The Winter My Mornings Fell Apart
The morning I noticed, I woke at 9:40 with the phone already in my hand and no memory of having picked it up. What made it register was not the time. It was working out, while lying there, that this had been the shape of every morning for about three weeks and that I had not thought about it once.
How it looked from inside
Sleep went first. I would fall asleep fine and then be awake at three, properly awake, and stay that way until five, at which point I would sleep hard until the alarm and wake up feeling like I had been hit. Then the alarm moved. Seven became half seven, half seven became eight, and eight became whenever the first meeting was. The hour did not get cancelled by a decision. It got eaten from the front, ten minutes at a time, and there was never a morning where I chose to stop.
By December I was starting the day at a screen, in bed, with a coffee I made and drank standing up in six minutes. I do not think anybody looking at me from outside would have seen a problem. I met my deadlines. The flat was reasonably clean. The thing that had gone was invisible from anywhere but inside.
The advice I gave myself, which was useless
My theory was that the routine had been holding everything up, so putting it back would put everything back. Get up at half six, do the sequence, and the mood will follow. I tried this for about ten days in January.
What happened is that I got the sequence and none of the effect. I stood at the window at half six in the dark feeling exactly as bad as I had felt in bed, with the addition of being more tired. The window was open, the coffee was good, and none of it touched anything. I want to be clear about this because I had believed the opposite for years and would have written the opposite here without hesitating. I now think the causality mostly runs the other way. Sleep and mood hold up the morning routine. The routine is a thing that happens when they are working, not a lever that makes them work. I say that as someone who badly wanted the flattering version to be true, because in the flattering version I am in charge.
The one thing I kept
Through all of it I kept opening the window for thirty seconds, whatever time I got up, including the mornings when that was ten past ten. Not because it helped much. I do not think it helped much. I kept it because it was the only piece small enough to survive the conditions, and because a version of the thing that still existed seemed worth more than an accurate account of its absence. When the rest came back, it came back around that. I do not know whether that is causal or whether I am telling myself a story about a window.
How it came back
Undramatically, and not through effort. A long work stretch ended in February, which removed the early calls. I had a conversation I had been avoiding since the autumn, which is not something I am going to detail, and after it I slept better within about a week. Somewhere in there I stopped needing the alarm.
Then the mornings reassembled on their own over roughly ten days. I did not rebuild them. I did not make a plan or a chart. One morning I was up at ten past seven with time to spare and I opened the window and stood there and it worked again, the way it used to, and the only honest thing I can say about the mechanism is that the order was sleep, then mood, then mornings. Never once the reverse.
What I revised afterwards
I used to half believe the hour was load bearing, that it was the thing keeping the rest upright. It is not. It is a good thing that happens when other things are already roughly all right, and it is a poor tool for making them all right. That is a smaller claim than the one I started with and I would rather write it down than keep the better sounding version in circulation.
There is a second revision that sits less comfortably. Through all of those months I was still capable of the things that actually matter to other people. I answered messages, turned up where I said I would, and was reasonable company at dinner. Whatever the hour gives me, it is not what makes me a functioning person, and I had quietly been assuming it was.
The practical consequence is that when I skip mornings now, I read it as information rather than as failure. Three skipped mornings in a row means something upstream is off, usually sleep, occasionally something I am not looking at directly. The morning is a gauge more than an engine.
Writing about mornings while not having any
The awkward part is that during those months I still had a blog about slow mornings sitting there. I published nothing for eleven weeks and told myself I was busy. The truthful reason is that I could not work out how to write about it without either lying by omission or making a larger announcement than I wanted to make about a fairly ordinary bad winter. So I said nothing, which is its own kind of dishonesty, and it is part of why I am putting this here now that it is over and I can describe it without needing anything from anyone.
