A single early morning or poor night’s sleep can throw me out completely, making me unable to write for days. I am tired today following a couple of day’s of early rising to take M____ to work. I used to have this problem with working at the hardware store. Half eight seems about the earliest I can start at work and not feel any ill-effects throughout the day, indeed, throughout the week. Any earlier and my brain literally never fully wakes up and I feel a constant lack of energy. Of course, when that happens I resent it so much.
M____ has a fifteen minute ride to get in to work. It could be less if she was able to ride a little faster. It really isn’t far at all. And I get up to drop her off, waking up unnaturally, disturbing my normal routine, cutting off that gentle waking which I need so much to start my day with. It’s a matter of half an hour, forty minutes, and yet it makes all the difference to me, to my day and week.
Years back I would have a daily dilemma of whether to try and wake myself up from those earlies with coffee and cigarettes, or try and sleep in the afternoon, something I almost never managed, and which, when I did, never left me remotely refreshed.
I had to lie down a little and sleep a little yesterday afternoon having come back from work, laying my head down on the sofa and muting Ready Steady Cook which I had turned on after listening to my Pimsleur Russian for a while. I woke up then and tried to get down to the entry about Wales above, but nothing gets down when you’re tired like that, and nothing helps. It can, and usually does, take a whole week to get over it, to feel fully refreshed and able to use those few hours at hand. It’s little wonder my life is full of frustration.
The Gingko Biloba slip up the other day didn’t help this time, of course, but as I wrote that night, there’s always something, and it is impossible to use the time I have.