I’d woken up early,

and I took a long time getting ready to exist

I have tried but, I am not a morning person. I tend to be a person who lingers. I tend to wake up three hours before I am due to arrive at work. This is somewhat ridiculous. I live 15 km away. I once told my therapist this because I thought it was a sign of my inability to focus. He called me a social dilettante. I think it was meant as an insult. I didn’t take it as one. In my mind, I’m just resisting the urge to be a productive worker/consumer/tax-payer.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me

Of course I manage to work and be some sort of productive member of society, I manage to take care of myself, pay the bills and everything else I am supposed to be doing. Next time around, I might be part of some 5 am club, I might be the bright eyed morning person who reads, meditates and writes and still has time to exercise before heading out the door. For now, I manage to read the news and loose track of time. Every single morning.

And there are many whose dullness and sameness of life is not what they wanted for their life, nor the result of not having wanted any life, but just a dulling of their own self-awareness, a spontaneous irony of the intellect.

I sometimes think that the decision of living with two dogs was a sort of an unconscious attempt to ground myself and feel responsible towards other living beings. It has worked for the past 5 years.

I’ve never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong
steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do
what comes naturally to other people. I’ve always wanted to achieve
what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me
and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn’t tell
were there by sight or by touch; I didn’t live that life or that
dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my
dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of
what I never was.

References:
Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet