In seven months it will be eight years since I left my day job, and in turn any and all obligations to the daytime world.
The daytime world, the time in which the sun is out and in which most of humanity (whenever their daytime is on the globe) does basic things like be awake because we tend to need daylight to function, has become a bit of a stranger to me.
I’m writing this now, at 11:30am on a Thursday, in a time that feels, I assume, like staying up till 2am to work on a paper feels like to your average day person. That sensation, one I am intimately familiar with from both school and my life over the last seven and a half years, doesn’t seem to belong in a world where the sun is shinning… albeit, right now behind a wall of clouds.
Being awake now, navigating the daytime world, feels performative. It feels temporary, and it feels alien. Or at least as alien as something that has made up decades of your life can be.
Before I tell you about my disposition towards, and life as a night person, I thought I would share the parts of daytime that I enjoy.
I enjoy the very early morning, and I never thought I would, at least not when I was young. Parts of me enjoyed the 6am world when I was in middle and high school, the quiet, empty space, the barely sparked to life morning of walking to the bus (or walking to school the first semester of my senior year), but I was always sleep deprived, and didn’t look forward to where I was going.
Even when I started going to community college, an experience I generally enjoyed, morning was the enemy, and it wasn’t early enough for the quiet of the pre-day (not pre-dawn, but the part of the day before it was, you know, daytime), it was just early enough for crowded buses.
And as community college came to an end and I started to work at the video store, mornings then became the procrastinator’s rush of getting up, getting dressed, eating, and going to the job that was five blocks from my apartment, well after dawn and daytime were in full effect.
I discovered that I liked the morning three years later, or roughly twelve years ago, when I started working on Queen Anne hill and had to commute to work, not just fall out of bed and roll semi-downhill.
Part of this discovery was due to the overall quality of life improvement that came with switching job locations, and part of that was a real amount of stability that came with it. What flies in the face of the last almost decade of my life is that I do much better with an external routine (provided my needs are being met… so you know, a regular person…), and I had the most stability and quality of life from the fall of 2006 through right up to about the financial crisis of 2008 that I think I’ve ever had, and a lot of that came from a lot of stability and routine.
For a lot of that time I was mostly opening the store, and while that did mean braving crosstown traffic at 8am, after years of working nights, closing the store at midnight or 1am, getting up at 7 and leaving at 8 was practically pre-dawn living for me.
Life got even better when I realized that us was almost as time effective, and a hundred times more quality of life effective, to walk down the hill to downtown after I got my coffee, instead of riding the bus the entire way.
So at 8, or 8:30-ish, I’d walk out my door, get my coffee, walk down the hill, then hop a bus up to the top Queen Anne… unless it snowed, then I’d ride a bus tot he other end of downtown then climb the hill, and that was more fun than it sounds.
The city at that hour was alive, but it was also morning. It was sunrise, or the slow climb. It was the day starting, and I found a way to make it work for me, and found a way to enjoy it. Even when I had to start going further and further away for work, first to White Center, then to Tukwila, to the town of Snohomish, and finally to Olympia for school, I loved the mornings, each one starting earlier than the last.
The only time I didn’t find a way to enjoy my morning commute was when I was working in Redmond, the day job I mentioned quitting at the start of this piece, and that was in part pretty intense depression… oh we’ll get there, don’t you worry… and the fact it’s just a shitty, crowded, uncomfortable commute. I mean, nothing beats catching a crowded bus down at the freeway underpass by the Montlake bridge…
There are other parts of the day I like, but I think anything from maybe 7am-noon or two is pretty missable.
I don’t remember if I told these stories here or not, but I have two life events that presage not just my night person-ing, but my life in general.
The first was when I was in fifth grade, 1993, and it was when I started staying up past my bedtime in my bedroom reading and listening to music. It was the late winter/early spring, and I’d fallen in love with the Prydain Chronicles books, so I stayed up until 11pm, 11:30pm some nights, just listening to music and reading.
And that leads me into my next memory/event.
In the summer of 1994, when my sister and I had been shipped out to Ohio for the summer, I had my first serious bout of depression.
I didn’t want to go out there that summer, the summer before 7th grade, at least not for 6 weeks, not when my friends were all in Seattle, compared to my family and cousins that I loved, but I didn’t click with, not like my friends. Then while i was out there, I kept getting swimmer’s ear, so enjoying my grandparents pool wasn’t really happening (I got ear plugs… we’ll get to that…) my cool uncle that I really connected to had moved, and the more lovable of my grandparents two dogs had passed away, so I felt very isolated, and miserable.
It was also the first time I got fat, because sadness is delicious and I was drinking tons of soda. Just tons.
(And I was as petulant and miserable as you think I was… and worse, because of hormones.)
I set up a routine of watching TV, playing vide games, watching more TV, and at one point as I was reading Jurassic Park, I wasn’t going to bed until 6am.
It was really only four or so weeks of misery, maybe five, if we were out there for 8 weeks and not 6, because in the last couple weeks of vacation things got better, but it was the first time my natural clock (and my mental health) got to really come through.
I like the night, because that’s when my body, and my creativity likes to be awake. I like the mania of staying up all night working on things, or doing things, or just reading. I like he quiet of the nighttime world, and I like the way the dark lowers my inhibitions (as I understand it, there’s some science to that).
I like the night, because when I want to be alone, I like to be alone.
I also like to walk at night, and while my walking started out in the late winter of 1996 when I was in 8th grade, walking home from school instead of taking the bus, stopping off to read and listen to music at Lower Woodland Park to read and listen to music, or hang out with people then walk home, by the summer of 1997 I’d started taking walks at night.
Being who I am, I’ve never really felt unsafe walking alone at 2am, and for a long time I wasn’t walking at night, or walking much at all, but thanks to gentrification and the pandemic I started walking again, and at night again, in 2020, and I missed it.
I missed it because it’s the best of both worlds, it’s being out of the house and in turn out of the room that’s defined my life for the last 12 years, and being almost totally alone. The nighttime world is quieter, and it looks different. It’s not just more mysterious because it’s dark, it’s more mysterious because it’s less obvious, so there’s more space for imagination.
The world of 2am-4am, with a cup of coffee, outside or indoors, is wholly unlike any other time. In the winter, it’s quiet, cold, black, and empty. In the summer it’s not as hot, not as loud, and right after 4 the sky starts to change.
Night is also the last chance, and for a lifelong procrastinator (I’m working on getting an ADD diagnosis, but come on, duh…) night is the quiet, but it’s also when the pressure is the strongest, when time actually exists, because there’s no more time.
Outside of the throes of depression, where every day and every time is bound to become the next one and the next one, to me, without the structure of a day job, night is more real than day.
We (the sighted of us) need light to do things, so we need the sun (also Vitamin D), and I don’t have anything against the day, or dawn, or morning, but thanks to technology, I can thrive at night.
The sun isn’t the boss of me anymore, my procrastination, anxiety, and introverted disposition are. The sun comes up and tells me I should be awake to do things, but the sun is a liar (sometimes), because if I can’t get it done today, I can just stay up and do it tonight.
And, and it will be easier for me to focus and do it at night anyway, because I’ll be all alone in the dark to do it.
(Of course, most of the time I flat out fail at hitting my deadlines, and baring the end times, you can always push things later into the night, or into the early morning, and while I’m fantastic at the content of my job, I’m terrible at actually doing it, regardless of what my sleep cycle is.
And while the vast majority of my novel was written during the day, when the sun was out, and when I was not at home, that was more a result of it being the first thing I did during my day, waking up, going to get coffee, and sitting down to write at the coffee shop as my first real activity of my day, whether is started at 4am or 4pm.)