It turns out that my light therapy is working very well. I have little trouble getting up in the morning at times that would be considered reasonable by the general public. 7:30 am, for example. I have been giving myself 30 minutes in the light each morning and moving the time I sit in the light forward each day to reset my internal clock's "morning" a bit earlier on each go. As far as I can tell, my body now behaves like morning is morning and evening is evening and night is night. This is the good news.

The bad news is that I now get tired at what would be considered a reasonable hour by the general public too. I still have the problem of often having more I want to accomplish in a day than there is time to do it, and as a result I still have a tendency to push myself to stay up. Sometimes I get more accomplished that way, but often I just keep myself awake on the stress of not doing as much as I wanted to do. It registers as pointless, but it's still very hard to effectively stop. The light makes it easier to get up in the morning, but if I stayed up too late the night before then I'm tired during the day. Sure, that's normal, but I know I can't sustain it indefinitely, and I know it's not healthy to try to do so.

There must be a next step after light therapy to finish up giving myself a healthy schedule with plenty of sleep. For quite a while I thought that having to get up early for a proper job every day would help, and it may, but in other ways it's counterproductive because it means I'll get less done around the house and from my list of personal projects, and that will increase the temptation to stay up late more frequently.

So, I've finally figured out how to do it. I need to get a patron. Someone who will give me a monthly paycheck that has "because you're awesome" written in the "memo" area. It doesn't even have to be a huge paycheck, and of course I'll pay taxes and everything like I'm supposed to. I'm thinking $85,000 a year is totally reasonable initially, and I'd even give my patron the option to lower my "salary" a bit the month after I get the rest of my credit card debt paid off. (If you're interested, drop me a line. We can go over the particulars before you make any commitments.)

what's on:
"The Blood Song" (King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) - They)