Time Isn’t Equal

On removing time stamps from self-worth

It’s 5:00am, a time you never picked to wake, a time your body rejects like a foreign object stuck inside your windpipe. But everyone’s telling you it’s when CEOs wake up, when dreams are forged and characters are built.

You do it today. You do it tomorrow. You do it for a week before your alarm fails and you wake up feeling like yourself before you start feeling like you’ve failed.

You read books about waking up at 5:00am. Well, that’s an overstatement. You use the books to put you to sleep when you join babies and chickens in early slumber, while everyone around you finally starts to shed the day and put on their real selves.

You fall asleep on your second date with the man you’ve been texting into the early hours of the morning, because it feels better to not sleep at all, than to sleep insufficiently. You fall asleep on the one weekend a month you spend with your family, cosied up on the now too small couch. You fall asleep on the way to work, the ‘dead time’ you were supposed to use to plan your day.

You recover some of your lost self at the weekend before you realise that’s all you ever do at the weekend now. Wake up slightly later and feel like you’ve just binge eaten an entire chocolate cake. Treat yourself to coffee in bed while blaming your increased heart rate on yet again starting your day with a sweet breakfast. Do your groceries. Do your laundry. Meal prep for the week. Set your alarm again for…