Good morning! Well, it’s nearly 2AM after all. That traditional blogging time, you know.

So I’ve been by myself for some time now after a long time having someone beside me almost constantly. And the thing that’s struck me the most is how one’s perception of time changes. Or maybe it’s not the perception of time, it’s the brain associating certain activities with certain memories and wanting to distance itself from them. Or, to simplify matters, it’s about the messed-up sleepytime routine of the lonely man.

Take going to bed. I’ve found it quite difficult to make myself go to bed at a reasonable hour. I never was particularly good at it at the best of times, but if the occasion demanded it, I could be in bed before midnight. Before 11PM, even. But now? Staying up late isn’t particularly unusual. This isn’t some attempt to take full advantage of my new-found and not-particularly-enjoyable freedom. It’s simply that going to bed means spending time alone in a dark room. Which, as anyone who has ever suffered through depression, stress, or any sort of crisis (all three of which I’m suffering right now) will tell you, is a sure-fire way to get one’s brain thinking about things you don’t really want to think about. So my body convinces itself that it’s not tired and doesn’t want to go to bed yet. So I don’t. Eventually I will collapse into bed and sleep, but it’s only once I really can’t go on any longer.

The side-effect to this is, of course, that it’s sometimes a bit difficult to wake up in the morning. But not only that. Having grown accustomed to waking up alongside someone else and having that presence there to spur you on to face the day, whatever it might entail, it’s a shock to the system to suddenly have to do all that yourself. I can wake up early, sure. But getting out of bed? More difficult. When it feels like there’s not much to get up for – and certainly no-one waiting for me to get up – it becomes easy to just lie there staring into space or worse, fall asleep again. This is, of course, enormously impractical and could probably be rectified by going to bed a bit earlier, but because of the aforementioned reasons, that’s difficult too. Vicious cycle, you see.

It’s not as if I don’t keep myself busy, though. If I stay up late, it’s not just to stare at a wall or sit there in floods of tears, though both of those have happened at least once recently. No, I find something to do. I find someone to chat to. I write something. I draw something. I play a game. I harass people on Twitter. Anything to avoid having to sit in that dark room trying to get to sleep, failing and hearing that little tap-tap-tap of the unpleasant thoughts come a-knockin’ on my brain. It’s a distraction, though, not a substitute.

So the moral of this story, then, is don’t be alone. It sucks.