It’s almost that time of year again, unfortunately. Spring forward, Fall backward. Daylight Saving Time. The good ol’ “confuse your body by altering the time associated with sunrise and sunset” event of now late-Winter. I mean, I’m excited to be able to drive home before it’s fully dark in maybe another week or two, but I’m not looking forward to feeling more tired than usual (if that’s even possible). Nor am I looking forward to how weird driving at sunrise and sunset are going to be for at least a week while everyone else adjusts to the change in the time-to-sunlight ratio in a way that somehow makes them a worse driver. It’s going to be a wild week and I’m going to be going into it with even less sleep than usual, which is a little rough these days considering how absolutely exhausted I am from a combination of burnout and trying a new medication that has me feeling pretty sleepy most days. All that said, I stand to benefit from it a little bit, too. My sleep schedule is usually at its worst during the winter months because I function better during DST than off it since I tend not to sleep through as much of the morning sunlight as I might otherwise. I love a later sunset, after all, and I’m really hoping that I can use this as the impetus to finally fix my sleep schedule. And, you know, for all my clocks to finally be right again (I stopped changing them years ago and now just let them be wrong for three solid months).

I was excited a few years back because it looked like we might finally do away with this dumb shifting of the clock, but the bills addressing it never even got voted on and the tumult of the last few years has largely driven it from everyone’s mind. Fairly so, I’d say. There’s much higher-priority stuff to do these days, if things are to be done (not gonna spiral about this, but let’s just say that I’m still incredibly unimpressed with all of my elected officials and their refusal to take any kind of action at the federal level), so it probably won’t land on anyone’s desk, much less get discussed in any kind of legislative session, for another few years at the very least. Who knows if it’ll even happen in my life time, what with the way things are going. It might be a long time before we have the time and space for frivolities–for things like “change the dumb shit we do twice-yearly with our clocks”–when much more important stuff like disease prevention, education, public works, and basic goddamn human rights are apparently in question. Can’t really fault anyone for not wanting to deal with daylight saving time in the midst of all that.

At least there’s some decent spring-ish weather to go with it this year. Which isn’t super great either, but I’m trying to look on the bright side. Nothing wrong with appreciating being able to take sunlit walks in the middle of the day again, or being able to walk to my car in something other than total darkness. Nothing wrong with appreciating that it’s already basically shorts weather again, and not in the way I like to joke that all weather is shorts weather if you’re not outside for that long. I just gotta try to avoid thinking about why all that stuff is and it’ll be fine. Which, after a year of needing to avoid the sunlight, worsening depression, and the slow decay of all my healthy exercise habits, I’m actually really looking forward to some warmth and light. The medication I was on, that made it painful to exist and more so to be any kind of active, also made my skin super sensitive to sunlight and I couldn’t stand to be wearing sunscreen all day while at work, so I had to skip out on my midday walks. I tried some late afternoon ones, but I still burned on some of those and it just never felt the same besides. It’ll be nice to finally get back to basking in the sun (or what passes for it on cloudy days) for thirty minutes a day.

Hopefully, with a little work and maybe some self-discipline, I can stop staying up so late and avoid letting the time change impact my sleep schedule too much. I’m certainly tired enough to try going to bed a bit earlier than usual, so I suspect that I could swing it if I could just tear myself away from my evening recreations. It’d be nice to not see the time change for the first time in a few years… Maybe that’s all I need. A little disruption to help me shake off the bad habits I’ve developed and redeveloped or worsened over the last four years so I can put some new, good habits in their place. Or maybe I’ll stay up super late again, get less sleep than I’d like, and continue to just be constantly tired like I’m the Bruce Banner of being tired. “That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always tired.” You know the line. Imagine how much I’d be able to do if I actually felt rested for once. Or, you know, turned in the Hulk of Tiredness.