Recalibrating

I’m giving up the nightlife. Not in the sense that I’ve decided to stop doing designer drugs and move on from the dance-till-closing-time club scene, because other than manufactured pharmaceuticals taken as prescribed, I have never done a designer drug in the first place, and I haven’t been to a club since the Beforetimes (i.e., 2019)—I can’t very well let go of a lifestyle I don’t have. What I mean is that, after a few months working overnight in a crisis residential facility, I’m going back to the 9-to-5 routine.

It was going to happen sooner or later; see the previous post identifying this pace as unsustainable. I just didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon, but I got an offer too good to pass up, and so here I am: hanging up the eye mask I wear to sleep during the daylight.

I’m going to miss parts of it. When I wasn’t also doing school and my internship, the pace was wholly sustainable. On my nights off, I had peace and quiet, space to experiment and explore and exist. I wrote prolifically, banging out 10k in one night on a few occasions. I did laundry at 3 AM and had breakfast with my family before going to bed for the day.

Now, the seventeen-year-old I live with hugged me this afternoon and said, “I haven’t seen you in three days,” and he wasn’t wrong.

There’s no real thesis or conclusion to this post, except to say that I was right—it was unsustainable.