Nine years in and people still ask me the same question when they find out I work overnight, some version of “doesn’t that mess you up?” And the honest answer is yes, in specific ways, and no, in the way they’re usually imagining, which is that I’m dragging through life exhausted and miserable. Mostly I’m not. What actually happens is you build a whole separate version of a normal day, just shifted eight or nine hours sideways, and the parts of it that are hardest aren’t the parts people guess.
The actual work isn’t the problem. Trucks come in, freight gets staged, orders get built, pallets go out, and honestly the floor runs calmer at 3am than it does at 3pm, less noise, less traffic in the aisles, a kind of quiet focus to it that I’ve genuinely come to prefer over the chaos I remember from a few day-shift jobs earlier in my life. What’s hard is everything outside the building. Doctor’s appointments, anything at a bank, any errand that assumes you’re a person who’s awake and functional during business hours, all of that requires either staying up on a day off, which wrecks the whole following week’s sleep, or dragging myself out of bed on four hours, which is its own kind of miserable.
The crew itself develops its own culture that I don’t think day-shift people fully get unless they’ve lived it. We’ve got our own rhythms, our own inside jokes that don’t translate outside the building, our own sense of what a “normal” hour is that has nothing to do with the actual clock on the wall. Marcus and I have worked the same overnight rotation for years now and there’s a kind of shorthand that builds up between people who’ve spent that many 3am hours in the same building together, doesn’t happen the same way on days where the crew turns over more and everybody’s schedule is more normal and less shared.
Renata and I have gotten good at protecting the overlap windows we do have, mostly weekend afternoons, sometimes a random weekday if her schedule shifts. I used to resent the mismatch more than I do now, felt like we were living two separate lives under one roof for a while there. What changed wasn’t the schedule, the schedule’s the same as it’s always been, it’s that we got more deliberate about treating the overlap time as actually protected instead of just whatever’s left over after everything else. A two-hour window on a Saturday afternoon, used well, does more for a marriage than eight hours of the same time slot spent half paying attention to each other.
Nine years running backwards from most people. I don’t know that I’d choose it again if I were starting fresh, but I’ve stopped thinking of it as something being done to me and started thinking of it as just the shape our life actually is.