Sleep

I’ve always had sleep issues, I just didn’t understand that they weren’t normal. It would regularly take me hours to fall asleep even long before homework kept me up till the small hours of the morning. It wasn’t rare to “pass” my dad getting up for work - in my defense, the man got up at 4:30 AM for YEARS - when I was finally sacking out for the night. But no teenager sleeps well, right?

I can’t remember a time when sleep and I didn’t have what my friend would refer to as a “complex relationship”. When I was young, I would wait till my parents went to bed, and turn the light back on and read for another couple hours. As I got older, schoolwork started to be a good excuse to stay up later, although I was still running a morning routine timed to adults with hour-plus commutes.