Cerebellum Chic

Most liberating day: Crack Den Day

Friday February 3^rd was a great day for me. They’d been this kind of pressure I’d been maintaining in January that was basically like a posture I was holding whilst waiting for a yoga teacher to move a couple of limbs to the correct angel and eventually release me from.  I was doing all the right things but felt this imposing “new year” pressure chasing me.  It’s still menacingly walking behind me as I march on into the illusory concept of time, but February 3^rd was when I told it to do one and stop creepily watching me.  Now, I think we’ve reached an understanding that it can’t not follow me, it’s my shadow side or something, but we might be becoming friends.

Although, I am in the process of learning about myself, being my own best friend, advocating for myself – all that good stuff – sometimes I’m merely going through the motions with it, I’m doing the right stuff but I’m not really feeling on my own side.  This was cropping up as a messed-up sleep schedule that just wouldn’t let me ‘correct’ it.

As most of the world returned to work and I was returning to my, at the moment non-working and nonroutine life, following the disruption of the anything goes Christmas weeks and an increasingly worsening phobia of sleeping soundly when home alone and husband leaving me to watch out for ghosts alone for a few nights, I just couldn’t find myself getting to sleep at an hour that anyone out there doing anything ‘proper’ could function at. This is fine if you sleep in.  Which I was doing.

After a passive aggressive dig from a loved one about this issue that I hadn’t raised with them (the genius of a dysfunctional family is knowing exactly where that Achilles heel lies at all times, through tingly senses alone) a few tears and the weeks therapy session, my liberation was found when I decided truly, not to care about long nocturnal streak.

I looked up anything I could find on night owls (the figurative kind, I don’t know anything about owls, I just had to google whether owls are actually nocturnal – I mean, I guess that would be really stupid if they weren’t.  Are there any other animals that have an equally as famous reputation that was started from a total rumor?) and just decided to embrace it.  Why do I care?  If my body wanted to go to sleep a bit earlier, it’s welcome to.  This is my preference right now.  All these boastful productivity articles about ‘successful’ people who wake up at 5 a.m.  Whadya know?  I was awake an hour before them!  We are both enjoying those silent “whilst everyone else is sleeping moments” just one of them has more stigma.  It was like this revelation to me that it’s outdated and doesn’t suit me, right now.  In fact, it was stressing me out and making the issue worse. And hellooo most people are into flexible working now.  Even if I did have an office job, I would be requesting the schedule that’s later, as that’s what works for me.  Who says I want to be an apex predator, boss type, anyway? I don’t have business clients eager to talk to me from the New York office.  Who says I even want to catch the worm?  Owls eat beetles, at night.   I was still fed, sheltered, watered, washed (at this stage), does my character improve if I sleep at 10 p.m. (well, probably a little), is my sleep schedule saying anything about my morality? I decided not.  I also decided, I’m tired of qualifying everything to that shadowy figure behind me.

So, once I hit this kind of “I am what I am” AHA moment – again, whadya know? I slept!  Exhilarated from the freedom of deciding to embrace living an unconventional life, I felt my first bout of sleepiness somewhere not too far from the sun’s own rhythm.  The next morning my eyes were totally opened in time for me to have hypothetically had time to sit in front of a P.C. before 9 a.m. Of course, if I was going to do the pyjama bottom trick and probably accept not washing my face, which isn’t far off how much time I reserved for myself before leaving for work when I was working.  One day I’ll tell you the story about my record 3 minute from bed to bus story. Put like that it sounds almost wholesomely efficient, like “from farm to table” restaurants.

Of course, there was no need to do any of that.  I’m awake, and I’m unemployed! Correction, a homemaker.  To celebrate my not caring about my distance from the land of the status quo, I decided to sit up in bed and not get out of it. Husband brought me coffee, like any good husband does for his housewife wife before he starts work, and I start journalling, leisurely, in bed, for most of the morning.  There is a brief interval when in my newfound liberation I also decided to adapt one of these “hacks” I had been trying that was supposed to help me with the sleep cycle.  It’s from Andrew Huberman and he says you should make sure you get morning sunlight into your eyes as soon as rise, not through a window but by being outside.  There are certainly benefits from doing this, but you know, sometimes it’s just too much faff if you also want to do your Fly Lady morning cleaning routine, your journaling etc.  So, I decided to just stick my head out of the window.  Like a dog in a car.  In my pyjamas.  Just dangling out my second floor apartment window titling my head up towards the sunlight.  Letting those photons in.

Once that was done, I returned to bed.  In my filth, I started to get a bit hot.  Now I introduce nudity to the story for no other purposes then to illustrate the following.  Every time I find myself naked in a position of vulnerability within my home, like curtains being open or I’m not next to the opaque window in the bathroom designed for said nakedness, I have the following two thoughts.  “Yeah, I’m naked. And what.  It’s my home.” Followed by “unless, it’s the first Friday of the month and the window cleaners are about”.  It’s always the 1^st Friday of the month.  You are totaling eye-rolling me now.  I’m obviously doing it on purpose.  What an exhibitionist.  Like that person who always tries to one up your story, or bring the conversation back to themselves in a clunky way.  Yeah, sure, you just happen to naked in front of the window cleaners all the time.  Well, yeah.  It must be a similar law of nature to the sleep thing.  When you stop caring about it, it will stop happening.  An algorithmic aligning of the universe.  This lesson will keep appearing, at your window, until you learn it.  They come on the 1^st Friday of the month for goodness sakes woman, when you have a job again like the rest of the world, you’ll stop running into them naked in the middle of the day Friday.

So there I am journalling in bed, pyjama top less, and I hear that little knock of the ladder against the window.  I put my Mathematician father-in-law’s jumper on that has a clever algebra joke written on it with the accompanying equation that I have no idea the meaning of but I think makes me look a disheveled genius, and pull those curtains shut.  This is my day. 

Later, I’m enticed out by the sound of a woman whispering in our living room.  My husband is interviewing people for a role within that real world I’ve ostracized myself from and she is performing the test part of the interview and whispering through her thoughts and the instructions to herself. Corporate ASMR.  See how normalcy can change so quickly? Corporate interviews now take place in corporate managers’ living rooms whilst they whistle themselves up some bruschetta from the kitchen and their wife emerges from her crack den to accidentally eaves drop on your mental process.  The world is as weird as me. 

Once that was wrapped up, we sat together and caught up on how his prior team day went down well and how his task to come up with “provocative statements” was well received.  One of his was “I am as a productive when working in my pyjamas as I am in my best clothes”.  Good one, I said! And then asked him, what’s for lunch?  As I exited the living room, the window cleaner had set himself up at the kitchen window, directly opposite me.  Busted.  He saw me, unwashed, pyjamas, approaching 1 p.m.  I pretended we hadn’t had eye contact and darted out the way, closing the door to my den again.  So what? I could have covid, I thought.  No! No qualifiers.  This is my day of mental liberation.  Love God and do what you want, St Augustine said.

The afternoon had wrapped up with another delivery from the outside world, a hot chocolate with and a piece of chocolate cake that I didn’t even request.  I think the New Agers would call that super manifesting.  Apparently, when you stay in your room all day with the curtains drawn and refuse to get dressed it can still be appealing to your best dressed at work award winning significant other as long as you are having fun and delighted every time they check on you.  Then the evening was scene out with by celebrating the launch of Cerebellum Chic with Chinese food and Tom Hanks in B.I.G.  A perfect day, am I right?