One of the advantages of being in college is that you virtually lose the need for sleep. In high school I would just put off doing anything I needed to do until like 11 p.m. and then be like, “Well, it’ll just have to wait now, I can’t possibly stay up a minute after 11 or I’ll be a useless zombie tomorrow and I don’t have the time or patience to be a useless zombie so I need to sleep NOW,” and I would drop whatever I was doing, get into bed, sleep for six or seven hours and wake up relatively easily, and of course I wouldn’t be a walking zombie the next day.

But here in college, there’s no going to bed before 2 a.m., especially with a roommate like mine, who has this charming habit of screaming at anything that disappoints her- and I literally mean scream, like the murder scene in “Psycho” scream, at things like someone taking too long to text her back or her flat iron taking too long to heat up- so you could say my need for sleep has been virtually eliminated because it’s not like I really have a choice.

But even though waking up in the morning feels like the apocalypse (all inclusive: the cowering under blankets in fear, fighting against all odds to rise and survive, contemplating the terror of approaching doom) it’s worth it. I literally have to pep talk myself out of bed every morning, like “Come on girl, you got this! Yeah, look at you being a total badass and throwing off the blankets. Now just sit up, come on, go, go, NO DON’T YOU LIE DOWN AGAIN.” Defeat. The good cop/ bad cop act continues until I have two minutes left to get ready and then it’s, “Get up, bitch, look how much time you wasted. You’ll never find a husband now,” as I frantically search for any random clothes to put on my body and pull my sad excuse for hair all the way back and check that my eyeliner hasn’t gone running all over my face in the night.

This routine worked fine until one day when I guess I didn’t check hard enough because I was walking around campus, passing time between classes, you know, went to Starbucks, shopped around my campus gift store, chatted with the cashier, and was about to go strolling some more when thank goodness I stopped in the bathroom because what I had not seen was a smudge of eye makeup right in between my eyebrows, making me look like I had the fiercest unibrow you’ve ever seen.So the late waking up routine has its shortcomings.

But I have to admit I love giving myself permission to stay up into the wee hours working on creative projects that only ever surface late at night, like little design experiments or research rampages or brainstorms on how to get a YouTuber to fall in love with me. I can see why artists find so much inspiration in late hours. I’m not sure if it’s the state of mind I get into when I’m up so long or the permission to break the rules because I’m already breaking sleeping rules, but whatever it is, I find myself exploring the person I want to be and the things I want to do when I have these sort of late night creation-vigils, and the inspiration it breathes into me is just enough to get me up for a too-early class and to keep plugging away at the things I care about creating.

Here’s hoping tomorrow is easy on me, because I think tonight was worth it.

DFTBA