Nobody warns you, when you take a night shift job, how much of the actual difficulty is administrative rather than physical. The staying awake part I adjusted to inside a couple months. What took years, and honestly still isn’t fully solved, is everything downstream of living on a schedule that doesn’t match the one every business, every friend, every piece of daylight-dependent infrastructure in this town runs on.
Blackout curtains were step one, obviously, cheap ones first, then better ones after I realized the cheap ones let in exactly enough light around the edges to convince my body it was worth waking up at eleven in the morning for no reason. Earplugs, a white noise machine that I’ve had to replace twice because I apparently run them into the ground, a phone set to do-not-disturb on a schedule that confuses every app I own into thinking I’m perpetually in a different time zone. None of that was the hard part, though. The hard part is the friends.
You lose some without meaning to, just through attrition, through being the person who has to say no to the dinner, the birthday thing, the spontaneous Sunday plan, often enough times that people stop asking, not out of malice, just because a standing no eventually reads as an answer. Marcus gets it because he’s lived some version of it himself. The Thursday group gets it because they’ve built around my schedule specifically. Everyone else, mostly, I’ve had to actively maintain, texting people at odd hours just to stay present in their lives, showing up bleary and slightly wrong-footed to the two hours of someone’s wedding I could actually make.
What I didn’t expect, four years in, is how much I’ve come to prefer certain things about it. The town at two in the afternoon on a weekday, when I’m awake and everyone with a normal job isn’t, has a specific quality I’ve gotten attached to, quiet in a different way than the desert at midnight, populated but slow, like a rehearsal for the real day rather than the day itself. I do my grocery shopping then. I read on a bench in a park that’s otherwise mostly empty. It’s not what I’d have chosen at twenty two, working retail on a schedule I actually resented. It’s just what I have now, and there’s a version of contentment in it that took longer to arrive than I expected, and that I still don’t fully trust, some days, not to leave again.