Half Life

Life, of late, has been feeling very strange for me.  A combination of factors have resulted in my sleeping pattern shifting radically which, in turn has resulted in my whole body rhythms becoming disrupted.  I feel like I'm spending half the day asleep.  Which, thanks to the shortening of the days as we get into winter, is effectively is what is happening.  Over the past few weeks I've found myself unable to get to sleep until four or five in the morning, resulting in me sleeping into the afternoon, when the sun is already well on its way down.  Consequently, it feels as if I'm living some kind of half-life where it is never fully light, existing in darkness most of the day.  The problem, of course, is that the cycle becomes self-reinforcing: you get up late, so you aren't tired come the usual bed time, so you stay up doing stuff, go to be late, sleep late, and so on.  Somewhere along the way, I need to break this cycle.  By getting up earlier, obviously.  The trouble is that it has turned cold, so getting out a cold bed doesn't seem a very inviting prospect when you don't have to go into work.  Which is one of the factors that have led to this situation: I'm on an extended 'sabattical' from work, but still waiting to start doing any supply teaching (Covid and my regular employers dragging their feet over references is currently holding this up).  So there's no oncentive to get up early.  On top of that, we're now into that time of the year when my body starts telling me to hibernate and this year, it actually has an opportunity to do so.

To make things worse, I find myself beating myself up over the fact that my current hours are resulting in me not achieving anything.  Except, as I had to tell myself yesterday, this simply isn't true.  Sure, I'm not doing things like outdoor activities, or DIY, or anything work-related, but neither are a lot of other people thanks to lockdowns, etc.  The fact is that I am doing stuff.  Just yesterday, for instance, on top of chores like shopping, I put together and posted my latest podcast over at the Overnightscape Underground,  recorded a segment for somebody else's podcast and wrote a post here.  Which is actually a lot to do, requiring quite a bit of effort, not to mention being quite time-consuming.  Today wasn't quite as productive, but I do have this post to show for it, (a lot of my time has been taken up today composing an official letter, which I can't go into here).  So I'm doing stuff, just not the stuff I was doing a few months ago.  Besides, why should our leisure time be based around 'doing stuff'?  If we make our down time entirely goal orientated, then we might as well still be at work.  Damn it, even spending hours sitting around watching schlocky movies (or 'the weekend' as you might call it) is 'doing' something. After all, I often subsequently write about these films here - a creative activity in itself.  Having said all that, there really are things I need to start doing: most importantly, sorting out my great nieces' Christmas presents.  (They currently live in the States so this has to be organised via US-based online retailers).  I mean, it's December already and I haven't dome anything in this regard - usually I've got it all sorted before the end of November!