Meditations on time
and my strange relationship with it
I said I would write, and three months passed by without a peep…!
I think I’ve been in quite a meditative mood recently, partly because work’s been picking up and partly because of the frustratingly slow recovery of an injury causing me vestibular (balance) issues. Each moment seems like an infinitesimally tiny slice of my life, with the whole weight of the present contained within it. (Is the pressure on the outside stronger than the pressure within?)
I’m not sure if it’s an AuDHD, ADHD, or just a me thing, though I’ve heard it’s a common experience among neurodivergent folks. The faster things seem to whirl around me, the slower I seem to move—both literally and figuratively—much to the chagrin of my parents, friends, and now, my husband. It’s hard to explain, but the more intense the situation, the calmer I feel. No one can get me to move faster, especially when I’m late; that’s when my movements get even more deliberate and sure. Finish my skin care routine with someone yelling in the background. Cleanser, toner, serum, moisturiser, sunscreen. Apologise to the yelling person, then rush out of the house to go somewhere. This trait of mine is only useful in emergencies, like when my cat’s tail was bleeding from an injury, and I calmly gave instructions to a panicking husband.
But emergencies don’t happen every day.
Days pass, things happen, I meet people, I work, and what happened last week feels like it happened last month. When people say the past bleeds into the present, I’m sure they mean it metaphorically. Not me. It feels like living in parallel timestreams, past, present, and future all at once. From moment to moment, I’m alternating my focus between them like I’m switching between the different lenses of a microscope, but they’re all always present on the same slide.
That past moment, the one I try to pin down on a slide under a microscope, to analyse and dissect for meaning, has mysteriously disappeared. But like some sleight of hand, it always reappears in the future, which becomes the present as we think of it, and branches off into yet other moments.
Considering the sea of choices compressed into a single moment is what sends me into a liminal (and not unpleasant) space of mental wandering where time almost ceases to exist—because it has no importance there. In that space, I see many pictures and videos of moments, but they’re not always tagged to a particular time. Past, present, and future collapse, pressing up against the limits of all the choices I have made and will make.
But of course, time exists for the rest of the spaces I embody. Since time feels elusive to me, I’ve been anchoring myself with some attempts at record-keeping: writing short journal entries in my daily planner, creating art and music as a way to capture my state of mind/heart in that moment, and looking at old diaries/photos to reorient myself when I need a chronological view of my life.
Looking back on one such moment, I wrote about a song I’ve loved since 15 years ago (16 years, now), “Zdes’ khorosho” (“How Fair This Spot”), which I finally recorded last year in November:
…in singing it now, I’m revisiting the years past and the challenging journeys I took to get here. This place is one of blessing—how fair, how spotless and without blemish we are when we’re here. Never quite arrived but always arriving; always in the process of becoming.
And here I am, in the process of becoming as I write these words.
Hi, I’m Rachel Tng, a disability and neurodiversity researcher, advocate and artist. Thank you for reading this post! If you’d like to follow my work, I’d love for you to subscribe to Uninverted.
You can also read my first post, “How to translate a mind,” to learn more about why I started Uninverted.