How Do I Move on When the Pandemic Has Stolen My Sense of Time?
I’m afraid the pandemic has done irrevocable damage to how I make sense of my life and the world outside my mind
People love to say that time heals everything. Hell, even I love to say that. It’s a nice three-word mantra that’s cliche, but it’s only cliche because it’s true. Can I honestly say I completely disagree with the core idea that time heals everything? No. I’ve experienced grief, loss, and heartache and though it takes a lot more work than just waiting out the clock, sometimes the energy to do that work only comes after I let time do its work.
At the beginning of the pandemic, many of us began to lose our sense of time. When you’re doing the very same thing every day you end up living in the moment in the most negative way possible. It hit all of us so differently, but it did hit all of us. Researchers even have a more scientific term for this experience: temporal disintegration.
I actually like this term quite a bit, because disintegration is a good way to describe how my loss of time has left me feeling.
At first, the pandemic’s time-shifting was a wonderful tool for me. I saved time on commutes and found myself feeling lighter. More time with friends and family. More time to focus on my writing and my work. More time to find new experiences when it was made abundantly clear to me that life was too short.
But then life got too long. My days are long now. At first, I tried to blame it on the weather. But it doesn’t matter if the sun decides it wants to shine longer or not because each day gives me the gift of too much time. More time to worry. More time to wallow in boredom. Far too much time to think.
I realized that I had gotten a little too good at managing my time. The strategies I’ve used since I was a child to avoid procrastination and be effective as a worker, friend, and person were leaving me with too much. We are the ones who have spent hours reading and experimenting with different techniques to beat procrastination. We’ve conquered panic attacks to produce incredible work. We’ve made up for our mental illnesses with overcompensation.
And of course, just as I felt like I was starting to get a handle on my broken brain a string of bad things happened. I then understood how intensely magnified depression becomes in the pandemic, unlike any depressive episode I’ve ever faced. I try my hardest to remember some of those weeks or even months but I can’t. I sit down and try to write out some of the things that were happening but I just cannot. I look over work that I produced in that state and it seems foreign as if someone wandered into my mind and changed the locks for a few hours to make sure I wouldn’t completely destroy what was left of my life.
My depressive episode was seven months ago but I honestly just had to pause and count on my fingers to make sure. It could’ve been two weeks ago or ten years ago or it could happen a few months from now.
Before the pandemic, I spent much of time in therapy talking about being “stuck.” It’s not an easy to define position because you’ve had enough time to feel your feelings but you can’t stop feeling those feelings. People tell me to get over it and I don’t know how to express that I simply don’t understand what that could possibly mean.
Even now I see the people I love going through horrible things but when I tell them that they'll get better with time it feels more hollow than ever.
All this is not to say I haven’t tried. I changed many things about my environment, focused more on family and tried to focus on smaller positive experiences I could integrate into my day every day. These things helped, but only at the moment. After the moment had passed those memories just joined the rotten patchwork of the last two years.
I feel like a zombie. I shamble through my daily tasks. Years of battling mental illness have trained my brain to be an effective autopilot to tackle all sorts of new challenges and even tackle them well.
And I know I should be happy about that. I know I should be grateful that I’m at a place where my illnesses aren’t dragging my life down. It’s just that I’m tired of feeling like I’m locked out of the control centre and mindlessly scratching at the door waiting to feel something again.
Even that is a lie. Because the one thing I feel in spades is fear. I’m so scared that something has happened to my brain. I thought that going out again and visiting restaurants and seeing old friends would start to cure my disintegration in time and space but it hasn’t. I am scared that this feeling will never go away and that each day will always feel so meaningless because my time is now meaningless.
I try not to be jealous, but that’s hard too. I see people who seem so happy. They’ve survived the pandemic and they’re out there stronger than ever. I feel happy for them, but the petty part of me wants to shake them and ask them how they did it. More than that I think the end of the pandemic is a cold reminder to me that even though it was something that equalized all of us that is now over. Those of us who struggled to live full lives before this are still in that place, now with brand new challenges.
I still try to be better. I make a list of things that happen each day as soon as I can. This exercise gives me some sort of record to help ground me, and though it’s still too early to tell I’m glad I have some sort of anchor. More than that I’m trying my hardest to make sure I have things to look forward to. I’ve always needed those, but now more than ever it’s something I can count down to. I try to be generous in this category. I try to treat these positive things as little gifts that I can space out across the course of a month so that I’m giving myself at least one memory I can use to differentiate between the long days.
I want to believe that time will heal my broken brain. It’s hard because every time I pick up the pieces of my life they seem to cut me more and more deeply in ways I did not think possible. I have to believe that one day I can come to a point where I can catch up to the trauma and the grief and the pain.
My first step to catching up is to remind myself that time still has meaning. That the future and past don’t have to be the same. I’ve only ever been able to convince myself of a better world by writing about it. So maybe if I can reach at least one of you it’ll remind me that we’re far from alone and that maybe we can replace a sense of time with a sense of understanding and community.
