I wake up at 5:45 or 6am now. I have a routine. A walk, sometimes. A journal where I write three pages in before my brain has fully decided to participate. Build my to-do-list for the day. By 8 AM I have done more than I used to do by noon and I am supposed to feel good about that.
I mostly do. That is the uncomfortable part.
There was a version of me that only existed after 11 PM.
She was not more productive. She was not more disciplined. But she thought differently, slower and stranger and without the performance of being useful. She wrote things she did not plan to write. She followed a thought all the way to its weird end without checking if it was going anywhere practical. She sat with questions she did not need to answer by morning.
That version of me was not optimized for anything. She was just – present. Fully, wastefully, gloriously present inside her own head.
I miss her in a way I did not expect, though it feels kinda odd..
Nobody tells you that self-improvement has a cost. Cost of being a care-free soul.
The productivity world will give you the benefits: better sleep, better focus, more output, more mornings that feel like momentum. And the benefits are real, I will not pretend they are not. I am less foggy. I answer emails at a reasonable hour. I do not spend three days recovering from staying up until 3 AM chasing a thought that turned out to be nothing.
But here is what they do not put in the morning routine content: you also lose the texture of who you were in the dark.
The 6 AM version of me is functional. She shows up. She delivers. She is a person the world finds legible and useful and on time.
The 1 AM version of me was none of those things. She was also more honest.
I think about what I was actually doing in those hours.
Not working, mostly. Not being productive in any way anyone would recognize. I was reading things that led to other things. I was writing sentences I deleted. I was sitting with the specific silence of a world that had gone to sleep and left me alone with myself, and there was something in that silence I needed that I did not have a name for then and still do not have a name for now.
It was not insomnia. It was not avoidance, or not only avoidance. It was something more like- permission. The feeling that the day was over and its demands were done and I could finally be whoever was left after all the performing.
The morning does not give me that. The morning is already asking something of me before I have finished my lemon water.
Self-optimization is a strange thing to grieve.
It feels ungrateful. You made yourself better. You built discipline. You became someone who does the things she says she will do before the day has a chance to take them from her. This is good. This is growth. This is what the people in the productivity content told you to want.
And you do want it. That is the problem. You want it and you also want the other thing and the two cannot fully coexist and you chose this one and you would probably choose it again.
But, I am a better version of myself at 6 AM than I was at 1 AM in every measurable way.
I am also a smaller one.
The 1 AM version had edges that the morning has softened. She was more difficult and more interesting and less easy to be around and completely unwilling to perform okayness when she was not okay. She said things out loud that the morning version edits into something more acceptable.
I do not know if that is growth. I do not know if that is loss. I suspect it is both and I suspect that is the part nobody talks about when they talk about becoming who you are supposed to be.
But some nights I stay up past midnight just to feel what it is like to be in that silence again. Not productive. Not optimizing. Just sitting in the dark being someone in the morning does not get to see.
She is still there. A little quieter now.
I am trying not to lose her entirely.
