turned out to represent my abandonment of sleeping into the afternoon.

Until I had to work midnight shifts, that is. If you’ve never had to work a midnight shift, consider yourself lucky. They are brutal, because one, we aren’t set up to be up all night and two, we aren’t wired to sleep all day. It takes a LOT of getting used to, if we ever really get used to it at all. I rotated three shifts, changing every two weeks, working in a steel mill, right out of high school.

Then I decided to enlist in the army. That move forever ended any leanings I had toward being a “night” person.

Once I switched, (forcefully by the US Army), to getting up really early every day, I found that being a morning person was what I was made to be. Even now, when I can get up whenever I want to, I still get up early. TOO early most of the time, I’m sure a lot of people would say.

Since I’ve been a morning person for many years now, I’m sure that “morning person” is what I was always meant to be and the sleeping in late was a short-lived mistake.

I've written this piece as I was inspired by a prompt that I received in a daily email from @shadowspub. The prompt is “Are you a morning or night person?”

Thanks for reading!

Sources for images used in this post:

Why I’m A Morning Person