Deborah Lipp

My ex is a confirmed night owl. At some point, he wanted to coin a term for daylight people, e.g. the opposite of night owls. I tried “normal” but he rejected that and came up with larks.

But the urge to divide people into owls and larks is just one of the many unimportant but ubiquitous examples of the dualism of our culture: Day or night, good or evil, male or female, right or wrong, we divide divide divide and never see the gray areas.

I am not a morning person. Just. Not. I wake up slowly and I don’t do well when the alarm goes off much before 7. Conversation before coffee is sluggish and reluctant.

But I get most of my work done in the morning. I clean the bathroom while I’m getting ready for work. I leave the dishes in the sink after dinner and wash them the next morning while making coffee. Then I get to work, get myself more coffee, and am at peak productivity before lunch.

I could continue with the boring details. I’m most social in the evenings. I have a dead zone around 2 p.m. I’m usually up past midnight but can’t write productively my last hour or so awake. The point is, I’m neither an owl nor a lark. I’m me. I have my own cycles and my own interaction with light, food intake, and the other things that affect circadian rhythms.

And so does everyone else. It’s just one more box we don’t have to squeeze into.