night marisa

I have this theory about myself that I developed last year and which I have since shared with multiple people. It goes like this: there are two parts of my personality. Normal Marisa....and Night Marisa. Normal Marisa is normal...but Night Marisa is AWESOME. She likes to go on adventures and philosophize and can write epic stories and be super crafty. She appears almost every night between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., though sometimes I (normal Marisa) get tired and am just useless at night. I think she appears more frequently when I have deviated from my nap schedule, whether that be taking extra naps or falling asleep at like 8 or not getting any naps all day (horror!).

I first noticed this in high school when I realized that my writing was way more natural (and funny and good) at night. For my creative writing class, I would try to write poems or short stories in the afternoons when I got home from school but they were literally the worst things ever. So then I learned to put off all of my assignments until the night before, and I would write them around 1 a.m. and then print them and then go to sleep and wake up like 3 hours later (this led to my nap addiction). Of course, everyone in my class confessed to doing the same thing, leading to my belief that all writers are best at night.

Looking back on my life after I came up with this theory, everything made sense. A lot of my friends noticed that I became super talkative at night. My whole family (minus my dad) stays up late to play games or watch movies (this is fodder for another topic entirely, so I'll leave it for now). It seems to be a learned behavior but also somewhat genetic.

To get into the psychology of it, I (normal Marisa) am an introvert and I strongly subscribe to the theory of Eysenck that introverts experience a higher baseline level of cortical arousal than extroverts. This implies that long, large or new social situations, which raise cortical arousal (ie activate parts of your brain which connect to heart rate, vigilance and other physical things related to alertness and make you read faster, more creative, more focused, etc.), put extroverts at a comfortable level but stress introverts out. Some theorists predict that introverts would be morning people because at that point their cortical arousal hasn't been too elevated so they seek out more interaction in the morning and isolation in the evening. I can see this.

But I am kind of the opposite...when I wake up I want some time to do my own thing and schedule out my day and figure out if my crazy dreams meant anything and figure out when and where I'm eating and catch up on everyone's lives via Facebook. By the time dinner has passed and I've been as productive as I'm going to be, I want one of three things: I want to do my homework for real and if anything gets in my way I will silently fume (or get really mad...this is not a good trait); I want to work on a really tangential and unimportant task with all of my energies, like sorting the Myers-Briggs personality types into the Hogwarts houses then trying to use the percentage of the total population who are supposedly each personality type to figure out if the fact that the students at Hogwarts are evenly divided into the houses means that the wizarding world is significantly different in its personality type makeup than the general population (it is); or I want to have an adventure slash meaningful conversation and I am super spontaneous. All of these are manifestations of Night Marisa.

I think it has to do with my inhibitions being lowered after being up so high all day. I am exhausted by the time 10 rolls around but I do get a second wind, probably because my mom does and makes me do things with her at night (like that time I had to construct bookshelves at 3 a.m....not that I'm complaining; I was raised with this and find it mostly normal).

HOWEVER, I was watching an episode of Seinfeld on Memorial Day because they had like an all day marathon and I was too lazy to get up or find the remote to change the channel, even though I knew what happened in all of the episodes (because I was partly raised on it...yes, this seems strange in retrospect). And one of Jerry's stand up segments was about night guy and morning guy, who gets so mad at night guy for staying up and making him want to sleep in and do poorly at work. And this is when I realized that I am way less insightful than I often claim to be.