Probably my biggest mental weakness (not to say that there aren’t plenty of them to go around) is an apparent inability to properly process linear time.
Naturally I’ve felt the compression we all do, the feeling that the minutes and days grow shorter as they each become a smaller and smaller fragment of our total lifespan. But aside from that perpetual acceleration, the moments never fully register. Many times in my life, I’ve talked up a casual friend at a party or in passing, ask them how they’ve been, how their partner is, how their job is going, only for them to explain that it’s been six months, a year, three years, that they separated from that partner ages ago, that they’ve moved on in their careers. As largely goodnatured people, these friends follow with a perplexed look, a chuckle, and little else. But it always dazes me a little bit, a forced realization that more time has passed than I was able to notice. And I’m forced to wonder; why, exactly, didn’t I notice?
This goes hand-in-hand, unfortunately, with a rather poor long-term memory. In this past month’s reflections, I noticed that my ability to recall emotions is near-perfect. (Perhaps everyone’s memory is like this, I haven’t taken any surveys.) But aside from feelings, my mind loses sights, sounds, and circumstances quite readily, retaining only the loosest outline of my history and past selves. As a result, reviewing photos or writing from past moments in my life will cause me to feel quite precisely like I did in the recorded moment, evoking everything from a moment of mirth to the drawn-out agony of heartbreak. But without specific scraps of evidence to recall, all those old feelings slosh around in my head in perpetuity—typically dormant, occasionally resurfacing for a moment without warning before sinking back into the deep.
These traits naturally synergize, with confusing outcomes. One is an unshakable feeling of personal continuity. This has been a going concern for as far back as I have records of myself. Even as a young man of no more than 17, I feared that I wasn’t evolving enough, wasn’t changing to suit my circumstances, that I was inexplicably and inescapably static. Today this doesn’t evoke the existential crisis it once did; like observing the grooves and scrapes and erosion on an old stone monolith, I can examine the evidence and conclude that, yes, I have probably changed over time. But the changes appear fairly small, and I still don’t seem to feel them.
My father has described similar if not identical sensations—if nothing else, it’s a little comforting to know that I probably get it from him.
The more disruptive of these effects is one I refer to as “temporal amnesia.” With my head unable to keep tabs on the continual clock, and my heart ready and able to fall backwards by five, ten, fifteen years in an instant, I’m frequently forced, for a split second, to remind myself when, precisely, I am. Under the best circumstances, this happens a good couple times a week, most often when I wake up or while I’m in my morning shower. In times of particular stress, however, the sensation is further inflamed by runaway thoughts or frequent dissociation. There’s been moments sitting at my desk in the workplace that, every handful of minutes, I feel like I’ve just awakened, and have to quickly take inventory; Okay, where am I? What year is it? What am I supposed to be feeling right now?
Again, maybe everyone’s brain works like this. In my case, though, it’s something of a struggle, a set of tendencies that I’ve been trying to unravel through therapy and attempts at mindfulness. Oh well. As struggles go, the difficult-to-explain, immaterial ones are probably those that are least likely to be real.
Addendum - later that day: Categorizing these sensations was simplified when I started to grieve my friend Nicki. At a certain point, I realized that I was feeling every every emotion I had ever directed at her, at full intensity, in parallel. Suffice it to say, the result was excruciating.