I have no sense of time
This newsletter is practice
I’m having a problem with time. It’s like I’ve lost all sense of it. Just yesterday, I had a conversation with someone where they asked me, “when did that happen?” I realized it was impossible for me to say. It could have been three months ago, or just as easily 15 months ago — either was plausible. This felt uncomfortable to me, as I’ve usually been pretty good about keeping things attached to some big mental timeline in my head. But over the last year, it’s become more difficult to do that. It’s not as easy to place events. My calendars and my journals are the only ways I tether my experience to some sense of recorded time. As I’ve gotten older, that relationship to time has only become more complicated.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
It also brings up the bigger question: what am I doing with it? Time, I mean. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim.” And this is true, especially in terms of cultivating a practice around something you love, around something that you feel is one of your missions in life (in this case, writing). But it’s also true that schedules and calendars can become a sort of cage. At its best, a means of self-regulation; at its worst, a self-imposed prison.
I also spend time thinking about time I’ve squandered that I’ll never get back. It’s easy to fall into a self-flagellating state when doing this, but I tend to be more introspective, hoping to learn from it. What I know now is that time is so finite, and our own time shortens by the day, and there’s no way to know when that will run out. I think about that time squandered and I ask myself what made me squander it — always, it felt like something short-sighted, something that doesn’t matter at all anymore. And always, it was a choice: to do one thing instead of another; to choose not to block off the time to invest in something I loved; to choose something that provided immediate gratification or dopamine.
I think back on those times, sometimes with envy, because that younger self had all this open time stretching out, opened up. That’s the double-edged sword of very young adulthood — having this kind of time in spades, yet misspending it in ways your older self would be kind of disappointed in. This is not a pity party — again, self-understanding is the goal. I often joke now that if only I had spent as much time writing as I did chasing undeserving men, I’d have written several books by now. But of course, that’s not how these things work. My progress on a book is determined by choices of time spent, and that’s in my control now and moving forward.
I’ve changed my self-interrogation from “what am I doing with my time?” to the more gentle “do I like what I’m doing with my time?” It feels like an easier place to begin, with kindness.
Last night, M. and I watched “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” on Netflix. It is, almost verbatim, the the story written by Roald Dahl, in the collection of the same name. Wes Anderson directs, which at first I was curious about (Dahl’s material often sits on the edge of dark, and Anderson’s style almost feels too whimsical for that). But it was a good fit. I can’t explain it, but by the end I thought, well of course Wes Anderson directed this.
The gist is this: a rich man learns about a guru who can see without using his eyes. Curiosity and big plans ensue.
Because it came out Wednesday, I made it a point to read the story again (it’s been decades.) It has one of the best opening pages I’ve ever read:
In it, one of the characters is aghast when he hears the amount of time that it takes to become good at something through practice:
“…If you work hard at this, you should be able to concentrate your mind, your conscious mind, upon any one object you select for at least three and a half minutes. But that will take about fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years!” I cry.
“It may take longer,” he says. “Fifteen years is the usual time.”
“But I will be an old man by then!”
There’s no shortcut for doing the work. There’s no substitute for the practice.
This newsletter is a type of practice all on its own: practicing writing, practicing how to show up for myself over and over again, practicing consistency. It’s practicing letting go of perfect, letting go of a persona, practicing being more authentic. That sounds kind of funny, I know, but we are always in the process of constructing a self, whether through our thoughts, words, or conversations. A lot of that is organic and not calculated in a way that is malicious, but any time I’m writing for an audience — this newsletter! — I can get in my own head about how much I want to reveal and how much I want to keep private. I think about the various people who might read this from many walks of life and I wonder sometimes what they’ll think about how their experience of me matches up with the words I write that are delivered in their inbox. That can be scary, and sometimes I try to be a little less of a messy person. Which is to say, I try to be less vulnerable.
But the things I read and the voices I’m drawn to embrace that mess, and I do, too, in my other writing, so I’m going to make an effort to do that here, as well. To show up a little more authentically, regardless of the messiness. A recent Substack by Marlee Grace (highly recommend) talked about just showing up to the page to write, not having anything to write about, and writing and hitting send, anyway. The power!
“I hope this newsletter shows you there are no rules to writing newsletters. You can just type and type and type and hit send. Isn’t that wild? The lack of rules.
I hope you are having a beautiful day. I am so glad I wrote!”
— Marlee Grace, “I saw my breath today”
I’m trying to translate that to other areas, too. Recently, when I started with a new therapist, I told them, “I need you to hold me accountable. I am not going to want to tell you the bad stuff, the icky stuff, the uncomfortable feelings. When you ask me how I’m doing, I will flash you a bright smile and say, ‘great!’ even if I’m not. I am a recovering overachiever and people-pleaser, and I will absolutely say what I think you want to hear, but I need you to hold me to the flame a little bit. I need to get more honest with myself.”
It felt like a really good start.
As a person who still struggles with people pleasing, especially in my personal life, but is actively working on it in therapy, this resonates.
And I’ve never read “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” before story, but I need to remedy that -- that first page is a banger. Thanks for sharing.
One thing I like about writing a newsletter (and once upon a time, a blog) was that it has helped me get over the persona, take off the mask. When you write and send (or publish), write and send, write and send, each individual message or post becomes less of a risk, because you're doing it so often, and as soon as one goes, it fades, and here another comes.
(And whenever I have a vulnerability hangover, I always remind myself of something my mom told me when I was a teenager and felt like everyone was staring at me all the time: "No one is thinking about you." That, and the fact that we all have like three-second attention spans now, almost literally, and whatever I am cringing about, everyone else forgot immediately.)