For Those Of Us Who Don't Do Mornings: The 5 Stages of Waking Up

Mornings are the enemies of college students everywhere. Unless you have the sunny disposition and general motivation of a morning person, that is. If you're a morning person, night time is no threat to you, it's just the time where you go to sleep (and possibly even make lunches for your day tomorrow, you organized wonderful freak). But if you're a night person, if you stay up late and indulge in a TV binge, morning is your enemy, a silent deadly enemy. While you're asleep, morning will come and creep in through your curtains and travel up your bed until it gets to your face and blinds your eyes with its sunlight and its bird noises. For morning people it's a lovely gentle greeting to the day, for the rest of us we lie there and go through these five stages before we can recover and motivate ourselves to get up and do something with our day;

Denial

The first stage, that of denial. You can't believe that it's really time to get up. Your bed is warm and you're cozy and happy. You must have messed up your alarm, or your housemate is messing with you, there's no way you have to get up now. It can't be morning, it just can't be. 'That can't be my alarm. I literally went to sleep like five minutes ago. My phone must be broken. I can't do this.'

Anger

Second stage: anger. Your frustration barrels through your denial. You're furious with yourself and with the universe. Everything is so unfair and no one has it worse off than you. You're trapped in self-concerned furious frustration: 'Why did I stay up so late watching Netflix?? When am I going to get my life together??'

Bargaining

You'd do anything to stay in bed for another hour. You mentally flick through your imaginary Rolodex of excuses to find one that you haven't used to get out of your morning lecture. Maybe you're 'sick'. You start questioning whether or not you actually need to go to this class in the first place. Are the notes available online? Can your friend get the notes for you? 'If I go sleep now for another ten minutes then I wouldn't have time to have a shower, but I can go to the gym after my first lecture and shower then! Plus, I'll definitely go to bed earlier tonight.'

Depression

Anger dissipates into depression. You let out a sigh and feel like just bawling your eyes out. Life is past unfair, it's unjust. You know you have to get up, but you can't. The pressure of your conscience is weighing down on your happiness and squashing it out. You pull the blankets over your head and contemplate life without early mornings. 'Well, shit this sucks. Everything is warm here, but I can't stay. It's so unfair, everything is so unfair, I hate this, this is so crap, why??'

Acceptance

You check your phone again and see that you have 20 minutes to get to class. You let out a huge sigh and kick the covers off you. As much as you hate it, it's time to get up and go. This is my life now. Tired angry and messy. This sucks, but this is how it is. Time to go out and meet the world, even if you really don't want to.

Where the fuck did I put my bag??