5:30 AM.
This is the time I wake up every morning.
It’s new. I used to be more of a 7:30/8 type of person.
Now here I am, yawning but awake no matter how much or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night before.
I find I enjoy this new time. It allows me to have peace in the morning before the world is awake; hell, the sun isn’t even awake yet.
I write at this time now.
My thoughts, once again, easily finding their way onto a page. But, it’s different than before.
As a teenager, my writing came to me at 2 AM when I hadn’t even closed my eyes yet. I still lived at home and everyone else in my house was asleep at that time. I’d be in my room, the door would be shut, and (most likely) U2 would be playing softly on my stereo. Back then I had this weird thing, that lasted thru most of high school, where, if I was home, I wanted the song “With or Without You” to be the first thing I heard in the morning, so it was often the last cd I listened to at night. I’d wake up, lean over to turn on the power to my small stereo and press play. What can I say? I’m a person of habit with some interesting quirks.
I used to think that’s why I stopped writing in the first place. Not because I stopped listening to U2 first thing in the morning (that would be crazy), but because I had lost that time of creative madness that only seemed to really happen in the middle of the night. The real world kicked in and I became someone who had to go to bed at a decent hour like most adults. My mind was overwhelmed with all the “rules” I had to follow: go to bed early, get up early, go to work, be successful, make sure every single person is happy (except yourself. Just take care of them. Your happiness is nothing).
There was a time for myself and my happiness. It was at 2 AM while I was alone in my room writing furiously into one of my many notebooks or journals that I kept next to my bed on my nightstand. I wrote like I physically couldn’t stop. Pages and pages would pour out of me a night. My hand would be cramping. My eyes would be red and watery because I never wore my glasses when I was supposed to. I would be overwrought; my feelings had stayed bottled up all day, but there in my room, in my notebooks that very few people had permission to read, they were safe to let out. I had so much to say and my mind wouldn’t let my body rest until everything was down on paper. It was cathartic.
Then it stopped.
Over the years, I tried to write a phrase here and there, but nothing felt right. I felt like a fake. It felt like my timing was always off.
Yet, after all these years, I found a time for writing again, a place for me again. I found the solitude I needed just before dawn. I guess it’s true, where there is a will, there is a way. And when I found my writing again, I found my joy.
I just had to change things up to find that creativity again. Instead of sitting cross legged on my bed in the middle of the night, I get up out of bed to not disturb my night owl husband. I, silently, tip toe into our kitchen to start a pot of coffee and then move into the living room to boot up my laptop. And somehow, I find that I can write again, that I want to write again.
Or is it now more of a need? A need that is so fundamental to my well being that my mind wakes me in the early morning hours to fulfill it.
Ideas, concepts, phrases; they are all always forming in my mind. Like they just float around there, waiting to be plucked down onto a page. For so long, I thought they were gone. I’d day dream often, but never be able to capture them like I could as a kid.
Somehow, at 40, I’ve reminded myself how I did it before, but I’ve tweaked it to fit into this adult life.
I have to laugh right now. I know that when I eventually go find my glasses and the blurriness of my sleep induced haze lifts with the help of coffee, I’ll find more mistakes in this than I’d like; the words and sentence won’t even make sense in some spots. I’ll wrack my brain trying to figure out what the heck I meant in this dream-like state. Because even though I’m awake, I’m pretty sure my consciousness hasn’t made its self known yet. I prefer it that way, drifting slowly into my day, into reality.
I’m still getting used this. I used to pour out my heart, my day, into a notebook before sleep would overtake me. Now I wake up and start my day that way. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s me doing the most human thing ever; adapting to this ever-changing world.
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Lost and Finding Me 