Recharging

I am an introvert. No, that doesn’t mean I’m anti-social and never talk except to my cat at late hours of the night. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you either. It just means that every once in awhile I need some time to be alone to recharge my energy. Just as having assignment after assignment due at school can be exhausting, I find the continuous presence of others to be a tad draining.

One of my friends and I have a running joke that my favorite hobby is to “go home and lie on the floor and contemplate the meaning of life”. Admittedly, that’s not too far from the truth. There’s something so utterly calming about being left alone to do nothing. Part of that has to do with the fact that amid our chaotic high school lives, those moments are hard to come by. I, for one, am well aware of the challenge in finding my alone time, which often leads to late nights of lying in bed contemplating one abstract concept or another.

The problem with this, of course, is that it’s an ugly cycle of attempting to solve exhaustion with even more sleep deprivation. Ultimately it comes down to whether or not I think it would be worth it to get that extra bit of sleep. Increasingly, I tend to allow common sense to take over and I manage to lull myself to sleep at relatively reasonable hours of the night. Still, there are nights after particularly rough days when I can’t help but allow myself some time to stay up a little longer to listen to my Yiruma Pandora station and wonder the fantastical “what if’s”.

I suppose I could find another time during the day to get my “recharge time”. It would definitely be beneficial to my health seeing as I’m reasonably certain my lack of sleep has already taken off several years of my life. However, our regular school days allow for very little to no chance to find that time. During my freshman year, when I was still considered the “new kid”, I spent the majority of my lunch periods in the South Attic of our school. Sometimes a few other people would be up there practicing, but they rarely paid me any attention. However as I have become more engrossed in student life, it became increasingly more difficult for me to sneak away.

At this point I have essentially resolved to compromising with myself. I do my best not to hide away during the school days. I talk to friends, attend thespian meetings during lunch, and even sit in the hallways, rather than in some hidden corner, to do my homework. The trade off, of course, is that I continue to use my “secret survival strategy” because ultimately that alone time doing nothing is what keeps me going.