Greeting the Dawn
Resetting my Circadium Rhythm Post Addision’s Disease Diagnosis
Recently, I’ve learned something transformative. I’ve learned that life is designed to be engaged with, not endured.
Perhaps you’ve always known this, even on your bad days. I think I’ve only known this in theory. I’ve listened to the inspirational TikToks on my ForYou page. I’ve nodded along at the uplifting podcast episodes. But when it came down to it, I didn’t know that life was not supposed to be at least a little bit painful. I came to expect a certain degree of constant suffering.
This understanding of life’s purpose was only challenged recently when I began to become reacquainted with mornings.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are moments of peace lost in my world in the mornings. As a child and a teenager, I was always a morning person. I’ve always loved the quiet stillness of mornings when no one else is awake. It’s a time when there is no space for ego. As a kid, I used to take this time to eat a Cheesestring and watch Rugrats. Now, I like to sit at my writing desk and play with words. The contentment is the same.
I lost that when I got sick. I lost over a decade of sunrises that I will never get back. For the past 11 years, I have been physically unable to get out of bed for many days. Most days, it would be lunchtime before I could move. Everyone else was hitting their afternoon slump when I was waking up. Except I never truly woke up, not really. Instead, I would push through life in a pain-induced, fatigue-fuelled daze. I got used to living in a haze of semi-consciousness. It was easier to dissociate entirely rather than acknowledge that my life was slipping away with little to no hope of returning.
During those 11 years, I did get to know midnights. You’d be surprised how intimately you can get to know darkness when your body won’t allow you to sleep, to drown out the constant shifting of your bones and cracking of your joints. Night-time is still, too, like mornings, but the darkness offers the knowledge that the world around you have stilled entirely. This felt comforting because it was the only time, I wasn’t actively falling behind my peers. In the middle of the night, it’s easy to pretend that everyone else is just as shattered as you are.
But then, The Miracle happened on December 14th, 2022. I was diagnosed with a rare chronic illness, Addison’s Disease, and began treatment. On a cellular, perhaps even spiritual level, I know that my energy levels have done a complete 180. Almost immediately, my body fell back into the circadian rhythm of a morning person. Of that girl who was up at dawn during school holidays. For the first time since I was seventeen, my body feels familiar and my own.
It's been a month of greeting mornings like an old friend. We lost touch for a while, but now, I’m ready for us to enjoy a coffee in silence together.
Today, I had an appointment in the hospital at 8AM. I drove over the hill into town and saw the sunrise over Tralee Bay. The sky was a kaleidoscope of peaches, purples, and inky blues, bleeding into one another. I was late for my appointment because I pulled over on the side of the road and simply stared at the sky. It took a long time for me to realise that I was crying.
If you take anything from this snippet of my life, please remember to take each sunrise and taste it. I do not mean that you ought to rise at dawn because that doesn’t suit everyone’s lifestyle. Rather, I invite you to embrace every sunrise of life. Embrace the glow of youth, health, and vitality. Embody what it means to laugh from your belly and feel fully, tremendously, undeniably alive.