by: Lydia Liu
Public Relations Manager

Unlike middle school, my high school classes have never felt so applicable to my actual life. I can tell you how the human body works thanks to Biology, how much sleep a teenager needs thanks to Health and Fitness, and how woefully unprepared all of that knowledge has left me for what happens every single morning.

Everyone knows about the morning alarm. It goes off, you dismiss it. It goes off again, you dismiss it with more conviction. By the third alarm, you have already imagined yourself getting up, walking across the room, and turning it off, which your brain counts as close enough before you drift back into unconsciousness, convinced that you handled the situation. I have spent the better part of this year peeling myself off my mattress to silence an alarm that seems to go off earlier every single morning. Four hundred times, give or take. Clearly, whoever put this schedule together has never once had to follow it themselves.

Even though I always go to bed feeling like an intellectual, full of plans, ambitions, and the delusion that I will wake up on time, I cannot help but notice that somehow, every morning, I open my eyes and it is already 8:19 AM. I do not know how this happens. I remember setting four alarms. I named them. I put a different ringer for each one. I gave them motivational messages like “WAKE UP U LAZY BUM” and “YOU WILL REGRET THIS.” And yet here we are, 11 minutes before first period, and I am doing the most unhinged thinking of my life: trying to figure out if dry shampoo counts as a shower.

For all you overachievers and morning people who bounce out of bed looking fresh and well-rested: first of all, who hurt you, and second of all, do not come up to me in the morning and comment on my hair looking like a bird’s nest because I have a legitimate excuse. It is called delayed sleep phase syndrome. Look it up. Teenagers’ bodies are literally programmed to fall asleep later and wake up later, so early school start times aren’t just annoying, they’re working directly against our circadian rhythms.

Saturday morning I am up before anyone asks me to be. No alarm, no parent cracking the door open, no threats about being late. I just wake up, naturally, feeling like a functional human being. But Monday comes and suddenly I am the laziest person alive who needs to learn some responsibility. Same kid. Same phone. Same everything. The only thing that changed was which Lydia decided when I had to open my eyes. If my habits were ruining my sleep, why do they only seem to ruin it on school days? The only thing that changed is that school is not involved. I am not the problem. The schedule is.

For now, I am officially signing off and submitting my formal request for school to start at 10:00 AM, or, better yet, noon. Until administration can sort this out, you can find me in my bed, horizontal, unbothered, and finally getting the nine hours of sleep my brain so desperately needs.

I will see you all eventually, probably in seventh period.