Have you ever loved someone who was a wreck in the morning? It’s a rollercoaster, every morning.
I’ve loved oversleepers, perpetual key losers, late starters, grumps, drunks, jerks and folks who were just plain “not morning people.” My mother is pretty organized, but I can remember many mornings as a child where she was running late, which meant I was running late, which meant there would be some sort of frenzied worry until she got to work, and I got to school.
As a childless person, I’m going to give the parents reading this *tons* of slack because kids can bring mornings to screeching halts. I give parents grace, but these lovers I’ve had were also childless. So we cannot use cute little kids as excuses here. No, these mornings of my past could have been different, frequently. Instead, they always had me strapping in and bracing for the next fire to extinguish.
Call it my virgo placement, call it a sprinkling of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Call it what you want. But I am a beast at organization. I love setting my mornings up for success, sometimes even the night before. Maybe even days before, depending on the urgency of the coming day. When my lifestyle changed, and I started dating a person who wasn’t fighting battles with their demons every single morning, it felt like I had the luxury to have peace when I woke up. But surprisingly, the chaos still lingered.
When I was in an abusive relationship, my ex-partner and I used to argue most mornings. By 9am, I had usually been called the equivalent of fifty “cunts” and hundreds of “bitches.” I had no idea how scarred I was until I was (thankfully) out of that terrible relationship. Weirdly enough, I would still have arguments in my own head a lot of mornings — residual fights that I was unfortunately used to. So instead of someone else doing it, I was calling myself an idiot, or declaring the day bad before it started, or going online and finding something to be angry about, which never took very long.
The Internet is great at boiling the blood. But I didn’t even need the Internet to rile me up. I just needed my own brain. The beginnings of my days had to change desperately for my own sanity. So I had to retrain my brain to be nice. To be cool. To be as chill in the morning as possible. Because my household is peaceful. The only chaos that could start in the morning would have to be the kind I cooked up myself.
So I had to kill my old mornings.
I had to do away with the notion that a morning has to be hurried and stressful. I had to kill “the wrong side of the bed.” I had to kill the unfortunate early self loathing. In order to do that, I had to execute affirmations that were the complete opposite of what I’d always known. I had to do really corny shit, like smiling as soon as I opened my eyes. I had to tell myself that I was blessed and awesome as soon as my brain started thinking. I had to pray. I had to flood myself with love before anyone got the chance to give me anything else. My mornings had to become sacred.
That isn’t to say that the little fires don’t happen. Just the other day, my morning started with some terrible news. But instead of it being a pile-on to an already shitty morning, it was something bad that happened in an otherwise decent day. There’s a big difference. One doesn’t have to declare the morning, or the day, bad. We don’t have to throw the whole morning away. We can be nice, even earlier than we may like. Even before our almond milk vanilla lattes. We can even be, dare I say, pleasant at the start of our days. It’s weird to think about, but it’s true. And if my cynical ass can do that, anyone can.
We are socialized to be stressed out and irritable. One glance at the news can erase joy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Get corny in the morning. Kill off the idea that the wrong side of the bed exists. Take back your morning by being so kind to yourself it’s almost laughable. I guarantee you won’t be so easily angered by the time the barista gets your coffee order wrong.
Carpe diem.
