new things

Image from seanwes.com

It's 6:27 AM by my watch right now, but I have been up since 5:30 in the morning. I was feeling really sick last night, so I found myself asleep in bed by 7. I actually woke up at around 2AM (about an hour before I find myself going to sleep most days), but I forced myself to go back to sleep -- partly because I was sick, partly because it was so dark out. Anyway, I'm so happy that I did.

I've been wanting to wake up early like this for months -- years, maybe. I can't count the millions of times that I've told myself I was going to wake up early, only to wake up some time past 10 (barely 11), frantic and needing to forego breakfast just so I can catch up on my day. I've forgotten what it feels like to not feel tired when I wake up in the morning. I kind of like it, this quietness, this absence of rush that is so pervasive when I find myself waking up at 8 or 9, after having worked till 2 or 3 in the morning. Maybe, after all those years of being a night owl, I am becoming a morning person.

I am trying to think of all those times in my life when early mornings were part of who I was. There was the month I spent living in a hotel for the Presidential Youth Fellowship, waking up at 5 AM so that I could get first crack at the bathroom (was kind of the mother hen who made sure everybody got up on schedule, and was dressed and down for breakfast in time). Then, there were those 3 weeks in Dumaguete, spent being the first person in our cottage to wake up, so that I could have quiet time to write in my journal. I've always wondered why it is that I find it so easy to get better starts to my day when I am away from my own home. I suppose, I always chalked it up to my desire to escape to somewhere else -- that when I am far away from where I am, far from the pressure and the drama, the burden of comparison, that I can truly be myself.

Yet, here I am, in my old room, same old me, up at 5:30, writing this blog post by 6:30. I am kind of grateful for the fever which forced me into bed early, actually.

It seems like such a small achievement, waking up before someone wakes me, but I feel like this is a good omen. For months now, I have been really unhappy with my circumstances, and am contemplating a change. It sounds silly, but there's a part of me that feels like if I can just make myself wake up early in the morning, I can do anything -- letting go of the safety job, applying for the  MA I really want, going after a teaching position, surviving the move abroad.