I am chronically tired. I can't remember the last time I wasn't the least bit tired. In fact, I sometimes find myself daydreaming about sleep. As I listen to my history professor drone on about the role of the press in post-revolutionary America and then make a semi-humorous, completely unrelated joke about texting, all I can think about is the two layers of memory foam and two feather comforters that cover my bed at home and how awesome they are.
And when I use the word ""awesome"" I mean it in its truest meaning. I once had an English teacher who would extort five cents from any student who misused the word. ""A volcano eruption is ‘awesome,'"" he would say. ""Your Lisa Frank folder is not ‘awesome.'""
I've been trying to correct my chronic drowsiness with more naps, but naps just aren't cutting it. For me, there's no such thing as a 20-minute nap. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes just to fall asleep, for chrissakes. However, three-hour to four-hour naps aren't really ideal as a college student. By the time I wake up, I have that eerie feeling that somehow I've slept 24 hours and it's suddenly the next day, at which point, I have a minor heart attack at the mere thought that I've missed an entire day's activities. The sad truth is I actually get plenty of sleep, enough to be a functional human on a day-to-day basis.
Regardless, every morning when my alarm blares, ""Everybody get up/ it's time to slam now,"" the last thing I want to be doing is slamming or jamming, and I definitely don't want to get up. My body has already been molded into the memory foam and there's no possible way I could drag my ass out of bed just to walk through below zero weather to sit in an uncomfortable chair for an uncomfortable amount of time. It's just not going to happen.
So, each morning as I ponder getting out of bed, I go through the five stages of sleep grief.
Stage one is denial. ""It can't be 8:00 a.m. already! I just fell asleep five minutes ago. I must have set my alarm wrong or maybe that's my ring tone and not my alarm,"" I think to myself.
When I gaze at the clock on my phone and realize that it is indeed 8:00 a.m. I enter the second stage—anger. ""Today fucking sucks,"" I say out loud to no one. ""How dare Mother Nature speed up the acceleration of time and deny me a full night's rest."" ""Why am I even alive?""
By now, I've wasted 15 minutes lying in bed and I start to get nervous about how much time I've left myself to actually get ready, pending my decision to get up. That's when I enter stage three—bargaining. ""Is the lecture material online?"" ""Can I sponge notes off of a friend without feeling guilty for telling them I was ‘sick'?"" ""How many ‘free absences' do I get?"" ""How many have I already used?""
Lately, I haven't managed to make it past the bargaining stage. Oddly enough, I'm actually quite persuasive when I'm persuading myself.
On the rare day that I actually roll out of bed and start getting ready, I go through stage four—depression. I'm dogged by this stage all week. It never goes away—I'm always a little bit depressed that I'm awake and tired, rather than sleeping and rested.
And then there's the last stage—acceptance. While I'm basing this judgment purely on my time spent watching bad episodes of ""Parenthood"" that replaced the in-flight movie on a Delta flight, I don't think that any adult ever really accepts the fact that they will always feel tired.
That being said, it's absolutely necessary that I actually start making it to my morning lectures, especially the class I haven't attended since the first day of lecture when we read through the syllabus. Now, when I gaze up at the ceiling each morning, praying that my phone is just broken and that my alarm isn't really ringing, I see a post-it note I so lovingly placed there for myself to read.
GET:
Out of the fucking bed.
Your shit together.
If only my motivational notes were as eloquent and easy to write as my essay on the importance of the press in post-revolutionary America will be.
How is your relationship with sleep? E-mail Stephanie at slindholm@wisc.edu with your own tactics for getting out of bed on time.
