"Oh, you wake up late? How lucky!"
Thinking about my Five Facts post, there's one fact about me I didn't mention there, and wanted to talk about.
It's about sleep.
Very often, when I tell people about waking up after noon most days, they say something along the lines of "lucky you!"
And then I have to restrain myself. So I just say something along the lines of "well, it's not that great" and let it go.
What I WANT to say is "so, do you usually tell people how fun their disorders are, or just me?"
I have a thing called DSPS. It is, as you can read in the link, a neurological disorder. It is not fun. It is not cool. It makes living a productive life much, much harder.
Most days, by the time I wake up, some government services are no longer available. Certainly keeping an office job is very hard. I had one for a few years, and the physical and emotional toll it had on me was massive.
I have been able to organize my life such that I don't need to wake up in the morning most times. This was not trivial. It didn't just happen. I work from home, both as a freelance translator and writer and as a publisher. I wake up to a pile of emails that my anxiety (see previous post) wants me to run away from.
In times of stress, my hours can fluctuate. I may find myself awake for too long, and crash at basically any time, disrupting my unusual, but at least somewhat regular, hours.
What I would ask is that people stop telling me how lucky I am that I get to wake up late. Recognize that a thing you may find desirable, may actually be quite crappy in someone else's reality.
Credit for the terrific cat photo above to Ranya at Pixabay.
Sorry you have to deal with that. Do any medicines or herbs help at all?
Sleep inducing meds and or herbs can help at a given time, like if I have to sleep before doing an important thing. But not for any extended period.
"It is not fun. It is not cool. It makes living a productive life much, much harder." I hear you. Ignorance knows no bounds - people mean well but just have no idea.
Love it that you credit pixabay and the photographer's name too!
I often don't credit them, because the license is "no attribution," but if feel exceptional work deserves the credit, and it really is a lovely picture.
Photographers deserve credit, I figure, and a lot of them have tip jars at pixabay.
My pet peeve: great cover art on a novel - not credited.
Why not say who did your book cover??
It isn't just indie authors - I've seen big-house publishers fail it ID the artist.
For my publishing house, my designer and my artist are the same person, and I always credit her. Both in the books themselves and when talking about them. Presentation is SUCH an important piece of the puzzle in books.
Speaking of, why isn't she on steemit yet?
I totally relate to everything you wrote here :P
(time here now is 01:26, my heart is racing like crazy and I already know I won't fall asleep till sunrise again...)
Telling someone with DSPS that they're lucky to be getting up late it like telling someone without legs that they're lucky they don't need to spend money on shoes.
I honestly wish my body would agree to go into deep sleep more before 4:00AM.
Sounds very hard to deal with this. I can't really see that people see this like some kind of luck... But I do hope they haven't got the whole picture.
The Pixabay photo is well chosen and very nice :-)
Oh, it's definitely the response of people who just hear "wake up around or after noon," not that of people who know the actual issue.
its probably a very hard lifestyle! i hope for you the things one day would be better!