Repairing lost time

by Kerry Mead

Early March 2021. A mid-week day in lockdown. I had an 11am appointment on Zoom with a psychiatrist to confirm what I already knew to be true. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else whilst I waited; I rattled around the empty house watching the clock. Time stretched. I’d already passed through most of the well-known stages of grief by this time; denial, anger, hostility, the urge to tell my story to anyone and everyone I came across. I’d been grieving ever since the realisation of what had actually been going on with me for the last 44 years had seeped into my consciousness, then slowly flooded it and taken it over.

I was surprised that I felt nothing when the psychiatrist confirmed I had combined type Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder at 11.38am. I was numb. I nodded solemnly and he finished the call. I carried on with my day, which wasn’t much. The kids were with their dad for the night and there was nothing to do. Should I celebrate? Buy a bottle of champagne? That seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t a champagne kind of moment. Instead, I tidied the house, scrolled through my phone, made and ate some food, but all the while I felt like I should do something to mark the day.

I wanted to run. I tied up my trainers and left the house around 6pm, taking my usual route through Eastville Park, looping around the lake and then along the river, climbing slowly up Broom Hill, body leaden, before the home strait, my speed picking up as I pounded downwards, back towards the park entrance under the motorway.

The sun was setting and there were no passing cars or people in sight. The pad pad pad of my feet on the smooth, black tarmac. The beauty of the blazing pink winter sky. The chill of the air entering my lungs and its warmth leaving my mouth created a circular beat to run to that propelled my feet forward with no effort needed. I felt a sudden lightening - the years and heaviness melting away, streaming out behind me in vapours. Time stretched, slipped, stopped.

The metronome. The tuning fork. A place of eurythmy reached. Arrhythmia falling away.

There was no anger, denial or numbing now, just the gentle thud of different trails of thoughts falling into place. Openings being created and doors sliding shut in perfect unison. As they should be. I could feel my self-esteem reknitting itself. And forgiveness. Forgiveness of the adults who should have noticed when I was a child. Forgiveness of myself for not realising sooner.

Life would have been so different had I known before.

I took a photograph of the moment in my mind to store away.

It didn’t last very long.

Where else could I find it?

I wasn’t sure. Instead, over the following weeks, I started making plans to make up for lost time. An urge we are all programmed to pursue. I felt like I had wasted my life so far, I was drowning in regret. I was mourning all the years behind me thinking that I had all the time in the world. Time had marched on at a speed I couldn’t keep up with - I’d lost years to melancholy, to anxiety, to standing still, to running away, to overwhelm and underwhelm. As I tried to locate all the time I’d lost, I dredged through my memories and found some months seemed to last for seconds, some minutes had bloated to the size of years, and some of the time had disappeared entirely. I couldn’t pin it down.

What exactly had I done with all of that time?

What I’d felt briefly on that run, a minute or so of the metronome lining up perfectly, reminded me of what I sometimes feel when in a state of hyperfocus. Finding something that sparks my interest and being so caught up in it that the hours fall away like skin and flesh off the bone. The clock forgotten. It is only when I am forced out of hyperfocus abruptly, glancing up and noticing it is now dark, or being pulled back into the room by one of my children tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that they are hungry, that I crash back into reality with a bump, full of self-hatred that I have lost my grip on time.

As a child I lost myself in words for hours - I zoned out mixing paint colours, I buzzed off the freedom found in the gaps between the notes of a C minor scale practised over and over. I hid under secret tree boughs on the edge of our housing estate singing to myself for hours. I was hypnotised by the rhythmical hiss of the spinning wheels of my bike, which found me miles away from home long after tea had been put on the table. Time stretched and looped out and flew away in vapours behind me.

Why can’t you pay attention to the time?

I don’t know. I forgot.

People with ADHD experience time differently. Our thoughts speed up or we freeze, we move too fast or wade heavily through the minutes. We lose focus, we lose hours to special interests which we place above all other things we should be doing with our time. We are regularly described as time blind. We often fail to achieve what others manage with apparent ease. We fuck up. We lose years to self-medication. I am not the only person diagnosed with ADHD as an adult to say their biggest source of grief when they look back is a sense of having wasted their lives.

Chrononormativity is a term which first appeared in Elizabeth Freeman’s 2010 book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. It describes the linear framework, the normal chronology many of us follow from birth to death in Western Society:

school/university/job/mortgage/marriage/childrearing/financial stability/retirement

It is a timeline that propels us forward, which is designed to ensure maximum productivity throughout our lives. A rhythm set by capitalist flow and demands:

Time is money.

