When I used to work for other people, there would be so many moments where I would find myself daydreaming about what it would feel like if I never had to do *this* again...

Some of them I have written about, many of them have been long since forgotten, and most of them have been replaced by daydreams about the opposite - what it would feel like if I never had to do *this* again (i.e daydreaming about working for somebody else :))

So it turns out that I have been unconsciously living one of my dreams, over and over again without even realising it.

One of the most tormenting aspects of any job, class, or even appointment for that matter, for me, is the wake up call. I just love to sleep. I can sleep for 12, 14, 16 hours at a time. At times I have been known to snooze in 5 minutes intervals for up to 2 hours quite happily.



I have tried every technique to reprogramme this habit - going to sleep early for 30 days, going to sleep late for 30 days, giving myself incentives to drag me out of bed, heating up the house so when I wake up it's nice and cosy... I have tried to teach myself to wake up using conditioning, I have dug deep into my psyche to investigate why I hate waking up to try to come at it from that angle, but the only thing that has worked occasionally but not consistently, is placing not one but two alarm clocks at strategic distances from my bed, so that I have to get up, and actually OUT OF BED to turn them off.

In my most shameful moments, I have been known to leave the alarm cry out in agony for minutes on end, while I stay stubbornly wrapped up in bed, waiting for it to stop... which it will... eventually. My poor future children.

If I think back, I did notice the aversion towards waking up in the dark and the cold to go to a job I didn't want to go to become worse and worse. I noticed myself postponing the moment of actually getting out of bed later and later, and as a result arriving into work less and less on time, and more and more shoddily put together.

Clothes were chosen from what I had worn the day before, the full face of make-up was gradually deconstructed to just a few stabs with a powder brush in the car between stretches of windy roads, breakfast was eaten from plates balanced delicately on the passenger seat and crumbs were collecting in miniature pyramids outside the drivers door of my parking space. It was a mess. I was a mess.

When I stopped working for someone else, I watched this battle with the morning hour being replaced by nauseating guilt that was fuelled by a sense of time wasting, poor wasted hours of bright sunny days accumulating in a wasted life, that coloured the first hours of my waking a deep grey as my body stubbornly slept through the concept of morning.

It is only now as the dark, cold mornings insist on smothering my sunny summer house, that I feel a childlike joy, a sense that I want to kiss the sky, the dark, the cold, and thank it for reminding me that I no longer have to get up at some god forsaken hour and prepare my breakfast, while simultaneously pulling my trousers on, with electric toothbrush whirring away in my mouth, toothpaste water dribbling down my chin, rushing, rushing, flushing my life away. My guilt is gone, I have reached a state of deep, serene calmness in my morning routine, a state of non-caring, where regardless of the hour I awake, it is the right one.