November 2017: Time Sickness

This morning I listened to a meditation about time sickness and then promptly fell back asleep. Time sickness, as it was described, is the feeling that comes with not finishing everything on a to-do list, or when a perfectly planned day goes awry. I perked up at this new phrase - time sickness! - in the way I sometimes grasp at new words to lead the way.

Surely I am a candidate for time sickness. But it’s not dread I feel at not getting to everything on my to-do list - it’s heaps of procrastination. It’s a to-do list made of things I don’t want to do. It’s how foreign my desk looks after weeks of not writing. It’s the guilt that comes with the couch. It’s the sadness I feel when I leave work so late that the sky is dark and the street lights are on and I realize that I haven’t been outside in more than eight hours.

It is a sickness.

Autumn is my fragile period. I’ve lived enough calendar years to know myself and the slight weight that settles on me when the days shorten, the world darkens, the year starts to wind to an end. There is a pressure that starts to bear down and want to quantify the good, the accomplishments, the things that are countable. I shared with friends recently that I’ll be starting a new job next month, a job with a better salary and benefits, all of those grown-up securities. People gave their congratulations and they also titled their heads, asked, What about writing? What about your book? What’s going on?

The largest symptom of my time sickness is shame. Shame that writing is a verb I’m only on casual terms with right now. Shame that it’s taken more than a decade of underearning to do something about it. Shame that fits so well into the quick shadows of autumn, the darkening days. I fall asleep after I meditate. The bed is a magnet in my home. The only cure I have known for any sickness I have had is rest.

For my new job, I had to get an NYU email, which meant that they reunited me with my old NYU email from when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I logged in to find a time capsule - a draft folder of emails never sent, asking about waitlists, Craigslist ads for freelance writing gigs, an email about a queer performance arts listserve. There are references to stories I wrote and don’t remember, to Meow Mix in Houston before it closed, to an apartment in East Harlem. There was a folder of emails called Love Is A Dog From Hell, which baffled me until I opened it and saw that it contained over 300 emails between me and my ex-girlfriend. I signed them with hearts made of lesser signs and the number 3.

Recently Emily finished knitting a baby blanket for her niece. When she finished, I showed her how to cast off, how to weave in the ends. We folded it again and again until it was bright and plush. Yarn had added up to this. Time had added up to abundance. Many autumns ago a friend taught me how to knit, sitting on the couch in a rented cabin in upstate New York that is what I still picture when someone says upstate. The cure for time sickness is more time. The cure for time sickness is to trust the story.

xo,
c