We have been fooled into thinking that this is the only worthwhile way to live our lives. As it is also an intrinsically heteronormative way of living, the queer community do not dance to this rhythm or get to reap the rewards that following this timeline offers us easily. The natural queer rhythm is denigrated as being worth less. Not following a chrononormative path leads to a disjointed sense of time for queers, cut off from the natural beat and flow of the society they live in.

Neurodivergent temporality is also out of joint; we also struggle to dance to this chrononormative rhythm. Does that really mean we have wasted time?

As I made my way into adulthood I tried really hard to tamp down the stretches and loops. Even though I tried to stay on the straight and narrow, to achieve what was expected of me and I expected of myself, up against the clock I always missed the targets, something in my aim slightly skewed.

I don’t have time for this

I’ve got all the time in the world

But I’d keep trying.

It's almost like a death drive.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the story of Hamlet’s descent into madness. He is visited by his father’s ghost, the former king of Denmark, who tells him that he was murdered by his brother Claudius so he could claim the throne in his place. His father’s appearance jolts Hamlet out of his perceived reality; the world is suddenly transformed, as is his perception of the past, and he utters the infamous line ‘The time is out of joint’. The diagnosis is my ghost. It’s not the appearance of the spectre that drives Hamlet insane; it is that he tries to mend the rupture caused by the ghost’s appearance and the hidden truth it reveals. He tries to force the dislocated world back into place, and the drive to do this eats him up inside. He can’t change the past and undo the murder of his father, so instead he vows to kill Claudius as an act of reparation. He tries again and again and fails, and only manages to kill him at the point of his own death.

Nothing is repaired, all is destroyed.

****

I attended a talk recently by the artist and psychoanalyst Patricia Townsend - she was discussing her work and how creating art can aid in the grieving process. When talking about her film/photography piece On The Shores, she describes walking on the beach at Morecambe Bay and being struck by a moment of alignment between her inner self and what she saw around her. For Townsend, this is the moment that sparks the creative process and is where a third entity, a work of art, springs from. She names this moment precent.

As I listen I am taken back to a holiday twenty years before with a group of friends in Cornwall. On the last night we took beers to the beach and built a fire. After a while a couple of us walked to the shoreline, and once I was at the edge of the crashing dark sea I wandered off alone, the sound of my friends partying becoming suddenly very distant. I stopped and looked up at the huge ink sky full of startling silver pinpoints and milky smudges of galaxies and felt something click into place briefly before it slipped away. A chiming between my inner self and the landscape; and both became charged with possibility.

The metronome. The tuning fork.

This memory of precent led me back to shady nooks under trees, hissing tyres, the spaces between the notes, and more recently pink skies and the pad pad pad of my feet hitting black tarmac. Then I think of the times in hyperfocus when I start to write and forget the clock and everything clears and things reconfigure and my sense of self reknits itself.

In her essay A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics Hanna Segal tells us Proust believed in art’s power to heal a sense of lost time, how creating a work of art suspends fleeting moments and makes them concrete again:

“… an artist is compelled to create by his need to recover his lost past…A real remembrance sometimes comes about unexpectedly, by chance association…such memories come and then disappear again, so that the past remains elusive. To capture them, to give them permanent life, to integrate them with the rest of his life, he must create a work of art.”

In fleeting moments of precent points of harmony between the inner metronome and the velocity of the outside world line up and art can spring out like a cuckoo from a broken clock. Sit with precent in a state of hyperfocus, let the creative process continue, and time becomes malleable – it stretches out and loops and the fleeting moment sticks around. This is where the reparation occurs.

This is where I really do I have all the time in the world.

I can now see that repairing a neurodivergent sense of lost time begins with an act of resistance - to resist the urge to force yourself to dance to a rhythm that isn’t yours, to mend the rupture between the neurodivergent self and a society that best suits the neurotypical. Instead, slip the clock. Escape into precent. The lost time I’ve been looking for is revealed in the words I am left with and is anchored there. Queerness, neurodivergence, creativity; all three dance to a different beat than the chrononormative timeline our current society favours above all else. To find your own temporal rhythm, to grasp it, step back into it, to feel at home in it once more, is true reparation.

I lay amongst the stones

I have a bad attitude