I don’t do mornings.

In fact, I’m slightly uncomfortable right now because it is morning as I write this.

There’s just something about me and the a.m. that don’t mix. Now when I say I don’t do mornings, people think I mean I have a hard time waking up, or I’m lazy, or I stay up too late.

No.

I mean that it physically pains me to wake up in the morning. It is mentally and emotionally draining for me to wake up anytime earlier than 10:00 am. It doesn’t matter how early I go to sleep or what I’m waking up for, if it’s considered morning, then I am not a happy camper.

Like last night for example, I went to bed at 9:30 p.m.… 9:30 on Friday night (I know, I’m quite the party animal). And my goal was to wake up at 7 a.m. so I could get a solid morning run in before starting my day. Sleeping from 9:30 p.m. to 7  a.m. is eight and a half hours, so I figure that’s more than enough time to recuperate and be ready to go in the morning.

Did that happen? Nope.

Instead I couldn’t wake up until 10 a.m. That’s 12 and a half hours, and I still felt as though I could sleep longer.

I work at a gym, and every Sunday I have to wake up 5:30 a.m. so I can be there to open at 6:30 a.m. There is not one Sunday that goes by that I don’t lie in bed contemplating if today is the day I get fired because I just couldn’t make it out of bed.

‘Where’s Brittany?’ ‘Oh she didn’t open the gym because she had a panic attack trying to wake up this morning, so we fired her.’

Yup, that’s my fate. It’ll happen one of these days.

I even had to drop my first class ever this semester because I just couldn’t drag my bag of bones out of bed fast enough to be sitting in class by 8:30 a.m. That wasn’t the only reason I dropped the class, there were other contributing factors – the class itself was excruciatingly boring, I had a four hour lull between that class and my next, and to top it all off the professor was an (expletive).

But I digress.

In my ideal world, the day would start around 11 a.m. Nothing would be scheduled before 11, you see.  You wouldn’t have to be at work until 11 a.m., and classes sure as hell would not start before 11.

I haven’t been into mornings for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of me at age 5 wailing my head off crying as my mom struggles to get me into my Catholic school uniform in the morning.

Speaking of my mother, I love her dearly but I do believe she is somewhat to blame for my lack of enthusiasm in the a.m. I take after her, and she too doesn’t do mornings. In fact, she might be worse. She has on more than one occasion – faked sick, killed off a family member, or fallen victim to sudden “engine troubles” just to avoid waking up and going to work in the morning.

But alas, I am my own person and I can’t blame my morning struggles on anyone but myself. So why is it that I just can’t do mornings? Is it the gravitational pull that my bed has over the rest of my body? Is it the warm blanket that has itself wrapped so tightly around me that I couldn’t possibly escape its grasp to venture out into cold, cruel world?

Who knows.

Writing about this is excruciating. It’s made me exhausted. I’m off to bed. Catch you in the p.m.