One thing that I knew would be great during quarantine was all the sleep I would get. At school, I was always excited about the nap I would take after school; most days, that would be all I could think about. Now all I do is sleep all day every day; I only wake up when I have to. My sleep schedule is nonexistent — I sleep 10 hours a night, and I take at least two long naps a day. 

The positives of all this sleep are my catching up with all the sleep school took from me and my love of sleep. Yet I miss deadlines by sleeping, such as in music appreciation and Prob and Stats. Thankfully my grade didn’t change; the assignments were just marked “turned in late.” Since my sleep schedule is so wrong, I am anxious about the return to school in August. 

Over the summer, like most teenagers, I stay up later than usual, but never as late as now.  Most days I don’t fall asleep until 6:15 a.m., and I don’t wake up until 5 p.m. I’ve tried to fix my sleeping habits many times, but it never works. 

I have tried setting alarms to wake up, but I always turn them off and go back to sleep. My sleeping has gotten so bad because I am no longer required to wake up early to go to school, my only responsibility. Even when I had school, I would oversleep a lot, resulting in lots of tardies. Oftentimes, I was so exhausted that I found myself sleeping in my classes. 

Now school assignments with time restraints are the only things I have to wake up for. I’ve learned that I have no willpower; waking up is the hardest thing I have to do every day, and I am a very big night owl. 

To fix my life, I plan on setting alarms in the hope that they will work, finding something to do that requires me to be up at a certain time and trying to set up a schedule for my day, but no changes have happened. This new distorted sleep schedule has helped me realize that in college I think I’d prefer night classes to day classes and that I’d rather work a night shift in the real world. 

Things people could learn from this personal struggle of mine is that it’s very important for me to set a schedule for my day so I get everything done at a decent time.